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Geocaching Aptitude Or G.a.


Snoogans

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I have been thinking about all the people that I have met because of geocaching and the fact that we all seem to instantly become friends. Our Texas group feels more like an extended family. Anyhooo…..

 

I’m sure it’s something deeper than a shared activity that makes us have so much in common. I’m pretty sure it’s things that don’t even get discussed here.

 

There’s a deeper appeal to geocaching which I call Geocaching Aptitude, or G.A.

 

It’s more than just a love of electronic hardware and the outdoors.

 

The problem solving nature of the activity pretty much ensures that geocachers have more than a couple brain cells to rub together, but that’s not it.

 

I’m not sure what “IT” is……??? I just know that I have it.

 

For example:

 

On a personal level I have ALWAYS been a cacher. I was putting “treasures” in a box under my bed when I was in preschool.

 

When I got a bit older I was really into the idea of hidden things and buried treasure. I drew treasure maps endlessly and was wayyy into Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts.

 

A bit older and I had a “Secret Stash.” A bit older than that and I had another “Secret Stash” etc. None of my stashes was ever found. I was THAT “good.”

 

So I grow up and get out on my own and the need for secrecy diminished, but I still had all this G.A.

 

I started hiking in the Sierras whenever I could afford to go home.

 

I hid my first cache in 1989. It was/is just some useful junk in a waterproof metal first aid box. (I always had an attraction to a good container.) It had/has: A lighter, some pictures, some change, an old pocket knife, a mini maglight, some other stuff, you know, things I could use. I hid it in a place that I like to go and hang out and think. (Yes, ala Alvin York for the obligatory obscure reference.) It’s still there as are about a dozen other caches. One wilderness cache is just a nice Arkansas whetstone and an extra jar of Pautski’s Green, (Salmon eggs.) which I replace with a fresh one every year.

 

I was a geocacher and I just didn’t know it until a happened upon the link at the Vermilion Valley Resort website on 2/28/03.

 

I already had a GPS and there was a cache listed less than a mile from my house as the crow flies, so I was after it the next day. I got SKUNKED! I went again the next day. SKUNKED AGAIN! I had spotted a geocacher on that second trip, (Lvispelvis) but I didn’t want to be shown where the cache was, so I waited until he got outta sight and I never saw that dude again that day. Almost two hours later and I had decided that geocaching wasn’t any fun and I wasn’t going to do it anymore. (Actually I was a bit more colorful in my thinking about the activity.) I went home to watch Jeff Gordon blow away the competition at whichever track he had won on countless times before.

 

So I’m sittin there and it’s just eating me that I couldn’t find that (expletive deleted) CACHE. I had a friend read me the new log from Lvispelvis over the phone and I was OUT THE DOOR. I was pretty sure that Gordon could win the race without me watching.

 

When I turned on my GPS this time I decided to look at some of the other features other than just the numbers. Hey, what’s this “goto” thingy? OOOooooooOOOooo, an arrow pointing thataway. 10 minutes later a true geocacher was born.

 

What’s your story?

 

Am I the only one who thinks that I have been a cacher all of my life?

 

How would you measure G.A. ?

 

Sn :):) gans

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I’m not sure what “IT” is……??? I just know that I have it.

 

I'm not sure what you have either, but I am sure I have a pill for it! :)

 

Is it true that Prozac fits in a PEZ dispenser?

Dunno...

 

kids.... candy... pills.... pez....

 

bad combination!

 

But it does go really well with a steak and red wine! :)

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I’m sure it’s something deeper than a shared activity that makes us have so much in common. I’m pretty sure it’s things that don’t even get discussed here.

 

There’s a deeper appeal to geocaching which I call Geocaching Aptitude, or G.A.

 

It’s more than just a love of electronic hardware and the outdoors.

 

The problem solving nature of the activity pretty much ensures that geocachers have more than a couple brain cells to rub together, but that’s not it.

 

I’m not sure what “IT” is……??? I just know that I have it.

 

Rather than call it G.A., maybe it is more like G.G.

 

I think geocaching is in our genes. Weren't we all hunter/gatherers thousands of years ago?

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I’m sure it’s something deeper than a shared activity that makes us have so much in common. I’m pretty sure it’s things that don’t even get discussed here.

 

There’s a deeper appeal to geocaching which I call Geocaching Aptitude, or G.A.

 

It’s more than just a love of electronic hardware and the outdoors.

 

The problem solving nature of the activity pretty much ensures that geocachers have more than a couple brain cells to rub together, but that’s not it.

 

I’m not sure what “IT” is……??? I just know that I have it.

 

Rather than call it G.A., maybe it is more like G.G.

 

I think geocaching is in our genes. Weren't we all hunter/gatherers thousands of years ago?

The elusive GNA molecule? :)

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I know I would have loved this as a kid.

 

I remember being fascinated when I learned about latitude and longitude in 4th grade.

 

One of my favorite boardgames was called "Lost Treasure". It had an electronic component. The board was divided into coordinates, and the computer randomly picked where a treasure would be. You narrowed down where it was by telling the computer where your piece was on the board. The computer then told you whether the treasure was north or south, or east or west of you. I still have it; it just needs batteries. The similarity to geocaching never occurred to me until I started writing this response.

 

When we played hide-and-seek, I insisted the playing field be the entire square mile of neighborhood and woods around us.

 

I spent a lot of my childhood exploring the woods around a friend's house, drawing maps of it, and naming notable places. Oh, the caches I could place there, if it weren't someone's driveway and swimming pool now.

