Me and the Door's went geocaching for the first time. It was a blast. We tried 4 different caches, were successful in finding 3 of them. For those that don't know about geocaching, you get the latitutde and longitude coordinates of a cache on the net. You enter them into a handheld GPS unit and then go to where the coordinates are located. Somewhere in the general vicinity will be some kind of cache. The caches contain some kind of log book that finders sign and note when they found it. Micro sized caches are only big enough to hold the log book. Other caches are larger and contain kitschy kinds of trinkets. The concept of those is to take something from the cache while leaving something in the cache. Other caches are multi-stage caches. The coordinates you get from the net lead you to the first stage, something in the first stage will give you direction or coordinates to the next stage and so forth.
First one, was in an industrial park in Solon. There was a little cul-de-sac. Took us about 5 minutes of walking around till Scott noticed a fake-looking bird's nest. It had a small quarter sized container in it with a couple folded up strips of paper that consisted of the log book.
Second cache was a failure. It was supposed to be a multi-stage cache, which would've been very cool to explore. Oh well, we'll find a good multi-stage sometime.
Third cache was fun. It was near the gorge in the Brecksville Reservoir. We had to walk up through what looked like an access road for park rangers, maybe. Then we got into the middle of the forest itself. Took us about 10-15 minutes to find this one. Ended up being what looked like a big plastic mayonnaise jar. It was full of a bunch of kitschy stuff.
The fourth cache was a fun one. We were following the directions on the GPS and had no clue how to get to it because there was no roads leading to it. We eventually found an office park that was the closest thing to it. We walked through the neatly mowed grass near the MetLife/Fox Sports Ohio building to a forest where we found a small ammo box.
On the way back to scott's we decided on a way for us to leave our mark on the geocaching world. I've got a set of cheap plastic poker chips. We stopped by Office Max and picked up some circular labels. Scott's got a domain name he hasn't been using for a while. So we're gonna setup a simple site, put the domain name and a unique number on the chips, then start leaving them in the caches that we find in the hopes that someone will find one of our Door-bloons (think dubloons, but since we're Door's we're calling them Door-bloons), go to the site and tell us where the found it. And hopefully our Door-bloons will spread across the nation to other caches.
To see other pictures from our first Geocaching expedition go to my Yahoo Photo Album
6 comments:
wow, that sounds like a blast!!!
That sounds like a seriously good time. Might have to give it a try if they do that down here.
should've put this in the post itself. For those interested in checking out geocaching, go to geocaching.com. you can search for caches in your general area
Hello,
Quite a neat adventure. I've heard of this sort of thing before, but never had the equipment to pursue it. It would be a ton of fun with a friend or two. (o: Have you been hiding things too?
-Br. Dr. Bear, MsD
we're considering making a cache eventually, but for the time being we're focusing on making our own trackable items to leave in the caches we find.
too bad we didn't know about this back when we were all at the same job. we could have organized a company geocache day!
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