Geocaching

Whenever I was a kid I never got into scavenger hunts or related recreational activities that involved hunting for items based on clues. Funny what age does to a person. So, this past Fathers' Day I got a GPS Magellan 1412 Roadmate. After one day of trying it out we were hooked. Then my wife told me about the geocaching phenomenon she ran across on the Internet while we were on vacation. As we made our way back home to Florida we decided to try our hand where my folks live in NC. After doing a little reading up on the geocache experience via its web site we printed out our first target and along with my brother, my wife, daughter and myself, we took off.

My brother had just purchased a top line Tom Tom being the first time we used his because of the reading it gave in degrees as we had not yet figured out you can convert your gps reading on the site to fit your readout. It was geocache called Person County Line in a location that stradles Person and Durham counties adjacent to a river bank. We had no idea what the dynamic was and was not even sure what we were looking for save a 35mm film cannister. With GPS in hand my brother found it almost immediately while my wife and I were stumbling around! My wife produced a pencil and we logged our first find. It was awesome. My brother thought nothing of it and did not find it interesting in the least. But my wife and I were hooked.

My wife and I are trying to find outdoor activities for our little girl since she adores the outside. This is a great way to enjoy it with her. I'm looking forward to doing other things with her as she gets older such as birdwatching, surfing, biking and well, you get the idea. I've just set up our cache targets for tomorrow in an area called Hanna Park in a small bedroom beach community called Atlantic Beach, FL. We are pretty excited to try our hand and see just how good we are. I'll post about our progress or lack of progress at it permits. Stay tuned...