A rusted out tractor deteriorated to barely recognizable parts, crossing a stream on large stepping stones, climbing a steep embankment, these are things we’ve seen or done recently while participating in a new hobby as a family, geocaching. For those who don’t know geocaching is a sport/hobby/activity in which you use a GPS device to find hidden containers mostly in the woods but really anywhere. The coordinants for these containers is located on a website called geocaching.com Once you find the container you sign a log book contained within it, additionally in the larger caches you can leave a trinket and take a trinket. The trinkets can be small toys or even travel bugs or geocoins which get passed on to the next cache. We have now logged 19 geocaches of varying types.

We had been caching with my blackberry 8100, bluetooth GPS receiver and some software called Spot. This worked pretty well for a while but my Blackberry had a tendency to freeze up every now and then which got fairly annoying, also it was quite a process to get the cache information into my phone. We decided that for Christmas we would get a Garmin so we purchased a used Garmin Vista C from ebay, it has made geocaching so much quicker.

What is most exciting about geocaching is that it is giving us a different perspective on our surroundings. We are discovering parks and other places that we never new existed and finding new and wonderful parts of areas we are familiar with. It’s something that we can do together as a family, it brings us closer to nature, provides many learning opportunities for the girls, and it is great exercise.