Ideas for Geocaching as a "scavenger hunt" for a birthday party

[Team zeP]

My friend and her husband are turning 40, and we are planning a birthday party for them in San Francisco. Her brother came up with the idea for a scavenger hunt, and since my husband and I are just joining the fun of Geocaching, I suggested that we do something along those lines. We're just in the planning stage now, and trying to decide if we will do a "true Geocache" or make up something on our own, but I thought I would get some ideas from those more experienced with Geocaching.

 

We expect to have about 25 people, with most being novices to Geocaching. We will probably break into teams of 4-5 people, and we hope to have a smart phone dedicated to each group, so groups can either choose to download the Geocache app or enter coordinates on Google Maps. (If we go with a real Geocache)

 

Any suggestions on making this work smoothly and with muggles? Some of the guest do not want to drive all over San Francisco. So we are hoping to either target caches that are within walking distance of the party location, or drive to one location, such as Golden Gate Park, and have people set off from there to find caches. One idea is for a group to find as many as they can within a given time period, and to assign higher points for more difficult finds. So one group may choose to find 3 easy ones, and earn 3 points, and another group may choose to find one that's more difficult and earn more points. They would have to picture document the team with the found cache to get the credit for it. We also found a cool multi-cache challenge that is not too far away from the party location. It seems challenging enough to be fun, but not too difficult. The winning team solves the puzzle and finds the cache first.

 

We don't want to make it too difficult, because I suspect we will have some "grumpy" participants that wouldn't choose to do this on their own, but reluctantly agree to do it for the party.

 

Any suggestions are appreciated, especially, a discussion of problems with doing things any one way.

 

Thanks!

[+lookout.]

My friend and her husband are turning 40, and we are planning a birthday party for them in San Francisco. Her brother came up with the idea for a scavenger hunt, and since my husband and I are just joining the fun of Geocaching, I suggested that we do something along those lines. We're just in the planning stage now, and trying to decide if we will do a "true Geocache" or make up something on our own, but I thought I would get some ideas from those more experienced with Geocaching.

 

We expect to have about 25 people, with most being novices to Geocaching. We will probably break into teams of 4-5 people, and we hope to have a smart phone dedicated to each group, so groups can either choose to download the Geocache app or enter coordinates on Google Maps. (If we go with a real Geocache)

 

Any suggestions on making this work smoothly and with muggles? Some of the guest do not want to drive all over San Francisco. So we are hoping to either target caches that are within walking distance of the party location, or drive to one location, such as Golden Gate Park, and have people set off from there to find caches. One idea is for a group to find as many as they can within a given time period, and to assign higher points for more difficult finds. So one group may choose to find 3 easy ones, and earn 3 points, and another group may choose to find one that's more difficult and earn more points. They would have to picture document the team with the found cache to get the credit for it. We also found a cool multi-cache challenge that is not too far away from the party location. It seems challenging enough to be fun, but not too difficult. The winning team solves the puzzle and finds the cache first.

 

We don't want to make it too difficult, because I suspect we will have some "grumpy" participants that wouldn't choose to do this on their own, but reluctantly agree to do it for the party.

 

Any suggestions are appreciated, especially, a discussion of problems with doing things any one way.

 

Thanks!

 

i would suggest doing your own caches that aren't published on geocaching.com, that way you can tailor them a little better to your group specifically. you could even put party related surprises in them for the FTF in your group.

[+Kryten]

Do your own caches, temporary caches are not permitted and it doesn't sound like yours would be permenant and secondly since published caches are open to everybody your party will be gatecrashed by the ravenous FTF crowd.

[+Chief301]

Also, know that there will be some problems trying to use Google Maps for seeking a cache. Google Maps is set up for driving directions, not off road. So it will let you enter a set of coordinates but will direct you to the nearest street address to those coordinates, not the coordinates themselves (i.e., if the cache is located in a tree in a park, Google will bring you to the front gate of the park but not to the actual tree)

 

There are a couple of kludgy workarounds for this but not something you'll probably want to have to explain to party guests. Also, having them download another GPS program (like Motion X or the Geocaching app) is problematic as well, because they might not care to install an app on their phones, or even if they did they still have to learn how to use the app. There's a little but of a learning curve, especially if the folks have no off-road navigation experience at all...it's a skill that not everyone possesses these days. Nowadays everyone's understanding of how a GPS works is spoken commands telling you to "turn right, now arriving at Starbuck's" kind of simplicity....getting to a specific point off the road is a little trickier.

[+niraD]

My experience is that it's better to use something other than coordinates if the participants are not already familiar with using a hiking-oriented GPSr. Driving-oriented GPSrs, Google Maps on smartphones, etc. tend to direct people to the nearest street address, which adds to the confusion. Letterbox-style clues work for a broader range of people than coordinates do.

 

Depending on your group, it can be fun to have teams work together. For example, I've had half the teams get an envelope (A1, A2, A3,...) from one location, and half the teams get an envelope (B1, B2, B3,...) from another location. The envelopes tell them to pair up with a specific team (A1 with B1, A2 with B2,...), and then the pairs of teams have to work together on the next clue.

[+DragonsWest]

Projection.

 

You have a location, you have a bearing, or figure one out, and go from spot to spot finding the next clue. Could work pretty well in a public park.

[Team zeP]

Thanks for all the info everyone. These are exactly the kind of "bugs" I knew you wise ones would be able to help us work out! :-) If we do a "real" Geocache, we would just have them find hides that are already out there. My husband and I have never hidden a cache before, and we don't live in the area where we will be having the party. So we wouldn't be able to maintain one that we would set up.

 

We thought about doing our own "private" cache, but being new to this, we're not sure how to set it up without the assistance of this website. Any suggestions on that? I never thought about Google not showing coordinates for off road. That makes complete sense though. Is there a "generic" app that helps you set GPS coordinates?

 

Thanks for your suggestions!

[+Chief301]

Thanks for all the info everyone. These are exactly the kind of "bugs" I knew you wise ones would be able to help us work out! :-) If we do a "real" Geocache, we would just have them find hides that are already out there. My husband and I have never hidden a cache before, and we don't live in the area where we will be having the party. So we wouldn't be able to maintain one that we would set up.

 

We thought about doing our own "private" cache, but being new to this, we're not sure how to set it up without the assistance of this website. Any suggestions on that? I never thought about Google not showing coordinates for off road. That makes complete sense though. Is there a "generic" app that helps you set GPS coordinates?

 

Thanks for your suggestions!

 

Since you don't live in the area, then you are correct, you shouldn't hide a "real" GC.com cache if you won't be able to maintain it (if only more people understood this )

 

The app I mentioned earlier, Motion X, is a good general purpose GPS app. You can get a free "lite" version that works almost as well as the paid one. But again, there's a bit of a learning curve to both the app itself and land navigation in general. Some of your party guests may be tech savvy and pick up on it right away, and some, well....maybe not so much.

 

Since you probably won't be listing the cache locations on Geocaching.com, you'll obviously need some way to communicate the coordinates to the guests....maybe you could have a handout printed up to give each guest, with the coordinates listed, or to make it a more interesting challenge maybe they'd have to solve some kind of puzzle to get the coordinates. This part would be limited only by your imagination and how much work you feel like putting into it. Perhaps the "clues" to the puzzle could be answering questions about the guests of honor, like their anniversary date or their kids' birthdays or something, and using those numbers to fill in the blanks of the coordinates or something along those lines.

[+Gus]

This sounds familiar.

I turned 40 last year and my wife pulled off a scavenger event for me.

Here's the GC page. Mission Impossible: Operation 40th Birthday!