Geocaching 101

Today, we were treated to another fun day with good friends in the beauty of the great outdoors!! Ashley, was given a hand-held GPS for her birthday last weekend, so they invited us to explore an afternoon of geocaching not too far from our houses!!

Geocaching is a world renown sport, where you plot the coordinates of hidden caches (ie, treasure boxes) into a GPS, then you have to try to find the cache!! It's pretty technical, and you have to be pretty patient, but it's so much fun with friends (and more eyes to look for the hidden box!! :))!!!

Here we all are...we just found the first cache!!! Yay!!! Ashley will be a pro-geocacher soon!!Below, example of a hidden cache...can you see it buried in there? :)
Tada!!! There it is! Ooh, let's see what fun toys are in there...a Hawaiin lay, a flexible frisbee, and more fun trinkets. The fun part of geocaching is that once you find the cache, you open it and choose from multiple toys/trinkets and replace what you take with something. We left with the lay and a couple of other toys...we found three caches total today!! Also, there's a log (ie, a small note pad) and a writing pen in each cache, so you can read who all has been there and the dates, and then you write a fun message, your 'nickname' and the date you found it. We found one that dated back to 2001!!It was a fun time, and it really is a great family activity!!

WARNING:
GEOCACHING CAN BE VERY ADDICTIVE, SO YOU MUST TRY THIS AT HOME!! ;)