First Geocaching trip Part II

Once on the road we started for the first cache on the list I made we get there and find the cache in under 10 min were back on the road. This unfortunately is not the way the rest of the day goes. After 4 hours we're only about an 8^th of the way along the route. It looks like this eight hour trip could take the whole two days we have for the trip. Now I have to make a decision do we stop caching altogether till we get to the hotel or do we just limit it. Well, wifey decided we’d just stop every once in a while to stretch our legs with a cache. This arrangement worked out fairly well however the caches we chose to hunt tended to be very hard to find. At about 6pm or so we still had 3 hours or so still of driving time and the hotel desk was only staffed till 9pm. So we drove straight through.
Now for an invaluable piece of Geocaching tip knowledge, ALWAYS get a hotel with a hot tub. This will keep your from being too sore to cache after a 12+ hour day f driving to cache the next morning. Take a 10 to 20 min soak then once back in the room stretch a bit.

First Geocaching trip

My wonderful company decided that they got to chose when we take our vacation this year. Yea, it sucks. However I decided to make the best of it and began planning a trip to the Ozarks National Forest. Weather shot that down, so I started looking around for a place I could drive to in under 10 hours that had caches, hiking, I’ve never been before and good weather. I finally settled on Fort Robinson National Forest. So I grabbed the wife, packed up the caching pack (tools like a telescoping magnet flashlight etc.) and headed off with a list of caches along the driving route.

Frist Geocacheing get-together

We had a few caches under our collective belt and decided to see what other cachers could impart knowledge wise. We logged into the Geocaching website and found a movie event and it even said there was going to be Geocaching specific topics discussed. So off we go following our GPSr to someone’s house who we've never met, to see a movie we've never heard of, with a group of people we've never met. We get there and we are looking around trying to figure out if this is the right house or not then we spot a guy with a Groundspeak Geocaching cap on and knew it was the right place. So we got out and wander up to the house, without batting an eye, the host invites us in and immediately I felt like we were considered part of the group. People introduced themselves when they didn’t recognize us and it was very comfortable. The movie turned out to be one of those B classics you love even though it super cheesy. It’s called "Find Me", look it up sometime. After the movie we chatted about all kinds of things and then it was time to head home. It was a very good day and showed me Geocaching is like many other passions it can bring good people together in a common bond or interest and make life that much better.

First Geocache.

Ok, so I'm going to go find my first cache. I log onto the website create a free account and take a look. To my surprise there is a cache right in my little town of Ceresco. So I load up the cache "Too small for doggy", cache code (GCW7E5), and head out. Following the compass pointer on my GPSr, I get to a back ally and find ground zero. Ground zero is the point that the cache placer has submitted as the cache location. The cache will usually be within feet of ground zero; however it can be up to 65 feet away. This discrepancy is due to differing accuracy of GPS receivers. Back to the story, I am at ground zero and looking around and I see this little wooden birdhouse. I go over to it and it opens and inside is a small peanut butter jar. The feeling of the find is like Christmas morning when you were a kid. I signed the log dropped of a plastic compass and put the cache back the way I found it. Now I had to find more...

Introduction

In January of 2010, I was looking at apps on my Blackberry and kept seeing this word Geocaching....I wanted to know what it was so I looked it up. I found out that Geocaching is a worldwide game of hide and seek using GPSr to find containers hidden all over the world and sign the logs. Some of these containers contain trade items, trade items range from little trinkets you get from coin machines at grocery stores to much more expensive items. I have seen disposable cameras, money and toys in caches. However most of the time it’s just a log book and maybe a trackable item like a Travel bug or GeoCoin. These two items are basically the same in function, you put them in a cache someone else picks them up and moves them to another cache and then logs the move on a web site. It is a lot to take in at first butt with just one hunt I was hooked.You need a GPS receiver or GPS enabled phone to cache. And at least a free member account at www.geocaching.com . Once you have these two items you can find your first cache.