Friday, July 13, 2007

Finding hidden treasure...right around the corner!

My parents tell me from time to time that I have too many hobbies: Kayaking, hiking, growing vegetables, meteorology, geneology, castnet knitting, storytelling, The War Between the States, reading, writing, blogging...the list goes on and on. I suppose they are correct; I often have so many things I need and want to do that I simply don't know what to do with myself! Well you can go ahead and tack on another thing to that list:
Geocaching.
I was reading through SophieMae's Florida Cracker Crumbs blog a few weeks ago, and I came across her link to geocaching.com. I'd heard of geocaching before, and I had always thought that it would be intersting, but never had the chance to try it out...So I thought I would go check out the website and see what I could do.
This seemed to have opened up a whole new world to me! A search revealed over 3000 "hidden treasures" within 10 miles of where I live, one of which I actually walked by many times every day at work, oblivious. "Geocaching" is the use of a GPS to find caches ("hidden treasure") in some remote and some not-so-remote areas of the world. It combines being outdoors with a sense of discovery: Two of my favorite things! I was immediately hooked.
I excitedly entered the coordinates of a few caches into my GPS, and away I went! Here's some of what I found (more to come later today):





If you like the outdoors, and love adventure, then you will love geocaching. This sport is becoming accessible to most folks now that the price GPS devices are dropping so quickly...The Garmin eTrex Legend that I bought less than 2 years ago for $180 can now be bought for less than $110. So go out and find yourself some hidden treasure!