Geocaching: Our New Hobby

The boys and I began a new hobby yesterday: geocaching. In short, you use a GPS device to locate boxes that are hidden throughout the landscape. The position of the boxes is precisely recorded and uploaded to a website so your GPS device can find them (it goes by coordinates, not by any signal that emanates from the boxes.

To the left is the device we bought at REI for $69.95. It has about 250,000 geocache sites preloaded into it. With a separately sold update kit (basically a USB cable) you can hook it up to your computer and download more sites for future adventures. The device is pretty stripped down and took a little while to figure out how to use. But once we figured it out it was so simple to use that the boys each took turns leading us to a cache.

When you find a box, you open it up and take out a piece of paper inside and log in to show that you found it. With the paper in the box is usually a little stash of toys (small plastic animal figures, whistles and whatnot). If you've brought something along with you to put into the box, you can take out one of the toys inside.

Before buying the device, I checked out how many geocaches were available in the Santa Cruz area. It turns out that there are nearly 3000. Several are within walking distance of our house. Others are a short bike ride. Many are located within some of our favorite hiking parks. so it looks like we'll have plenty to do. The tipping point for us in thinking about whether or not to get it was precisely the fact that so many caches are so close. We can easily see a couple of kids, complaining about boredom after school, getting off their butts with their GPS and finding a couple things in the area.

The boys were really excited about the experience and want to share it with their friends. Last night, Sammy said, "You know what I like best about geocaching? Finding toys!" I replied, "You know what I like best about geocaching? Giving away our toys!"

He didn't seem to think that was such a cool thing.