What is Geocaching? (And how to do it!)

In my first year at University I made an effort to join many on campus clubs. Surprisingly, the most enjoyable was the Photo Club. I went on all sorts of adventures with them, but my most memorable was my geocaching extravaganza.

The principle behind this GPS adventure is relatively simple – it’s a treasure hunt. People hide “Caches” of goodies all over the world, and post their Latitude and Longitude coordinates on the Internet. Other people use their Global Positioning System Receiver to track down the location. Once they find it, the adventurers take something out of the cache and put something new in it. Sometimes there are themes – movies / western / etc.. Other times it’s a garage sale-esque conglomeration. Regardless of what you find, hiking blindly guided only by a hand held GPS device is absurdly fun, and if you ever have the opportunity to embark on one of these adventures, I recommend it.

A good site that features many of these locations is http://www.geocaching.com/. To find out more, check out this wikipedia article.