Anita's Notebook

Geocaching is an unusual hobby. You use handheld GPS to try and find caches that other people have hidden and tagged as being around a certain location.

Caches can be as big as an ammo box or as tiny as a pencil eraser and are hidden anywhere and everywhere. You probably pass tons of caches every day just on your drive to work, it’s like a whole hidden world right under the normal one.

But when I first heard of geocaching I thought ‘Well that sounds…kind of…lame.’

I’m not a big hide and seek sort of person and from what I could tell you didn’t even get much for your efforts of finding a cache. Some have prizes in them but many don’t, so often all you really get is to be able to sign the paper log book in the cache and mark it as ‘found’ on the main geocaching site. Not really my thing, or so I thought.

UNKOWN CORNERS

Jennifer however thought geocaching sounded like a good thing to try and she started to go with a friend of ours (Elijah) who’s been an avid geogacher for years. She thought it was great and really wanted to get into it more so eventually she convinced me to go and try it too.

What I found out was that it was a lot of fun and harder than you might think. It’s definitely a game for puzzlers, something that Jennifer and Elijah are but me …not so much. I’m different than most geocachers in that I don’t have such an intensity about actually finding caches, strange as it might sound I mainly like going geocaching for other reasons.

One thing I like about geocaching is that it takes me to places that I never would have seen otherwise. Little unknown corners of the city or beautiful places out in the woods that the average person just passes on by. I love photography and going to these kinds of places enables me to take awesome pictures.

Though by far what I really like the most about geocaching is the stories.

CHEW MARKS

There’s just something about geocaching that makes it so every time you go out you come back with an interesting or crazy or scary story, or all of the above. We often go geocaching in the middle of the night (less people around so it’s easier to grab caches without being busted) so that usually adds even more interesting elements to the stories.

I thought it would be fun to start sharing some of our geocaching stories here on the blog. This is one to get the ball rolling, it’s very short and gets right to the point but still was quite the memorable experience. Here it is as I’d typed it into my phone that night:

Saw fresh bear poo on a trail while late night caching in the deep dark woods. Later one of the caches there had chew marks on it.

Lol! So geocaching in the middle of the night in the middle of the woods in Alaska is probably not for everybody, but you do get some good stories out of it :D.