Where in the World?

When I marked down "Geocaching" in our list of goals for this year, I knew very little about what was actually involved. I knew that there was a sort of game that could be played with a GPS unit--you type in the latitude and longitude and it takes you to a location. It kind of reminded me of scavenger hunts that we had to do when teenagers gathered together back in the day.

This is more like "hiking for Type A personalities". You know, a goal-directed activity. Type A question: "How do you know when you're finished hiking?" Well, this helps answer it.

But this activity was a little different. I was hoping that it would be a fun thing for Ryan and I to do together, and it had elements of searching for hidden treasure, rewarding the use of technology and navigation, and was something we could do outdoors. At least somewhat outdoors--I guess you have to count the fact that we needed to spend a lot of time in the car.

So, I borrowed a GPS unit from my friend, Marty, and we scheduled an open Saturday in June and planned to go out for the day. The night before, I went on Geocaching.com and tried to figure out how to get started. For a minute, I thought I was going to have to pay for a subscription or something, but it turns out to be completely free. I did have to use Google Earth to get the exact latitude and longitude coordinates for my house (Try it!) (for your house). That was kind of freaky to zoom in on it from outer space.

Once I got set up, I figured out that there were at least 100 geocaches stashed within about 5 miles of our home, including one about 200 feet from our back door. What did they look like? What was inside them? I had no idea. I picked about 12 of them and printed out the coordinates. Each cache has it's own webpage with a description, exact coordinates, and log entries from other people who have visited the cache before. Sometimes there is a clue about how to spot the cache once you get to the location--Surprisingly to us, even standing within two feet of the site it can be very difficult to spot the hidden container or whatever you are looking for. Sometimes, the clue is a coded message that you have to decode with a key.

Geocaching has a relatively brief history--it was invented in 2000 when handheld GPS units started popping up everywhere. Since then, it seems to have exploded with thousands of sites across the country, and little "games within the game" that are played like traveling pieces that are intended to go from cache to cache.

Like many of the things which I find interesting, there are people who sink their heart and soul into geocaching. I like photography, and can appreciate beautiful photographs, but when I read photography websites I get overwhelmed with people who critique the finer points (read: exhaustively trivial) of photographic equipment, etc. The same thing goes for computers--there were times when I was up to date on the hottest hardware, etc., but that stuff just bores me now. It makes me think of the Flintstones--I could never bring myself to put on the hat and join the Lodge of the Water Buffalo--I would feel ridiculous. I'm one of the people who stand in the back of the room and wonder quizzically at the people who do put on the hat. Destined to always be an outsider.

But I've learned to enjoy the role of an outsider, and get the valuable pieces of information that I need to blend to a certain extent, and these were the skills we used to get our feet wet in geocaching last Saturday.

We woke up pretty early and realized it had rained a little. Despite a pretty serious case of "Can't-get-out-the-(*&#$-door" syndrome (you know--getting in the car and realizing you've forgotten your cell phone/paper/camera/wallet/hat) (in that order, one by one--5 trips back and forth, eventually requiring sedation). We stopped at McDonald's and got breakfast, which we ate in the car. I had Ryan hop up in the front seat (I don't think he can actually ride in the front seat legally until he's 10 years old or so) and we ate together and planned our trip.

The first cache we were searching for was at a park by the library. I had been to this park dozens of times, but of course didn't realize that this little canister was hidden there. We plugged in the coordinates and the GPS pointed the way. Ryan would sometimes blurt out that we need to "go right" or "NO! not this way!!", ignoring that we actually had to follow the road and not plow through an apartment complex or try to drive our car through a lake because that was the way the arrow is pointing.

He followed the GPS directions without looking up, the antenna sticking up like a digital divining rod pointing the way. Yet, we tried to be discrete and not give away the hidden location. Surprisingly, the GPS led us within a foot or so of the location, and the decoded message said "Look in the big tree"--but there were several big trees and, for some reason, I didn't trust that little number counting down to "10 feet, 6 feet, 2 feet", so we ended up spending an extra 15 minutes looking and at one point found someone's abandoned lunch trash thinking it was our treasure trove, finding moldy potato salad instead. At last, I spotted the camoflauged container stuffed inside a bushy area which we had already looked at previously, and called Ryan over so he could make the find. He was very excited.

Opening up the container was kind of weird--it reminded me of the contents of Boo Radley's knothole in the old movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird--discarded bits from a junk drawer: An old brush, baseball cards, action figures, plastic army soldiers...along with a log book and a pencil. We signed the log and I brought along a book to record what we did--it ended up coming in handy when I went back online to electronically sign the logbook.

We went from cache to cache--Ryan would help me enter the GPS coordinates and we would hit go and race from place to place. I won't bore you with each find, but one was in an old cemetery where I had gone as a kid and took rubbings of the epitaphs--I referred to one in my blog entry before, so I got a picture of it. Additionally, I saw a marker designating one occupant as a Confederate War Soldier from the American Civil War. The cache was lowered down into the hollowed-out crook of a tree with a leather strap tied to it--Ryan had to get on my shoulders to find it.

Another one was in a rockpile and was painted the same gray color as the rocks--I literally was standing on top of the container for about 5 minutes, which cracked Ryan up.

We stopped for lunch and ate a hamburger. Ryan was feeling especially spoiled so he begged for ice cream. I didn't give in and made him eat his lunch, but told him we could swing by at the end of the day and pick up a treat--he saw Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream, and got it in his mind that he would really like to try it, and he wouldn't let me forget that I had committed to getting him some...

All the time as we were searching for these, I felt a little out of place, as if we were trespassing or shouldn't be there. Maybe it's the secrecy of what we were doing. One place I finally drew the line, as the directions took us to the front porch of a church where some sort of activity was taking place. People were coming and going, and I felt very uncomfortable that our actions would be misinterpreted. We left. I even entered this comment on the electonic log, which made the guy very defensive. My first day in the activity and already making people mad.

Toward the end of the day, we were very tired from running around in the 100-degree heat. We came to a park where the cache was supposed to be hidden in a very small container in a crevice in the wall. After searching for 10 minutes or so, I was ready to leave. Ryan insisted on searching more, so I sat on a park bench and waited. The next thing I saw was Ryan jumping up and down with a huge smile on his face. He had used a stick to dig in some mud in one of the crevices, and had uncovered the container! He was so excited to have found one and kept reminding me that I had given up.

That moment made me realize that he had truly enjoyed the experience. Ryan will sometimes put pressure on himself to enjoy anything that I bring him to do, so his smile told me he was genuinely having fun--I would recommend anyone to just try it at least once and see what it's all about...I'll have an update following.