What do you get when you mix one part technology, one part hiking, and one part treasure hunting? You get the fun and challenging sport of Geocaching (pronounced geocashing), a great hobby for anyone from seasoned athletes to families with small children.

How does it work? One person hides a container (cache) of items somewhere outside, and then shares the GPS coordinates with others. Geocachers then use the coordinates to find the cache and trade an item of their own with an item from the container. The concept is pretty simple, but the difficulty of the caches can vary greatly. Some may require only a 5 minute walk in a local park while others may require you to take an hour long canoe trip into a marsh to probe for a sunken cache with your canoe paddle. 

I enjoy Geocaching because it is something I can do with my whole family and it can be done anywhere in the world. It brings us to parks, nature preserves, and hidden or little known historical sites that we might never otherwise get to see. Other times it is more about the journey than the destination. Even though we are outside having fun with my family, I am still getting to make use of my Windows Mobile device paired with a Bluetooth GPS.

Although the "treasure" usually is not anything of great value like small toys and trinkets, they might sometimes contain costume jewelry, foreign coins or travel bugs which are specially tagged items that travel from cache to cache with the finders posting stories about the item along the way.

The Geocaching.com website is one of the best places to learn more about Geocaching and where to find caches in your area.

Enjoy!

- Alex
Developer One Software
Customer Services Specialist

"The Groundspeak Geocaching Logo is a trademark of Groundspeak, Inc."