Geocaching
A couple of years ago, when the paramour bought our first GPS unit, zie came across the pastime of "geocaching", which involves using a GPS unit to discover little caches that people have hidden all over the world. At the time there were only a handful of geocaches in our city, none of them near where we lived. We talked about going out and hunting a couple of them down at some point in time, but nothing ever came of it.
I was reminded about geocaching the other day by an article I read online. Since I now own a cellphone with GPS capability I decided to check out the geocaching web-site to see if there were any nearby. I was amazed to find that there are now over thirty caches listed just within a 2km radius of where we live, let alone the many others scattered about the city in general.
Four of the nearby caches were on a local trail which the paramour and I often walk, so this afternoon I downloaded a geocaching app (c:geo) for my Android phone and we went out to see if we could find a couple of them. We found the first one fairly quickly, but the next two eluded us despite being listed as "easy" finds. At that point my cellphone lost its 3G service and I was not able to download the coordinates of the fourth cache, so we decided to call it a day.
By this time I had the bug, though. Back home I started looking through the local listings again and noted that the one nearest to us was just six blocks away and fully accessible by road. It's a full moon tonight so I decided to go for a midnight stroll and easily found the cache.
Apparently geocaching has grown rapidly in popularity over the past few years. In 2002 there were only 300 caches in all of BC. Today there are almost 14,000.
I was reminded about geocaching the other day by an article I read online. Since I now own a cellphone with GPS capability I decided to check out the geocaching web-site to see if there were any nearby. I was amazed to find that there are now over thirty caches listed just within a 2km radius of where we live, let alone the many others scattered about the city in general.
Four of the nearby caches were on a local trail which the paramour and I often walk, so this afternoon I downloaded a geocaching app (c:geo) for my Android phone and we went out to see if we could find a couple of them. We found the first one fairly quickly, but the next two eluded us despite being listed as "easy" finds. At that point my cellphone lost its 3G service and I was not able to download the coordinates of the fourth cache, so we decided to call it a day.
By this time I had the bug, though. Back home I started looking through the local listings again and noted that the one nearest to us was just six blocks away and fully accessible by road. It's a full moon tonight so I decided to go for a midnight stroll and easily found the cache.
Apparently geocaching has grown rapidly in popularity over the past few years. In 2002 there were only 300 caches in all of BC. Today there are almost 14,000.