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Where and when did you hear about geocaching the first time?


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First time I heard about geocaching was in 2003 on TV. I remember thinking to myself "Why would somebody want to find an old box under some bushes?". Later on I discovered the deeper meaning of geocaching and bought the Garmin Colorado I still use. Soon I was hooked :-)

 

Where and when did you hear about geocaching the first time?

I was at a family party. I friend was there with his GPS and laptop. He showed me somethings. I was totally amazed with the whole thing. I never new this existed. I left that night hooked and obsessed with the whole thing. I dreamed of making my first cache which I did. I know have 30 that I'm quite happy with.

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It was in the Fall of 2008. We were getting ready to make our Annual Trip to Gettysburg for the Apple Harvest Festival. I went on to the Garmin Web site to update the maps on my Nuvi. While I was on the Garmin web site I came across Geocaching. Became a member right then. And our first find was that weekend in Gettysburg. Just wish I had more time to do more of it.

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A few years ago, I was hiking at a local park. I was reading the information sign, when I saw a note saying "No geocaching " I had never heard of the game, so I did a google search and learned about the game. Then, two years ago, I decided I wanted a GPS for mapping my hunting and fishing spots. I remembered geocaching, and went and found the website.

I have been hooked ever since.

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I read about it in a parenting magazine about 3 or 4 years ago, and thought it sounded really fun, but I had a baby and so I kind of forgot about it, thinking that all geocaches were in the middle of the woods... If I had known there were 5000 of them in my county alone, I would've started then!

 

I forgot about it until I saw another article about it at work back a month or so ago, and a week later, I had time to go out and find our first cache! I am using my Nuvi now, but plan on buying a hand held this month. I love everything about it! It's really given me a great new hobby and things to look forward to.

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I found my first geocache before I knew what caching was. I was leading a hike for work one summer day, and while eating lunch at the summit, a couple kids went exploring the rocks nearby,. Suddenly one returns to the group, carrying an ammo can. "What's this?" he says?

 

"Well, it says 'Official Geocach-ay, Do Not Disturb' on it. You better put it back," I say. I didn't think much more about it. Only later would I not only find that I pronounced the word wrong, but if we had opened it & signed the log book, we'd have been First to Find!

 

I actually learned what caching was when my wife came home from work one day. "Hey John, have you ever heard of 'Geocaching'?"

 

"Nope, what is it?"

 

She explained how a local teacher brought a group of students to the museum she worked at to find the geocache hidden on the property. She started asking questions about why a busload of kids were trooping off into the woods, and when she found out why, she thought I'd be interested.

 

I think she sometimes regrets telling me. :blink:

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Nine years ago next week we were flying back home to California after a t-day visit to Seattle. Alaska Airlines in-flight magazine had a feature article on geocaching.

 

The following day we discovered that visitors had placed a dozen caches along the Mendocino County coast. We already had a Garmin eMap so we called up our friend Roadcow and spent the afternoon finding three caches all in tough spots. Let the games begin!

 

Back in those days it was very important that visitors place caches far from their homes. Otherwise our many drives to and from Seattle would have been quite barren for several years. We did our best to maintain any I-5 cache that needed help.

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In early Dec, 2008, I went with my son's Boy Scout patrol on a hike. His scoutmaster had a GPS with him. He mentioned a couple times on the hike about a geocache in the area that he couldn't find. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was interested in that fancy electronic compass he had. I guess I talked about it a lot at home, cause Santa brought me a Magellan Triton. The scoutmaster gave me the website and a new hobby was born.

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I'd first heard about it on facebook, once of my wife's friends mentioned she went geocaching. I did some research on it, but it didn't interest me because it was all about hiking and being outside, something I've never really been interested in. Then I'd heard about it from a user on another forum I frequent and still, it didn't interest me.

 

Then a friend of mine that I worship at church with mentions he saw some lady wandering around our parking lot with a GPS in her hand and he asked her what she was doing. Apparently there was a geocache at the edge of the parking lot there. I did some more research and found out that there were several near my home and work. Then I became a man obsessed. I had to have them all.

 

Drives my wife batty because I pretty much know exactly where all the geocaches are in the area around me and insist on pointing the ones I haven't found out every time I pass them.

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Nine years ago next week we were flying back home to California after a t-day visit to Seattle. Alaska Airlines in-flight magazine had a feature article on geocaching.

 

The following day we discovered that visitors had placed a dozen caches along the Mendocino County coast. We already had a Garmin eMap so we called up our friend Roadcow and spent the afternoon finding three caches all in tough spots. Let the games begin!

