What is Geocaching?

What is Geo-caching? We love it. Classified as a game of treasure hunts. We don't have a lot of time on our hands, and DH hates wasting time. If we didn't ride together to and from work, I would stop all the time at new locations. Geocaching is a real-world, outdoor treasure hunting game using GPS-enabled devices. You have to navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates and then attempt to find the geocache container hidden at that location. Sometimes there's tradables (random misc items), sometimes there's just a paper to sign your username(log). Now to participate in Geocaching, you need to sign up at geocaching.com. That's where you get the coordinates of the caches. Here's a Show-You video from the site.

Anyways, I've participated in this many years ago, but never got really into it until it moved to the App stores. Now my phone or iPad are the GPS. Totally free through itunes. Recently I've gotten back into it. Mostly because of more caches hidden in our area. We also did some geocaching on bike too. Yesterday I became a Premium member for 3 months by donating $10. It shows even more caches in our area. In fact during our evening bike rides, we ride by 2 of them. I leave for Las Vegas this weekend for a seminar, and I will be enjoying many caches off the strip. I've also picked up a Trackable geocache, it's my first one so far. I'm looking forward to taking it with me.

I'm not going to go much into the description of geocaching, but it is something that us as a family like to do. I really like seeing what items people leave and take. I tend to leave an item or few when I find anything that will hold more than a signing log. Maybe I should change my username to The Gifter. :p I also wanted to leave something behind that people could go online and get some info on the things that we do, and have done. I like to hear of history of the people that were there before us. Leaving something with my username on it was what I started really getting into. I ended up making a template, and doing some of my own copy paste designing. I was disappointed to find out that the person that found a cache after us, had taken out the items I had put in there and not replaced them with anything. That's the point. If you take something, you have to leave something of the same or greater value. Over the weekend we found 2 caches that had, what I call minivan cache, in them. A plastic army man, a plastic truck with no wheels, a strip of stickers, a bead, and a yoyo with no string on it. These are all things that you would find under and in between the seats of our minivan when the girls were younger. I want people to find neat creative things. That's when making our own trinkets came in. Commonly called The Swag Bag, ours tends to get full of our own projects, rather than what we trade out with.

Here's some pics of our swag.

I downloaded a sticker making template into Microsoft. Then used Paint to draw, cut, paste my own personalized labels. Copied it over to the template. Printed out they are square, then I cut them to circles. Using Outdoor Mod Podge, I glue them to clear stones I got from Hobby Lobby, and then after they dry I cover the paper again and just around the rim of the stone. I only do the bottom part because when I seen this similar thing done, they covered the entire rock. It made it shiny, but it looked fake, and tended to peel off when scratched against something. On several of the stones I also stuck magnets onto the backs of them. The printouts have a clever little info on them, then my username and my state. Even though I don't have many other geocache friends, I like to think that the person that picks up something that I made will remember me.

Always encouraging people to DIY if possible, here are some starter backgrounds if you'd like to make your own personalized pieces. Just copy or save the image, then open in Paint program (or whatever you use), add your stuff. :)