Geocaching - A walk with a purpose

A few years ago one of our sons sent me an email about Geocaching - an international treasure hunt using GPS devices.  It looked interesting, but I did nothing about it.  Then, some months later, he took us both to a local beauty spot where one of these geocaches was hidden.  Once we had found our first we were hooked and have now found over 1500 in several different countries.

Geocaching began near Portland, Oregon, in May 2000, when a man called Dave Ulmer hid a bucket with a logbook and a few other items in it.  He published the coordinates on a social networking website and challenged people to find the bucket.  He called it a GPS stash – the name geocache was coined later – and hoped that one day there would be thousands of such stashes across America.

There are now over 400 geocaches within ten miles of that original site; over 28,000 in the state of Oregon; over 110,000 in the UK; and over 1,600,000 across the world.  He certainly started something!

Whenever we plan a weekend, or more, away in our caravan, we always have a look at the Geocaching website - www.geocaching.com - to see where the local geocaches are.  They have taken us to some very interesting sites and some beautiful views that we probably wouldn’t have found otherwise.

As with all hobbies, the amount of effort, and cost, that you put in to it is entirely up to you.  The only specialist equipment that you need is a GPS device and these are available at a wide variety of prices that reflect the sophistication of the software within them.  Also, most - if not all - smart ’phones can be used as GPS devices.

We can thoroughly recommend it!