Ten Reasons Why Geocaching Should Be Your Hobby

So I realized that I have been writing a lot about this and that a lot lately. So I want to share with you my top ten reasons why you need to geocache:

1. It is overall relatively cheap and free to join the website.

2. It appears like this sport will not be going away anytime soon.

3. It can range from easy to extremely challenging. We all know we need a challenge every now and then.

4. There are at LEAST 10 (could be way more) caches within a five mile radius of your home. You have no excuse to not get those convenient ones.

5. You can do it in almost any weather.

6. Meeting new cachers is very fun and advantageous for when you can’t find that tough cache and you need a friend to call.

7. You get to be outdoors!

8. You are allowed to do your part by hiding caches of your own.

9. Believe it or not, it stimulates the mind a lot.

10. The world is indeed your playground! You will discover so many new places that it will blow your mind!

These are just a few of the reasons why I think it is worth your while to get into geocaching. If you do not want to take my word for it, just go out and give it a try. If you have a decent reason for not liking it, I will respect that fully. Now get out there and enjoy!

Getting an Automobile GPS

Before this Christmas, Erin and I only owned the GPS that was given to us when we first began geocaching. I know I have harped that geocaching is virtually free minus a few costs. However, I am pretty sure many people either own a GPS for their car or have one built in. If not though, I highly suggest looking into buying one. You will not be disappointed, I promise. Up until this holiday season I always had to look at maps and plan routes out as to the best ways to get to the caches we were hunting. I realize that some cachers will just use their handheld to get them there but I sometimes feel like I am driving in circles using that seeing as you never know the exact street to turn down until you have went too far. So writing these routes out would sometimes take hours on end. I do not know how some people do it. They were especially bad when we were planning trips out on the back roads because I would have to zoom in so far to A. find out the name of the road, and B. make sure it did not dead end two miles down the road. I am convinced that it was this route making that would occasionally turn me off from geocaching for a few days. So I figured out a solution to the problem. Christmas was here and since I had nothing else that I really wanted I asked for a GPS for my car. I got a beautiful Garmin Nuvi 260 and am absolutely in love with it. Her name is Hilda by the way. I even turned her accent on to mock an Australian because I think they have the coolest accents. None the less, I never have to create routes anymore. I simply plug the coordinates into her and she tells me exactly where I need to be. Don’t get me wrong, these things are never perfect, but with as accurate as it has been thus far I am not concerned. In case you have not gotten the picture yet, I am telling you that if you have the money go out and buy a GPS for the car. It will strengthen your love for geocaching, I guarantee it!

The Four Seasons of Caching

When it comes to living in Illinois and caching all year round, it is safe to say that we cachers experience something different in each season of hunting. Me personally would choose to cache in late fall to early winter any day over the summer months. My explanation is simple; I am extremely allergic to poison ivy. Every time I go out to cache in the late spring and summer I am taking a very large risk of infecting myself with some of the nastiest outbreaks of poison ivy I am pretty sure you have ever seen. I guess the cliché is true though: “with no risk, comes no reward.” Although I do cache in the summer, I attempt to make sure the caches are less in the area of dense forest and close to paths and even more urban. If I am to get poison ivy I am out of the game for at least a couple of weeks and it will spread like a fire all over my body. Yes, it is not comfortable at all and I do everything in my power to avoid being put in that situation. None the less, there are other reasons for enjoying the hunt in the winter as well. For one, all the undergrowth in the forest’s are dead making it easier to walk through what used to be thick forest. Now, instead of trying to find the best route to the cache you can walk straight to it with no problem. Some cachers will argue that this makes the sport too easy. My response to that is that you have to play the weather in your favor. If there is one important thing I have learned while caching it is that each and every weather scenario has an advantage to cache in. The hard part is determining which situation works best with the particular weather. I have yet to figure it all out yet, but I am confident it will come with more experience. If you have any hints feel free to let me know as well. I am always up for good advice.