 

Back in those days it was very important that visitors place caches far from their homes. Otherwise our many drives to and from Seattle would have been quite barren for several years. We did our best to maintain any I-5 cache that needed help.

 

I try to maintain an I-5 cache. Its at the In 'N Out Burger in Kettlemen City. It is currently questionable, but I will check on it next week when I head north for Thanksgiving.

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I try to maintain an I-5 cache. Its at the In 'N Out Burger in Kettlemen City. It is currently questionable, but I will check on it next week when I head north for Thanksgiving.

 

We've been to that cache.

 

This is our route to our annual spring Mojave desert trips. Last time we were there our friend Roadcow told us that the high school kids in LA were modifying the INO Burger bumper stickers. They would remove two letters from the word burger and that would spell... well, never mind. I shouldn't have mentioned that. Anyway, it made me remember the cache.

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My daughter discovered a container on a class field trip. A while later we were hiking around the area to visit some labyrinths and she showed it to me. But if it had a stash note, I didn't see it. My daughter mentioned it to some other hikers and they told us it must have been a geocache.

 

This picture shows where we discovered our first cache:

 

d845b7f4-1fd8-4089-ac7b-f9824b350565.jpg

 

Several months after that we were looking for something to do and thought about geocaching. There was a local cache listed in an area that I knew so we decided to find it. I didn't have a gpsr and this was before google maps and google earth, so were limited in what we could find. The maps on the web site were pretty basic and eventually I realized I would need a gadget. I got a basic second hand gpsr and thought caching was even more fun with it. My family soon thought I was obsessed.

Edited by mulvaney
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My girlfriend and myself took a vacation in the mountains of Arkansas in Oct 2010 and were staying at a resort in a "yurt" overlooking the Boston Mountains. I was on the laptop looking for some waterfalls to visit and came across a webpage on the Arkansas Park system. They had an article about geocaching which looked interesting. We looked on the Groundspeak web site and found that there were several caches in our area. We drive into Fort Smith and bought a gpsr and we have been hooked eversince!! We have located over 170 caches in about a month and are planning on starting the LA Geo Project this weekend.

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A couple of my horse riding buddies started caching about 4 years ago. I thought it was one of the stupidest things I had heard of. I would sit on my horse (and hold theirs) while they searched, sighing and looking at my watch. Finally last year I got stuck actually looking for one with this group..and it was FUN. I was hooked and I now spend most of my free time caching. The rest of my friends think it is one of the stupidest things they have heard of.

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Sometime in 2005/6 a co-worker told me about this hobby he and his family were into called Geocaching. We didn't have a GPSr, and I told my wife about it that evening, and it was 'That sounds like fun".

Nothing for at least a year, and then, in 2007 as we were going to visit friends near Toronto, and knowing they liked hiking, and also knowing they had a hand-held GPSr, Sharron said "Let's try that 'treasure hunting thing'".

We looked the site up, and loaded 3 or 4 caches into their unit, and off we went. One find and we were hooked!

Within 2 or 3 days we had purchased our own unit and we have never looked back!

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I think I had heard about it somewhere as a passing reference before but I can't remember for certain. The first I know for sure I heard about geocaching was from an old friend of mine back in 2008. He was over at my house and we were hanging out in my bedroom. He brought it up and we came to the geocaching website.

 

He wasn't into this for a long though, so it seems. He hasn't logged in since June 2008, the same month he registered his account.

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I learned about it in my high school phys. ed. class. My teacher wanted to introduce a fun activity to the "modified" class (we're unable to participate in regular gym because of physical issues like asthma and such) so he planted some makeshift caches around campus and let us use his GPSr to find them. I was the only one who really found it interesting. After a few months reading about it online, I acquired an old eXplorist 200 and began hunting. I don't have much time to get out and search, but I'm very active online and I go to events (including volunteering at GW8)! I love this hobby, even if I never have time to actually go out and find.

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My boyfriend bought me an HTC EVO for my birthday last month, and it was my first ever "smart phone", so I was obsessed with playing with all the bells and whistles and figuring out cool things the phone could do. He mentioned geocaching at some point (not sure where he heard of it), but he had never actually done it before. A quick Google search brought me to this site, and when I saw how many caches were hidden so close to my house out in the boonies, I was so excited! We planned a hiking trip at a local state park for that afternoon, and used my phone to find 3 caches on the trails. It's only been a couple of weeks since I started, but I am definitely hooked, and have been trying to talk my friends into coming with me (with minimal success). Unfortunately, my boyfriend is hardly as enthusiastic about it as I am, so it takes a lot of bargaining to get him to come on a run with me. I am trying my best to make him a convert! I love this game!

