You say what?
Most people still say "What's that then?" when either of us mention Geocaching. There are plenty of good explanations out there on the web already so I'm not going to trouble myself with creating another. You can read about it at the official
Geocaching site, or on
Wikipedia for example. Put simply it's Geo as in Earth or location, and caching as in a store of items. The idea is you use the Internet, a handheld GPS unit, sometimes a little brain power, and a lot of leg power to go find some stuff - Internet treasure hunting if you like.
What's the point?
For us it's all about going for a walk. We love to walk when we have spare time and Geocaching is our way of extending walks into even more of a hobby. We get to go to lots of different places and see things we perhaps wouldn't otherwise get to experience, both locally and while away or on holiday. It's cheap entertainment too, you just need the initial outlay of buying a GPS receiver and access to the Internet and you're off. Seems great for kids too, we've met lots of people who say it's the only way to get their little ones out of the house, and our niece is testament to being able to use a GPS and loving Geocaching. You do get satisfaction from finding something hidden in the middle of nowhere, and it can be equally disappointing to come away empty handed if you don't find one you're looking for.
About Graham & Beth
Our geocaching user name is Graham&Beth, this is how we're known on Geocaching sites and how we sign logs we have found. We signed up for an account on Sunday 18
th January 2004 after Graham heard about it for the first time on a television show. Unusually, Beth was enthusiastic about one of Graham's seemingly crazy ideas and we invested in a GPS unit and were hooked from there. We still have the same GPS unit today, a Garmin
eTrex Venture, which is simple but effective. We tend to average about 50 cache finds every year, which while sounding like one per week, realistically we tend to go about once a month and find several caches in a day.
More info and stats
I would love to be able to put more information on this page to automatically update about where we've been recently and what we found, and perhaps with some pictures too. However, sadly, Groundspeak the company who run the Geocaching web site have not yet seen fit to make this information programatically available so if you want to see what we've been up to in more detail you need to register with them and look directly at our profile page there.
