Geocaching?
You may ask what is geocaching? Well their is a definition here and a pretty good one here as well. A friend once called it "hiking with a purpose." I like to think of it as a high tech treasure hunt.
We started doing this as a family on Sunday, May 19, 2002. We were at church and heard about this and decided to go give it a try. We found two that day. Next day at work myself and a few guys from work found another. We found 10 that month. 17 the month after that. 137 by the end of that year, which back then was pretty good since there were only about 800 in the entire state. Since then we have found a few more. You can view our stats here.
Why do I like Caching?
I think it stems from when I was a kid. My Dad would take different roads, different routes from one place to another. Often he would test me to see if I knew how to get home from our currently location. I saw more parts of our city then most people that way. Geocaching is very similar. It causes you to stop and travel to places that you wouldn't normally visit. I doubt I would have ever known about a lone Cedar tree stump with it's own gazebo or perhaps the leaning tower of Salt Lake City. I had been to Gilgal Gardens before but Geocaching gave me an extra excuse to stop once again. These places along with 100's of others we have seen and experienced simply because of this little hobby.
Travel Bugs
For those who don't know, Travel Bugs are little hitch hikers that travel from cache to cache moved by other cachers. They can be anything. We have a bunch of these yet we have a few special ones as well. One of our current special collections is a group of 5 little Matchbox cars. They were dropped in Pennsylvania on a race back to Utah. They really haven't moved much.....but oh well.
They didn't start quite even. I placed two in one cache and the three others in a cache a little farther away. The two placed in the one cache are already lost. Which sucks...but that is life.
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