Our Only Travel Bug

Since joining the Geocaching community we have only activated one travel bug of our own. We intend to put out many more in the future, but at this point we are sitting at one. We can only hope that the luck of our future TB’s are far greater than our very first. For our first travel bug we wanted to play a little bit into our name like we try to do so often. So we looked up key chains online that had puzzle pieces on them. We eventually found the perfect one and before we knew it we had a TB ready to go into a cache. It seemed very fitting to activate our first cache at the same time so we decided to put the bug into our first cache. Now it begins to get intense. The person who was first to find on our cache ended up taking our travel bug like we expected. What we did not account for was the fact that they were going to forget they had it for about three months. At this point in time I decided to e-mail the cacher and sure enough he told me that he had forgotten that he even had it and it was buried in his glove compartment in his car. Sigh. Finally he replaced the TB back into the world where it belongs. However, he decided to place it in a cache that he owned and consisted of roughly 9 stages. It is not as bad as it sounds until you actually go out and try to accomplish this cache. At least three of the stages were incorrect information and we ended up finding this cache ourselves by using brute force. I want to back up a little real quick. He did not place our TB in this cache until we had already found it and told him that the stages were error filled. It almost seemed like he did it to spite us. I know it may seem like I am making cachers out to be rude, but this makes for a good lesson in geocaching. We ended up being the last people to find this particular cache for about the last three months now and I sent him another e-mail asking if he could move our TB. Shockingly, he obliged and moved it to another one of his caches. It is now time to play the waiting game on our travel bug that has moved a grand total of 28 miles in 6 months.

Story Time: The Tale of How We Got Our First GPS

Since Erin and I are your typical broke college students, finding money to buy a GPS was going to be hard for us when we first began this journey. Plus we were anxious to get out in the field to begin collecting caches that we did not want to wait for any kind of money to come our way. So we decided to go about caching in a very primitive way: Google Maps. It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. We figured we had no money, so why not try and “beat” the system. Looking back on that idea now I would have told myself that I was crazy for thinking a blurry icon on a map would show me where a cache was. However, we gave it a go and actually came up with 7finds on our first day of caching GPS-less. It was sort of a triumphant day for us that I think we will always look back on a laugh. So here I was all excited to log these finds and in doing so I wanted to make it clear that we made these finds by using Google Maps and not a GPS. I thought it would make us look hardcore or something. Interestingly enough, a fellow cacher in the area was reading our logs and decided to shoot me an e-mail. He mentioned that he saw we used Google Maps to find our caches and wondered if we planned on getting a GPS. Naturally, I responded and told him that a GPS was in our future plans since it was something we really could not afford at the moment. Later that day I got his response telling me that he had an extra GPS and was willing to give it to us for no charge. Now, I may be a college student, but I know that in today’s day and age it is rare to receive anything for free. Sure enough though we met him for lunch a few days later and he gave us our GPS that we still use today. It really was a blessing that he found our logs and was gracious enough to do that for us. Not only that, he also became a good caching friend. In fact, we have been on a few cache hunts with him and hopefully more in our future. If he ever does read this, Thank You from the bottom of our hearts!

Our First Ever “First to Find”

The story behind our first ever first to find (FTF) is actually ironic and funny. It came back in December when I was home from school for winter break. Erin was visiting me on this particular weekend because it was my annual work Christmas Party and I wanted to bring her along since I was allowed to bring a guest. Now, I am about to get off topic a little here, but it will all tie in I promise. Anyways, Erin tends to bring me good luck and at our party my work was doing a present giveaway and the way to win was to be drawn from a hat. She claimed I was going to win if she was there. It just so happened on the first drawing I did win a tool set and a real nice set of LED flashlights ideal for geocaching. That was not it. They did a second drawing for much bigger prizes and guess who won? Yes, I won an iPod touch in that round. I could not believe it. Now I call Erin my good luck charm. Now back to the FTF story. We just got back to my house from the Christmas party and my dad begins telling me about a cache that was just posted right by our house. How nice, it was dark and I just won LED flashlights. See the irony in this one? Someone definitely knew something that I did not that night. So we headed out to get the cache right then at about midnight. I forgot to mention it was sleeting out too pretty good at this time as well. Here we are with about a 500 foot walk to a cache in sleet and darkness. The flashlights definitely came in handy. I ended up finding it before everyone else to cap off a great night overall. That is definitely a night I will never forget. We have since to land an FTF, but hope to sometime soon.

