Geocaching is a nice way to discover new places or explore your neighborhood. You might be surprised how many geocaches are around in your hood, without you knowing. Once you start to find geocaches you will start to look at the world from a different perspective. There might be a cache right at the bus stop, where you are standing every day without you knowing it. People pass those hidden gems every day at the most everyday places and have no clue about it.
What is Geocaching?
Geocaching is the world largest treasure hunt.
It’s a fun outdoor activity, where you search for hidden boxes. Once found, you write your name into the log as proof. Geocaches come in different sized and in different kinds. The most common ones are the traditional caches, the “tradis”. They are a single box hidden at one given location. There are also mystery caches, where you need to solve a puzzle that reveals the location or multi-caches, where a box tells you the location of the next box until you reach the so called “final”.
With location we mean GPS coordinates. And that’s in principle the only piece of equipment that is necessary: a GPS device. For starters a smartphone is fine, but they still do not have the accuracy of a dedicated GPS handheld. I own a Garmin etrex 30, that I bought for [our Iceland trip], and is now also used for Geocaching and of course navigation on longer trips.
If you are interested in Geocaching, have a look at geocaching.com (Owned by Groundspeak). There are also opencaching projects (e.g. opencaching.us and opencaching.uk) but most of the caches are at geocaching.com.
If you find it interesting, all you need to start is your smartphone and the Geocaching app. There are a handful of caches that you can use just for free - and if you like it, then you might consider paying the required 30 bucks per year - for me that’s the equivalent of going twice outdoors instead to the movies.