Birthday Parties

[Migsters]

Hello,

I have been trying to read up on throwing a birthday party with a geocaching theme. All I can find is someone saying that you can ask for it to not be published and then give out the coords. These are young kids though, how do I actually show them how to look it up and follow geocaching (iphones)?

I was hoping to give each child one to find and one to hide to get started (most of them having never done it before).

Any help you can give I would appreciate!

Thanks!

[+Casting Crowns]

Ummmm.....sounds to me like you need to have and hide your OWN TEMPORARY caches hidden within your yard or local park wherever you're having the party. Officially published geocaches have to be no LESS than 528' apart so this would not be the best way to introduce youngin's to the game.

 

Just hide some of your own caches around the yard etc. and save the coords to your gps. Then, when they arrive, you can help load the coords onto their phones/gps's and let them find them. Good luck!

[hoosier guy]

Good advice there

[+buttaskotch]

...actually show them how to look it up and follow geocaching (iphones)?

you have more than 1 iPhone! Cool!

But to the point, the temporary caches can't be published and need to be 528' apart to be published, which maybe a bit much for small children.

Best bet, since the accuracy of the iPhone can be less than accurate (I have rarely gotten less than 15' from a cache) get a GPSr load the coords and you are off.

If you can't purchase one, perhaps a friend or fellow cachers can be present to assist.

[+moose61]

I once organized a kind of a multicache for some friends which were unfamiliar with geocaching and GPS devices. I rented some GPS devices (of course iPhones will do as wel) and created entered muliple WP's (50) predefined in the devices. They started with WP1, needed to answer a question and the number they received was the number of the next WP/question. This way they do not need to understand entering new WP's. Since there are so many WP's in the device they still didn't know where they were going to. This method worked out fine.

[+cw1710]

If you do just make sure everyone takes care of the caches. We had someone in my area do that after they figured out what geocaching was because I had one hidden next door to their house and they met someone looking for it. They emailed me and said they were gonna do a party and look for a few of my caches. I was soon after doing maintenance on a couple of my caches. One of them had the lid totally gone and the log just stuffed back in. How do you lose a bright orange lid?

[+Gitchee-Gummee]

Sounds to me like you have a tall ladder to climb.

 

You want to have young kids running about with smart phones, trying to do something completely new to them, in a relatively confined area too boot?

 

It does sound like a hoot, and lots of fun. But do keep in mind that it takes most older people a year or more to fully understand the concept -- not to mention the error potentials of the device (smart phone or GPSr, either one).

 

Deliberate temporary published caches on the website aren't allowed -- and they must be available to all or at least premium members. As mentioned the "saturation" rule of 528' would also apply.

 

How about, written or typed pages describing paced directions and distances along with other clues, distributing the pages so that each youngster starts with hunting a different 'cache'? So to speak, a staggered start?

 

Good luck. I should be fun to watch!

[+The Jester]

Set up a sock puppet account, hide and write up the cache pages without submitting them to review, and have the log in data available to each phone/user to look up the unpublished pages. You can always adopt the cache pages with your main account and re-write them for real caches later.