My Personal View on Travel Bugs

When first getting into geocaching, the whole idea behind travel bugs and geocoins very much captivated me. The thought that some items were able to be tracked and could be checked up on at any time was very appealing to me to say the least. I made it my goal to attempt and collect as many TB’s (travel bugs) and coins as possible and to move them as far as I can each time. However, I have come to notice that not all cachers share the same passion I do towards these unique items. Before it appears like I am complaining, I want to clear up that I have respect for all cachers and I know there is a rhyme to everyone’s reason. I just have to respectfully disagree with the way some cachers go about TB moving. When I find a travel bug I always make sure to read the goal and try to accommodate it to the best of my abilities. If it says it wants to visit Alaska, for example, I am obviously not going to be able to take it there, but I will move it more west to at least keep it going in the right direction. Moreover, after I replace a TB, I enjoy checking in on them from time to time. Since it shows me the TB’s I have found I like to take that to my advantage and have a look see every now and then. This is when it baffles me to see some bugs being held for months on end. I am not sure if some people just quit the sport and forget they have TB’s in their possession or just forget they have them in the first place. This is when I put myself in the bug owner’s position. Personally, when I place one I want it to move as much as possible. I think I am just venting at this point now. None the less, the point I am trying to make is that although collecting TB’s is something I enjoy, I also make sure to replace them as soon as I possibly can.

A Few of My Ideas for PuzzlePiece915

When Erin and I decided to partake in geocaching, there were a few ideas that we threw around that we thought would make it even more interesting for us. Don’t get me wrong, caching is intriguing just the way it is, but we wanted to spice it up a bit from our end. Our first idea was to play off of our caching name, PuzzlePiece915. We thought it would be neat to buy a few puzzles and kind of integrate leaving puzzle pieces behind at the caches that we found. I guess we wanted to make it our calling as some might say. Anyways, so we took these puzzles, built them, and then proceeded to flip them over and write neat quotes on the back of them. Next, we would break the puzzle up into an even amount of pieces. The ultimate goal was to find the ultimate zealous cacher out there and hope that they may take the time to collect our pieces and enjoy what we were trying to do. To be honest, I did not think anyone would really latch onto the idea. No sooner did I get an e-mail from a caching icon around here (Ma n Pa is there caching name), telling me that they solved out puzzle. Sure enough, there was the quote on the next line: “Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.” It was very gratifying to say the least. Not only did someone solve our puzzle, but it happened to be the one with our most favorite quote on it. Moving right along, our other semi-neat idea was to attempt to pick up a different item from each cache. We want to get the widest variety of items instead of zoning in on any specific idea. Erin then labels the items telling us where we found them and who found that specific cache. We do this because now when we want to hide a small or regular cache we are going to use those items as a starting point for swag to put into the cache. They will also be used to refill the caches when needed. We have a bag for each set of 100 finds. I realize how pathetically nerdy this may sound, but in theory it is great to us.

My Most Recent Caching Adventure

So, my girlfriend (whom I will now refer to as Erin), was in town for the weekend and we decided that we had to do some caching on Sunday. Well, I looked at the map around here and decided that we were actually going to venture out and do some caching around Clinton Lake in Clinton, Illinois. However, at the point I planned this little caching trip I was unaware of the snow that was going to be falling. Here we were on Sunday morning looking out the window at a steady snowfall and 21 caches with our name on them in Clinton. Our stubbornness persuaded us to keep to the plan and head out and tackle these caches. Everything was going well for the most part until it began to snow more and harder as well. We knew we would be going on back roads to get to many of these caches, but what we did not know was that they were going to be some of the biggest hills we have seen in this area. Big hills, lots of snow and ice, you do the math. We found ourselves unable to make it up a few of the hills no matter what we did. I even backed the car all the way back to the bottom and tried to get a head start only to make it just a little bit further. It was disappointing because we were forced to DNF some caches due to inclement weather. Having to turn away from a cache that I know we could have found is very difficult for me because I do not know if I will ever be back to where we were. After quite a few disheartening encounters, we knew the only thing to do was keep on searching. We fought through the rest of the search and were able to come up with 13 successful finds. I know it is a far cry from the 21 we had planned, but with the way the weather was on this day, we were lucky to grab any. I am quite positive we may have been the only cachers out in this area. I guess it just goes to show either we are completely insane, or love the sport enough to do it in whatever obstacles that are thrown at us.

Goal Setting

As I have said before, I have been caching for almost a year now and almost every time I go to the Geocaching website, I find myself setting a new goal as far as caching goes. My girlfriend (Erin) and I are constantly setting a goal as far as how many caches we want to find by a certain point. Albeit, we are only at about 350 finds right now, I am pretty proud of our accomplishments seeing as we are also full time college students. I think our goal for the upcoming summer is to go into it with 400 finds. I feel that is very much within reach since we are at 350 after less than a year. We basically have three months to find 50 and depending on how tough our workloads get, it should definitely be attainable. We also have different goals such as attempting to find a cache in as many states as possible. We both love traveling, and upon our graduation, we are hoping to begin to take as many trips as the wallet will allow. As I have said numerous times, caching allows us to see parts of Mother Nature that we would have never known existed. Why wouldn’t we want to explore as many states as possible? Moreover, a more longtime goal is to one day reach 10,000 finds and more! We realize that this one is a little on the over optimistic side, but we also know that geocaching is something we want to keep a part of our life for as long as possible. Now, after writing all this it makes me wonder if other cachers make goals as well. If so, I am extremely curious to know what type of goals they set as well.