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I really don't remember when I first heard of geocaching. I guess I've been "aware" of it for a few years now but it didn't particularly pique my interest beyond a general thought of "That's pretty cool". I guess back then the main things I knew about it were 1) there aren't a lot of caches in my area, and 2) GPS units are more expensive than I really want to get into.

 

Fast forward a few years and I have a friend in my volunteer fire department who is retired and takes this annual 2-month ski trip to Lake Tahoe. He has guests come up for shorter stays while he's there and one of them (a neighboring fire chief who I know well), unbeknownst to me, is into geocaching. They do a little caching while they're up there and he said they had a great time. So next time I see the chief, I mention it and he gives me the details. Coupled with the fact that by now there are a lot more caches in our area, I'm starting to develop an interest.

 

I still couldn't see dropping all that $$$ for a GPS unit just to play a game, but when I upgraded my phone to the iPhone 4 recently I figured it was time to give it a try. Tried the free app for awhile but didn't take long to decide to upgrade ;) .

 

That was only a couple of months ago and after a slow start I now have 25 finds. Did the first few solo just to figure it out but have started bringing the family along now. The kids get a kick out of it (wife is warming up to it, I think :) )

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I was doing some web reviews on what automotive GPS to buy. I kept seeing info/features on "geocaching" and did a Google search on it. I knew a little about it already, and first thought it was things hidden in the deepest most remote parts of the back country, out in the puke weeds. I was blown away when I found the geocaching site and did a search in my area! Tons of geocaches! I went out that day with my automotive unit and found my first and was hooked. Two months later I had a hand held and was off and running.

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A timely topic, as I found my first geocache one year ago today! I'd first heard of geocaching years before that- must have been 2004-5 or so when I was a freshman in college, and I heard about it somewhere on the Internet to the point where I was on geocaching.com seeing what there was around campus. Two things got in the way of me starting then however- a. I was a freshman in college and thus too poor to purchase an expensive GPS, particularly with b. I had no car and there were only one or two geocaches I could imagine reaching by foot or bike in my area at the time. So I scratched that.

 

One year+ a few days ago, however, I was procrastinating exam studying over lunch and trying to find new fun apps to download for my iPhone- remembered geocaching and wondered if there was "an app for that," and sure enough there was and there was even a cache a few hundred feet from where I was sitting! It was too high a Muggle area for me to find, but I was happy to find my first in a quiet cemetery that weekend. :laughing:

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I could not remember when it was that I first heard about caching but it was probably in 2004 (at least according to my gmail archives). There was a lot of crossover with my involvement in the Halloween/haunted house industry at that time. This sparked my interest as I had been in electronics my whole life and worked for a large retailer of electronics. The hobby sounded cool but not cool enough to justify the price of the handhelds at that time.

 

Flash forward to this year and one of my friends in the haunt industry is up here in Ohio and stayed at our house for a few days. He started caching last year and wanted to do some near here. I could not go but I rekindled my interest. I thought this would be a good way to spend some time with my son (11 years old) in the outdoors. Little did I know how much both of us would enjoy it!! We are both addicted and having fun with all types of caches. I have recently taken up climbing some of the tree caches around here. I tell my wife it is my mid-life crisis and that it is cheaper than a Corvette or Harley. LOL

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We saw an article in the local newspaper about geocaching, back in 2004 or so. We had a car GPS we had bought several years before to use for driving our daughter back and forth to college, and we also had gotten a hand held unit. When we looked at the geocaching.com website, we saw a cache only about two blocks from our house. We went to try it but couldn't find it, after a very long search. At that point, we didn't try again till a year or so later, when we had a better, more accurate handheld GPS, and also the satellite coverage had been improved to allow for more accuracy in locating coordinates. At last we were able to find a few caches, and we were hooked!

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i found out about it while watching Splinterheads. once they started talking about it my wifer paused the movie and said "go ahead" I said "go ahead and what" she said "you know you want to look it up and see if its real and it will bother you til you do so just look"

 

about 15 min later we were walking about 500 feet from our house and searching for our first cache.

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I was searching for an autorouting GPS back in mid-2001 since a friend had one for dual use in his car and plane. I wound up at Joe Mehaffey's GPS review site: http://gpsinformation.net/ which eventually led me to both GC and Buxley's.

 

Spent about a month bidding on a GPS V on ebay before receiving the unit in November. I played around with getting it the maps and such all set up before finally giving a geocache a go right after New Year in 2002. I still have that unit, although it has long ago been relegated to the geoshelf.

