geocaching - free outside fun for the whole family.

My kid is in religion education classes right now. After one of her last classes, the teacher told me that she wanted to talk to me which immediately scared the crap out of me. It is bad enough when a regular teacher tells you that but a religion teacher opens up a whole new level of “what the heck did my kid say”.

Turns out, they were asking the kids what their favorite summer activity was and mine said geocaching. They just wanted to know what it was. (phwew!)

see my links at the bottom for some of our adventures.

Geocahing (pronounced geo cashing) is basically a treasure hunt for nerds using a GPS and a website full of coordinates. People all over the world hide small containers stuffed with a log file and little toys or coins. Then they post the GPS coordinates on this website geocaching.

People like us go there and look for caches (cashes) near us. Put the coordinates in and start hiking.

The general rules are:
• Sign the log book
• Take a small toy and leave a small toy
• Sign up online that you found it
• Don’t let “muggles” (non geocachers) see you when you find it.

So it’s free fun, they get a toy, they get to be sneaky and they know a secret that not many others know. My kid LOVES knowing that we have one we can see from the house and people are walking past it all day without knowing.

---

Once you get good at finding them, hide one. You and your kid can read all the log entries from people who found what they hid. And for even another level of fun, you can order “travel bugs”.

Those are dogtags you attach to a toy. When someone finds a tag, they enter it’s code online and move it to another cache. In this way, your kid’s toy can go all over the world and they can watch it online. We had one that went to Hawaii and back twice and both coasts of the US. It was a lovely way to teach geography too.

Here is a link to one of my travel bugs and a photo gallery of where all he has been in his 8,000+ miles of travel. Then there is the cache cow that we hid. 124 finds and this is the oldest cache in grason county.

Mama isn’t horribly keen on this since last time she went she got covered in poison ivy but apart from that, we have all had so many good times, I thought I would share. Ps. If you keep your eyes open because you are likely to find wonderful father and daughter fishing locations.