Well, I found a new hobby...






I've recently been absolutely sick of TV and the general idiocy of famous people. Michael Jackson. Paris Hilton. Tom Cruise. Britney Spears. Etc. Etc. On and on. That was one of the reasons I originally got into kayaking, but it didn't really work out so that kayaking was a family experience.

I really enjoy kayaking, but it is a one man show here in my home. One of the posts on Paddling.net was about Geocaching. I had heard about it a while ago and it seemed kind of cool, but I never really thought too much about it. However, I was sort of kicking around the idea of buying a cheap GPS unit for camping and kayaking trips and I decided to take a look at the site.

Basically, Geocaching is a high tech treasure hunt. Someone hides a cache (which vary in size) and then posts the coordinates and some clues on the Geocaching web site. You enter the coordinates into your GPS unit and go find the site. Once there, you then have to find the actual cache, which can be located and hidden in some really ingenious ways. Some of these caches are smaller than a 35 mm film canister. Some of them are very well camouflaged. Some of them are hidden in very busy areas, such as Lake Ella or the parking lot of a super popular megastore.

Anyway, if you are lucky enough to find the cache, there are usually some assorted stuff to trade and a log book. The 'treasure' usually isn't anything all that super, but that isn't the point. The way you are supposed to trade is to trade up. That is, take something but leave something a little better in the cache. Nothing in the caches I have found have been all that valuable, although the foreign coins were cool to trade for. Shelby and I have started collecting those. After you are done caching for the day, you go back to the website and log your finds. Some of the local Tallahassee caches (122 in a 3o mile radius from Tallahassee) have been around since 2002 and have logs of over 50 visits.

So, I bought a cheap GPS unit; a Magellan Explorist 100. It's ok for geocaching but is pretty basic. I went out on Father's Day and found two caches, I was the first to find (FTF) on both of them. FTF is kind of a cool designation. One of my caches was a quick .10 mile walk down the bike trail. The other was a 4 mile walk around Lake Lafayette. Neither of these places have I ever seen.

That is what geocaching is all about. Seeing cool places in your area (or anywhere) that you wouldn't see otherwise.

So, Saturday, the whole family loaded up and went geocaching, my 18 month old included. We found six out of seven caches we tried and were even lucky enough to be FTF on our first cache.

So, mission accomplished, we as a family have a hobby that takes us outside, gets us some decent exercise and gets us away from TV.

On the last cache we found, we were in a park in a neat area of town and came across a pagan altar or shrine. Interesting stuff...