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We heard about it from my wife's friends in the summer of 2008. They live in CA but got married in WI and were road tripping back after the wedding. They mentioned they would be caching on the way home. Fast forward a year to when they flew back to the midwest to spend Memorial Day weekend with us and took us out around my hometown. We found 6 or 7 that weekend and I was instantly hooked. 1000+ finds later and I'm constantly looking for new places to cache whenever we travel.

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We are new to the game and heard about it on Downsizer.net this summer. Somebody posted a thread in the forum asking for suggestions on family activities for the summer holidays. We took a quick look on the map and were happy to see the nearest cache was just 5km from our home. So we went and found it and that's how we got hooked.

 

Funny thing is that I can't believe we never heard about it in the UK when we lived there as we were keen orienteers and knew alot of folk that pursued outdoor activities. Funny old world eh?

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i found out about it while watching Splinterheads. once they started talking about it my wifer paused the movie and said "go ahead" I said "go ahead and what" she said "you know you want to look it up and see if its real and it will bother you til you do so just look"

 

about 15 min later we were walking about 500 feet from our house and searching for our first cache.

That's how I found out about it too.

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The very first time I heard of geocaching was only a week ago. I was a little bored and decided to use Bing to look up "gps" as someone I know just got a Garmin gps watch for running. However my search came up with geocache results. Confused I hit up youtube and saw the Geocaching intro video and the Splinterheads geocaching explanation. That night I rushed out and got a gps as it reminded me of my childhood. Back in the early 80s in summer camp at Camp Norris I had climbed Mt. San Gorgonio and was amazed to find a summit cache with log book and a benchmarker. Geocaching is letting me relive that thrill.

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first time I heard about anything to do with geocaching was 2007 when I was a member of a local coin club and another member brought in some geocoins to sell this got me on the track to geocaching but did not really understand it until 2010 when I met a fellow geocacher who took the time to explain it to me and after that my wife and I have been hooked and going strong.

Edited by kevcco
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Sometime during Jan 2010, a coworker came into the office on a weekend, gimping like his leg was about to fall off. I asked what was wrong, and he proceeded to show me a popped blister that was at least 2 inches in diameter. I asked how he got it, and he said he was geocaching. I was like, "Huh??" He told me to look it up, and gave me the web page address. At the time, all we did was play on computers and playstation, etc. And, all of us were showing the effects of a lack of activity. I mentioned it to the Mrs. and she wasn't very enthused. I mumbled agreement, and started doing homework on GPSr's. When the PN-30 arrived, I drug her out of the house. Ever since our first find, she's been more addicted than I am. (We bushwhacked through about 400 feet of briars, hip deep weeds and woods in shorts and sandals to get a cache......) To be honest, caching probably saved our marriage (16 years in July), and we've made some amazing new friends in the year since that first find.

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About a year or so ago I was watching an episode of CSI NY and it was on there. I thought it sound pretty interesting and meant to look it up but forgot. Then one Saturday just before New Year I was bored and wanted to come up with a new hobby for the new year. I had a bit of think and remembered the episode I had seen but couldn't remember the name so googled geo treasure hunt. Up popped this site and away I went. The odd thing is that when I went to Boss Mum's house and mentioned it to my Mum, I found that all three of my brothers had just started doing it on the same day!

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It was just last summer.

 

My young son expressed an interest in hiking and I was all for it since I used to mtn bike a lot in my younger days. I figured we both could use the fresh air and exercise.

 

We live in a hiking trail rich area so after we did a few hikes and he was still in to it, I bought all the trail maps for our area. When looking at hike we had already done I noticed that one of the "nice View" spots noted on a trail we did had a name, so I googled the name to see if I could find out why this spot had a name and the only hit i got on the name was at GC.com. There was a geocache at the spot with the same name. We had lunch no more than 10 ft from it when we hiked there. I mentioned it to my son and he had to go find it. It might have been since I mentioned that it mich be like finding a treasure chest.

 

I read through GC.com and realized that there were hundreds of them in our area. So I borrowed a gps from a buddy and we were off.

 

We were hooked after our first day.

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The book "North of Beautiful." Don't recommend it, it was a not so great book, way to melodramatic for me. but it did include a character who geocached, who I liked, and I thought that was the neatest part of the book. Most of my good ideas I steal from books. :P

Edit to change wording on further thought.

