Sunday, May 2, 2010

Geocaching is way cool

Recently I watched a movie called 'Splinterheads' and the main character went "geocaching." I decided to Google it and boy am I glad I did.

A week later, I took my son, Jax, geocaching for the first time; it was a very interesting experience because we had no idea what we were looking for. Thankfully, www.geocaching.com  has linked coordinates (longitude/latitude) to upload to your personal GPS. After setting five different coordinates, Jax and I set out on our adventure.

The first set of coordinates took us to a dirt road next to a small wooded area. The name of the geocache site was called "stumped," so I figured a stump is what we would be looking for. Because I had saved the coordinates into the GPS, it didn't give me the actual longitude and latitude, just a flag of the destination.  We looked around a log, wood piles, and trees without luck. In order to keep Jax's attention, we decided to move on to the next geocache site.

I ended up parking too far from the point, which made it about a two-mile walk down the a trail. Once we got to the destination flag, the grass was up to my hip, so actually finding the geocache became a feat and once again, we moved on.  After no luck on the next two geocache locations and Jax's mood decreasing, I decided to take us back to the first site. By the time we had gotten there, I had figured out how the GPS will show my location, with coordinates, and that worked to our advantage. The coordinates took us right back to the log, but we came from a different angle and just as we closed in on it, Jax saw the geocache under the log.

I hadn't thought about looking under it. This was our first geocache and we really didn't know how hard the geocache's are hidden, but the fact we found something really boosted Jax's mood. We signed the paper log and traded a Jordanian Dinar for a plastic dinosaur. Jax thought it was a fair trade and named his new dino 'Geo', after our new found love of geocaching.

xoxo

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