Getting Lucky

I know that a lot of veteran cachers will know exactly what I am talking about in this post. A lot of times when one person in a relationship likes caching the other one does not. Now this is not accurate in all accounts, but I have definitely come across my fair share of combinations of haters and embracers. Now, I fully understand the main cause for it. In a lot of the cases I have seen it is a husband and wife and they usually have a family. Now either the husband or the wife enjoys caching while the other feels like they have to take care of the family while the husband/wife goes geocaching. I can totally see where they are coming from, but I also wish that the people who disliked it would just give it a chance. I realize that some families have small children. That may be a time to relax from the sport. However, the beauty of geocaching is that it does not seem to be disappearing anytime soon. When your child/children have grown a little I think it is a great idea to begin showing them the activity of geocaching. In my opinion it is completely possible for everyone to enjoy caching if gone about correctly. I know it is hard to teach and old dog new tricks, but I also know that it is possible. This is exactly where I got lucky. The first time I showed my girlfriend geocaching she fell in love with it just as much as me. We knew we liked it so much that we are now listed as our own name, PuzzlePiece915. It has been something that has brought us together even more and we vow to keep doing it as long as possible. I guess my main hope for you cachers who have a hater in the household to stay strong and hope everything will work itself out. This is way too exciting of a hobby to just let it go by the wayside if you really do enjoy it.

Take Part in the World’s Playground

When I first discovered the idea of geocaching, I was really unsure of what to expect. However, all it took was one escapade out into the world to realize just what I was getting myself into. I am sure I can speak for many cachers when I say the world literally becomes your “playground”. I found myself discovering new and exciting places in which I would have never known existed had it not been for geocaching. I know this will sound cliché, but it was as if the world stands still in that moment you take in what you are being a part of. Parks and preserves are now places that I will frequent even if there is no cache to be found. In that case, you can bet I will be looking for a place to hide one so I can share my experiences with the next cacher. I can only imagine how exciting it is for cachers just like me who find somewhere new. Hell, there are even roads that we would have never known existed had it not been for that cache placed at the end of it. Even more, if you ever get sick of searching in a specific area, there are caches placed all over the world. Expand and find out what this sport has to present in other areas. Enjoying nature’s beauty and serenity are definitely cause enough for one to at least give this activity a try. Basically, I am reaching out to you adventurous ones who love to explore our wilderness and all it has to offer. You would be surprised just how much of the world you have yet to see. This also goes for the ones who have yet to discover their exploratory sides as well. When you do decide to venture out into our playground just remember that geocaching is giving us the gift of discovery; the ability to see the world from a new perspective.

My Journey into Geocaching…

As of a little over a year ago I had no clue that anything like this was possible, let alone existed. My dad had come home from work one day and while we were sitting outside on the deck he mentioned this really interesting word, “geocaching”. Geo-what? He went on to explain to me that one of his co-workers had told him all about it and showed him the whole geocaching website. At this point, I thought they were both a little bit crazy. I had heard of doing a little scavenger hunt, but never one that involves anywhere one could imagine. It was really hanging me up and my dad knew that. This is when he decided to prove it to not only me but himself as well. A few days later he had come home from work with a handheld GPS he had bought on lunch. Now it was time to show me exactly what we were dealing with. He decided to join the site for free and made his caching name, tooltime8. There was no rhyme or reason to his name so I tend not to ask him why he made it that. Anyways, after signing up, we began looking at some caches that were surprisingly nearby the house and plugged like five of them into the GPS. Was this really going to work? With a few knick knacks in one hand to trade and the GPS in another we set out to see what we could find. I don’t want to spoil what a first caching trip feels like, but needless to say, we were instantly hooked. I never knew that people hid ammo cans out in forests just waiting to be found. We found some in woods in which I had played in my entire childhood. It was simply amazing. I am sure I will expose more stories and go into much greater detail as this blog continues but for right now I hate to ruin it for ones who have yet to cache. I can only hope that everyone can take away even half as much as I did from my first experience.