Geocaching - A walk with a purpose

John explained that it was a walk with a purpose as there was treasure to be found at the end of the walk.

So that is essentially Geocaching; it is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches.

The geocache can come in different sizes (some as small as a magnet) and has some trinkets in, a logbook and a pencil with the idea being that you take something and leave something behind.

There are a nearly a million caches hidden in 200 countries on all seven continents of the world.

In fact there are 1250 geocaches within a 50 mile radius of our house.

They are always hidden and you probably walk past some every day of the week without knowing that it is there. There are several tiny ones hidden at Metro stations.

Hiding a cache

The geocacher carefully chooses a location and fills the box with trinkets, a logbook and a pencil.

Then they note the geographical coordinates, they log them on to the geocaching website for other cachers to find.

Sometimes the geocaches have clues with them to help them cacher find it.

Finding a geocache

The geocacher goes on the geocaching website and types in the postcode of where they are going. Then it comes up with all the geocaches around there and the cacher picks a few.

When the geocacher is on the walk the real treasure is the country view.

When we are geocaching it sometimes it is easy and other times it is hard and we use a GPS machine to help us.

When you find the cache it is a really happy feeling. You open the box and take a trinket but you must remember to leave something.

Fill in the logbook and record what you had taken and left. After that, put it back in the same place as before. Don't let muggles (non-geocachers) see you!

Then on the website, log that you found the cache, what you left and took, maybe a comment.