Edited by Quetzal1234
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Back in 2005 my husband mentioned he heard about geocaching and tried to explain it to me. We only did 5 caches that year...guess we didn't get hooked at that point. In fact we didn't cache again until 4 years later! Shame on us. :unsure: For the past 2 years we've gone a lot more and look forward to caching hikes, trails, rr tracks, p&g's, and everything in between.

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I was on a website that features homemade gadgets, workshop tricks and tips, "hacked" technology and such.

 

One guy had hollowed a 1/2" bolt, put a nut and a few magnets on it, and was gonna hide it. Cool, but what the heck for? I followed the link, and here I am.

 

I was immediately gung ho. Within a few hours, I had found my first cache, less than a mile from my house. It was a magnetic micro, and I found it with out a gps. I ran out and bought a Geomate the next day. A month later, I moved up to an eXplorists GC.

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A friend of mine emailed me to ask if our family geocached. I had heard about it and was vaguely familiar with the idea but we had never looked into it. I found this website on google and was surprised to find out there were 6 hidden right out to the back of our property and tonnes within a short drive around our town and surrounding area. We started with the iphone app but my phone must have missed the smart gene because it had no idea where it was :rolleyes:

 

Yesterday we decided to try again and wanted to find one urban cache since we were out running errands... that one find turned into ten searches, nine finds and a trip to the store to pick up a real GPS unit. Yup, I think we are hooked! We enjoy the exercise, the excitement and the challenge- the kids love exchanging swag and seeing all of the different people on the logs.

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I first heard about it from my mother who actually found a cache by accident as a muggles! That was about 6 years ago. I didn't look it up at that time and forgot about it completely until late last year. I'm not sure what made me remember about it, but I suddenly thought that it sounded like great fun. I looked up caches near me on here and was surprised to find hundreds within biking distance, including one just down the road. Went out to find that one that evening but unfortunately a DNF. Ordered GPS straight away afterwards. The next day before the GPS turned up I made a find based on guessing the location from Google maps and the cache description. Then the GPS turned up and I was hooked.

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My daughter discovered a container on a class field trip. A while later we were hiking around the area to visit some labyrinths and she showed it to me. But if it had a stash note, I didn't see it. My daughter mentioned it to some other hikers and they told us it must have been a geocache.

 

This picture shows where we discovered our first cache:

 

d845b7f4-1fd8-4089-ac7b-f9824b350565.jpg

 

Several months after that we were looking for something to do and thought about geocaching. There was a local cache listed in an area that I knew so we decided to find it. I didn't have a gpsr and this was before google maps and google earth, so were limited in what we could find. The maps on the web site were pretty basic and eventually I realized I would need a gadget. I got a basic second hand gpsr and thought caching was even more fun with it. My family soon thought I was obsessed.

Beautiful picture

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The first time I heard of geocaching was probably 4 years ago. My wife was running an overnighter for a group of young Scouts and when she got home, she told me about a funny thing that had happened during the camp. A group of guys came through the area with their GPS units and said that they were looking for a geocache. They looked for a while and eventually gave up and left. Soon after, a group of Scouts comes running out of the woods announcing that they found it! My wife, being a letterboxer herself, explained that the boys needed to go put it back exactly where they had found it. i still don't know if those guys ever came back to make the find!

 

Fast forward to last year and I'm sitting around, playing with my iPhone and I come across the geocaching app. I try the free version and go find my first cache. A week later, I upgrade to the paid version. Two weeks after that, I go buy a Garmin 60CSx. Now I wonder if sometimes my wife wishes she had never told me that story! :)

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My wife's cousin was talking about geocaching at Christmas in '09. We were interested, her moreso than myself. A few months later in March my wife told me she had been saving an iTunes gift card to try out geocaching on her iPhone once spring hit. On March 24th we found our first few caches, and that was it for us; we were hooked. I know it doesn't seem like a great number, but I'm closing in on 200.

Edited by foxual
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My grandma gave me the idea. She knows all the family loves scavenger hunts and mushroom hunting. She read an article and showed it to me. So when the weather got nice and a few hours to spare- we headed out. There were 6 of us. phone app said we were standing on top of it. We had no idea what to look for. We didnt find it. It was in a park so we tried another one located there. There was nothing there(coords were definitely off) So we gave up and said this is stupid. A year later- no gps-aimed with the clue only- looked 3 different times. I blamed it on the snow for the reason I could not find it. A few weeks later I wrote a few done and thought I would try again. Finally, found one. Have been hooked ever since. I love the fact that it is great excercise. making excercise fun is the only way I am goona do it.

 

Oh and btw the ones in the park were there at the time we looked but have since gone missing.

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