Geocaching: Good, Clean, Cheap Fun

For $100 one can buy a discount GPS and start GeoCaching. What's Geocaching? I'll explain it by telling you how to do it. To get started, go to the website GeoCaching.Com and put in the coordinates read from a GPS. The website will present a list of "caches" and their coordinates. These are usually tupperware containers or altoids tins full of largely worthless trinkets. You then follow your GPS to the coordinates of the cache and look for it till you've found it. You then sign the logbook and put the cache back where you've found it.

That's not the main attraction of it though. The fun of geocaching is that in the quest to find these caches, one will visit places in the local neighborhood that are very interesting. These places are ones that most people who live near them probably don't even know exist. I went to an interesting cemetery, a hard to get to point at the end of an artificial harbor, a haunted hospital, a lake I didn't know about and a whole lot of great views. I also bumped into other geocachers looking for the same caches. The best thing about Geocaching is that, after the initial GPS investment, it's pretty cheap. It also gets you outside and to interesting places. For those who've forgotten: Outside is that place that you go in between Work, Home and Costco.