Yesterday I mentioned geocaching and thought maybe you'd like a bit more information about it. It's based on the European letterboxing, but uses GPS coordinates to help you locate a "treasure". Letterboxing uses compass and orienteering skills and often a rubberstamped image is exchanged.
Geocaches vary in size, from micro (about the size of a film canister or Altoid tin) up to large (surplus ammo box). The small ones only contain a piece of paper for you to sign, sometimes a stub of a pencil. Larger ones contain items you can take as well as something to sign, and you are expected to leave something.
There are themed caches, where you leave items pertaining to a particular theme, and multi-stage caches where there might be four or five in an area and each one gives the coordinates of another one. In this case, most of the first ones are micros and the final one is large.
We started doing this when Sophie was 5 because she really didn't think she would ever have an "adventure" and this seemed as if it might fill the bill. Luckily, the first one we took her to was a HUGE ammo box hidden in a hollow log at Alexander Park in Chehalis. It was jam-packed with stickers, small toys, coins, rubber balls, and lots of trinkets. She's been hooked ever since and we have done more geocaches with her than without.
The hardest one we've ever found took us five tries. It's in downtown Centralia, in a parking lot between Pearl and Tower. We searched and searched and searched, finally resorting to reading the logs other people had put online and found a clue...someone mentioned they had recently purchased that type of cache container and was pleased to see another one.
So, we started looking for an unusual container....it turned out to be a fake electrical connection outlet attached to a power pole.
We have found a few in Washington and a couple in Oregon and thought it might be fun to find at least one in each state we go through, but didn't really stop to do it until last night. We now have found geocaches in Montana and Idaho. Since we are going to go south and travel I-80, we have pulled the information for a couple in Utah and Wyoming, in case we don't have internet access before we get there.
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| Outside West Yellowstone, Montana. |
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