The Outdoor Activity for 2012

Geocaching baby! That’s right, techy treasure hunting. I love hiking and I also love finding things so what better activity than geocaching?

Back in August of 2010, we did a quick geocache that was in a park a mile or so down the road. I loved it immediately. It’s something that we can do in town or anywhere else. TJ and I were completely shocked by the number of caches all around the city. After that, school started back up and then fall came and then that was it.

I had forgotten all about it until a forum friend in Germany brought it up a few weeks ago. She and her wife took a trip to Denmark and she posted pictures of her geocaching adventures there – some were located in old bunkers – and I got excited to try it again.

Lucky for me, TJ and Micah are totally on board. We had some free time this past Saturday and found several caches within a couple of miles from home so we went searching. We ended up being a little disappointed when, after 20 minutes of scouring the same few yards of land, we figured out that the cache had been removed. TJ verified it on the website, geocaching.com, so we headed home. All in all, even after picking up lunch, we were gone less than an hour. We’re already planning several trips this week while we have Micah, Rose, and Dillon for spring break.

We took the Flat Stanley that Micah made with us. We figure we’ll drag him along for other trips, too. I wanted to name him Flat Bruce to set him apart from the cutouts that are sent around the country but I was overruled.

There’s also the GPS that I ordered tonight. I love gadgets!! The nice thing about geocaching is that, beside the GPS, you don’t need anything else. A little something to add to the cache is good, but there’s no real cost involved.

Just as an example of how quick and easy they can be, Tim and I had planned to take a walking break at work today so I loaded the geocaching intro app to my phone, found a cache that was .15 miles from our office and it took us 10 minutes to walk there and find the cache. You never know where they’re hiding!