Posted on 08/08/2013 12:40:57 AM PDT by Daffynition
.....It’s a geocache (gee-oh-cash).
And finding these modern-day treasure chests is worth more than the hunt, devotees say.
“It gets you outside — gets you exercise. And while your mind can wander while you’re walking, it makes you think, solve puzzles,” says Kevin Venator, 45, a Johnson County geocacher.
Interest is very high in the sport right now, Venator said. “It’s exploding,” he said.
Geocaching has become so popular that cities have had to wrestle with the hobby. If a geocacher looks out of place or suspicious, homeowners might call police. That could result in an altercation.
The practice recently came up at a Leawood City Council meeting. Council members asked their parks and recreation director, Chris Claxton, if they needed to issue a policy or ordinance to regulate the practice.
[snip]
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
I really enjoyed it. I traveled internationally. Would always try to find a geocache on the weekend. Loved the travel bugs. I would drop them over there with a note to point them home to my own cache. They returned from Singapore, Melborne, Tokyo, Belgium, S Africa, Mexico, Spain, Brasil and Argentina. Passing through hundreds of hands that passed them forward. I still have them...nice treasures. One is still out there. It is a dog tag hooked to a rubber snake. You don’t put it in the cache but very near it. It is to teach the children to BE SAFE geocaching. I has been in circulation for almost 11 years.
Bless her! I opted for sections....which I regret b/c my knees are now too bad to finish. When I was younger...and always working...I never had the time for a through hike....now that I have the time ...I don’t have the health. C’est la vie.
Your daughter has my admiration...hope she enjoys every trek!
Error Number One: "A geocache is most often a trinket like a deck of cards, a keyring or a poem."
No A geocache is a hidden container that has a log book. It MIGHT contain treasure (A.K.A. SWAG in Geocache speak) but many geocaches are so small they can only contain the log. Especially urban caches.
Error Number Two: "It’s buried in a waterproof container of varying sizes."
Very few Geocaches are buried and If they are they are buried under loose rocks or piles of wood. In fact the guidelines for placing a cache absolutely forbid placing a cache wherein one needs to use a shovel to retrieve it. The Geocache sites don't want people running around with shovels digging holes especially when you consider that GPS units are only accurate to within 20 feet and that is under optimal conditions at sites with no large structures or trees nearby.
Error Number Three: "Geocaching begins with a piece of equipment — a handheld GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) unit, which costs anywhere from about $25 to $100, that you buy at a sporting-goods store."
GPS Units vary way more in price with very few under 75 dollars and most well over 100 Bucks. The more expensive ones have all manner of nifty features including a paperless Geocache logging system which is very handy!
Excellent! THX.
Oh yeah. THIS is something the government should regulate! Good heavens ...
What’s Reagan’s famous quote? “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
Lol! Far from it. I love wandering around old cemeteries. The stories those tombstones tell ... I guess it must be the historian in me.
Good luck, she'd better get seriously in shape. My cousin - who wrestled in college, and was seriously in shape - tried it, and quit after a couple of weeks. He said, "I'm eating 5000 calories a day, and losing too much weight. I literally just can't eat enough, or fast enough, to keep up."
The Northern End, especially Katahdin and Knife's Edge, is some amazing scenery.
We should start a club...”The Creeping FReepers”.
:)
The vast majority of ‘cachers here are Obama voter types.
It’s like they finally gave up Dungeons And Dragons, left their mother’s basement and started wandering around the woods, instead.
The morons even have nerdy LOTR/etc nicknames.
Apparently they don’t subscribe to the “clean up the trash” claims.
The leave trails of Red Bull cans and candy wrappers.
Lol! I suspect there are a lot of us out there, and not just on FR. Find-a-Grave.com is one of the more popular sites on the web. And I imagine if you look you could find half a dozen blogs dealing with cemeteries, tombs, catacombs, ossuaries, etc.. Some of the most requested tours in New Orleans, for example, are the tours of the “cities of the dead,” the vast burial grounds for generations of Orleanseans.
I would *love* to visit New Orleans cemeteries.
My main interest is the old statuary and wonderful tombstones of the past.
Modern ones are all so four-square, unoriginal and banal.
My dad’s stone was just put in place last month and ‘fancy’ as it is, it’s just a variation of all the ~other~ ‘guy-in-fishing-boat-with-deer-and-mountain-scenery’ stones nearby.
On the flip side of that are “cemeteries” like the ones we took my gramma to visit in WV.
We’d tromp through somebody’s pasture to pay our respects to long-gone kinfolk who only had field stones with no names on them.
Gramma always knew whose rock was whose.
She’s gone now and I couldn’t even tell you exactly where in WV they are, let alone list the occupants of each rock.
Some are micro caches and you can sit at a picnic table and not be aware your 2 inches from a cache. Plain fun and ingenious methods to hide them make for a fun outing, planned or spur of the moment. And yes I bag trash and haul it out.
I actually sorta Geocached some of Leawood’s dynamite once many years ago...
Ah, the indiscretions of my youth are the stuff of legends...
“Let’s not mention the tons of trash left by hikers trekking Mt. Everest. ;( “
In defense of those fanatics, dead men can’t carry out their trash. The AT passes through northwestern NJ; the lowest point of the trail is about an hour north of me (at Bear Mountain NY).
I don’t see the allure of such a hobby.
Of course they probably wouldn’t see the allure of the things I like either.
Where is “here”?
I played Dungeons & Dragons when I was younger; I don’t see many D & D types near the caches we go for. I really want the kids (and myself) to get a workout, and I’m tired of finding the easy ones stolen/emptied.
I watch a Korean show called “Running Man” (with subtitles of course) and it is very entertaining. It makes me want to organize a Running Man club so we can all chase each other ripping name tags off each others backs.
Gotta be some good exercise in that.
Trayvon was Geocaching! He was just wearing a hoodie instead of a floppy hat, and had Skittles in his caching bag.
-PJ
The funny thing is, someone reported not finding the cache, but instead found somebody's stash of drugs.
That's the problem around here. There are some hidden pot farms in the hills around here. People have been killed for accidentally stumbling onto them.
-PJ
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