If you have never heard of geo-caching, thats fairly normal.
Its an activity popularized by the widespread availability of GPS technology on the consumer market in recent years. Geo-caching is basically running around with a GPS device, visiting location coordinates people have posted on a main internet website. People post coordinates after stashing something at a given location...so you are there to find their hidden treasure! Once you reach the location directed by the GPS coordinates, you hunt around for anything that looks slightly unusual...sometimes the website even gives you a clue of what to look for. Once you find the treasure you open it (its often a small container of some kind) sign the visitors log, and then have the option of taking something out or leaving something inside (at one we took a keychain and left a guitar pick). Our several stops ranged from a tupperware hidden under some coral rock by a beach parking lot, and an ice cream bucket covered in a heap of pine needles in a vacant lot, to a thimble sized magnetic capsule at a crosswalk in the middle of town! It was like a scavenger hunt trying to find these hidden items, since the GPS coordinates only get you within about twenty feet of the target! I even have battle scars- I walked into a tree branch in the vacant lot and gave myself a bruise/cut my forehead! Haha. It was worth it- we had a good time:)
Our GPS device
Jason and I in a sea of dune plants- right where the coordinates led us.
Discovering the cache under a stump and some coral rocks!
Investigating the contents of the small tupperware container...
And signing the visitors log! Our first geo-cache success! Yay!
Interestingly, my family has been doing a low-tech version of this activity for years! We had a "family treasure" hidden in the Black Hills that we would revisit regularly on vacations- film capsules full of notes and coins etc. buried under a rock, after a cattle grate, off a certain scenic road... we would pace off the steps from the fence post and find the rock and reclaim our treasure. And we even would give family friends that vacationed there our cryptic directions and let them participate in our tradition. They could hunt down the treasure, and then leave their own notes and mementos. Haha- guess we have been low tech geo-caching for awhile!
Just another evidence that there is nothing new under the sun, I guess. Not even geo-caching.
