geochaching

I am not sure I have the patience or attention span to get particularly excited about Geocaching. However, it is at the moment, taking a fair bit of my attention. To be fair, in that respect it is filling the void left by work which has lost whatever ability it had to inspire. And I am not alone in that. My office is a motivation-free zone right now. Anyway, back to geocaching.

You can read all about it here but in the nutshell it is an online community of folks that hide stuff and post the GPS co-ordinates of their caches on that website. The cache will have, as a minimum, a logbook and often cheap and cheerful treasure to swap with fellow hunters. And that is it. You log your finds online. Kinda like a scavenger hunt. Only with satellite navigation.

scatrd and Mrs. scatrd go a-hunting and told me about this a while ago, before I owned a GPS. Fast forward to Monday-last and I was home alone as Sal had gone interstate to visit her sister. For reasons that escape me I logged onto the geocaching site to discover one in a park I regularly walk Rowlf in. And I could download the co-ordinates to my GPS. Hell, why not?

For the record, the answer to that question is because I should have been on a coastal cliff looking for whales. But I forgot about that, was bored and hence...

This gave me a perfect opportunity to explore some extra features of my Garmin 305 (it is a fantastic gizmo) and that is what I did. I downloaded the location, grabbed the dog and went off to find the cache. A fairly easy challenge and it took me only a short while of wandering back on forth as my GPS told me I was on top of the cache..no, it's over there...no there...no, right here...

I felt like an excited kid when I found it, filled with the sense of achievement work fails miserably to provide. I phoned scatrd - at home getting over a bout of iritis (I know what that is like, luckily once for me though) - and had a natter before heading off in the rain to fnd some food. At that time I wished I'd downloaded a few other locations. As the drizzle came down I was happy to be undercover hough. Thanks again to JR, aka scatrd for introducing me to this.

Since then I've been looking for the locations of other local caches and have had a go at finding three, failing on all counts. In my defence, I've looked for one at night and one in the morning beore it got light and both of those times I was walking Rowlf. I looked for another at lunch time today while out running, but I was pushed for time and there was a muggle about. Yes, a muggle...

And here I introduce my bigget problem with geocaching. The term 'muggle' refers to a non-caching passer-by from who the location of the cache is kept secret for fear of it being 'muggled', or stolen/removed/abused. I think it is the word that leaves me feeling uneasy; all a bit Harry Potter isn't it?

So, my jury out, I am fairly sure I will go out now and again to hunt caches when I have nothing better to do. I want to discover the ones I have had a brief hunt for; unfinished business. So you may read more about this pastime here. But you might not.