Edited by Dinoprophet
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As a child, I was a latchkey kid. I went to my grandparent's house after school and hung out there with several cousins until my mom got home from work. My grand parent's land consisted of around 50 or 60 acres of woods, fields streams and ponds. When it was sunny out, my grandmother did not allow us in the house unless it was supper time. She used to grumble that "Youth is wasted on you young kids". She thought we should be out getting scraped up and dirty, not sitting in front of the TV watching "Dialing for Dollars" or playing the super new Atari 2600! Anyway, we made up scavenger hunt games that evolved into something akin to Geocaching on their property. I got to know every tree, rock and bush on that piece of land! We had several plastic mayonaise jars that we hid each others stuff in. (Matchbox cars, Star Wars figures etc... (Sound familiar???)) Then we would make up clues as to where the other could find their stuff. There was real motive to find your own stuff!

 

My folks had friends who had parties that were bona fide scavenger hunts. They would publish a list of clues about things in the area and you would have to do some research to figure out some of it. I am from Bangor, Maine and they actually set up with Steven King one year that you had to go get his autograph on a Burger King crown! You had to get gravestone rubbings, business cards from different places, dates from buildings etc...

 

I love that stuff! My folks always brought me even though I was kind of young for the parties because I loved participating in the find!

 

25 years later, (August 2007) I'm dating this wonderful lady (The other half of the SuitedPair). She has friends who are into this thing called Geocaching and it sounds neat! "Check it out and see if it's something you'd want to do." One night on phone watch (Navy), I found the website address on something in my gymbag and decided to check it out!

The rest is history! We started out slowly this fall having only found 14 out of 16 caches attempted. One, it turns out must have been muggled. The other, we gave up. It was 20 degrees out and with about a 40 mph wind we looked for about five minutes and ran back to the truck, half frozen! it was the 4th of 4 that day, so we were not horribly disappointed!

Now I am stuck out in the deserts of Qatar. There are two here on base. One is a wicked one with all kinds of cyphers and puzzles. I have almost finished it. I read the Geocaching website all the time when I get a chance to get on a computer. I have discovered Confluence Project.org and decided that we are going to be the first to visit ALL of Maine's confluences and place a Cache near all of them (Except the seabound ones). It will be my summer's mission when I get back home from here.

 

Geocaching has given me a great out let to pass my time while I'm here. It's a great morale booster to me and will become a true hobby of mine and the other half as we make our way through life together.

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Reading the OP reminded me of wooden boxes full of treasures that I buried (shudder) in my back yard in the second grade, and then in the woods as I got older. I've been hiking and exploring forever. In Hawaii I discovered caches in which Hawaiians left food and water on long trails through the mountains. I've never really been a gadget person but when I moved to Long Island my wife bought me a GPS so I would stop calling her from the Pine Barrens at dusk saying, "Don't call anybody yet, but I'm not QUITE sure where I am..." I discovered GC.com by accident and it all fit perfectly together. Along with the treasure aspect of it, one of the things I love the most is that I can test my ability to find my way through the woods by features of the land, sun position, etc and then if I'm wrong (which I often am) I can look at the GPS to get back on track. I've never been much of a collector but now I'm fascinated by all the cool geocoins that are for sale. I hope I'm out in the woods too much to have time to actually follow up on that crazy obsession!

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I know I would have loved this as a kid.

 

I remember being fascinated when I learned about latitude and longitude in 4th grade.

 

One of my favorite boardgames was called "Lost Treasure". It had an electronic component. The board was divided into coordinates, and the computer randomly picked where a treasure would be. You narrowed down where it was by telling the computer where your piece was on the board. The computer then told you whether the treasure was north or south, or east or west of you. I still have it; it just needs batteries. The similarity to geocaching never occurred to me until I started writing this response.

 

When we played hide-and-seek, I insisted the playing field be the entire square mile of neighborhood and woods around us.

 

I spent a lot of my childhood exploring the woods around a friend's house, drawing maps of it, and naming notable places. Oh, the caches I could place there, if it weren't someone's driveway and swimming pool now.

Mine is really simple I just like to use up batteries....

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I grew up looking at, collecting, and reading maps. I always wanted to go wherever they led me. I want see what they depicted.

When the family would travel, I would set in the back and follow our route on the map. I would click off the rivers, crossroads and towns as we passed them. The more detailed the map the better.

As I got older I started using topographical maps. Even for the hikes in the mountains at the edge of town that I had crossed countless times and knew intimately, I would look at the maps or follow them as I hiked. I would look for things I had not found in my journeys and hunt them down. Maybe it was a stream I hadn’t seen or small valley or cliff I hadn’t been to, but seeing it on the map made me want to find it.

When I was in the Army everyone would trust me to get them to the point we were to be at. Even in my off duty time I was hiking. Often it would be to some point I had seen on a map during a maneuver, or somewhere I had read about in a paper or travel/hiking book.

Even beyond the maps I’ve always had wanderlust. I had to go see what was around the corner or over the ridge. Just one more mile and then I’ll stop. I don’t know times I’ve said that to myself.

Now I look at the cache pages and map feature and want to go find them. Now it’s, “Just one more cache and then I’ll stop.” Nothing has changed. I just found a new outlet for my compulsion.

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my first geocache was found together with some friends, on a company trip,

they knew all about it, and even used real outdoor gps devices,

but it was a secret game, only for the coolest of the coolest,

no normal should know about it, beware of muglers, they are all lame and can not be told or see what we do..

uha it was very interesting..

we got out and away and found it !!! man was I sold !!

when I got home I connected a gps receiver unit to a portable PC serial port -

reading the positon information in RAW NMEA code, printet out the wanted end position of a near cache I wanted to find,

and walked in zig-zag curve with the pc in my hand, until the numbers matched as much as I cound make them..

HAHA that was VERY hard, but I actually learned how the N - E numbers went up or down, how to turn and walk to make them go where I wanted..

after a few caches this hard way, I found a very bad and unstable program written for a windows CE palm pc/navigator,

the internal gps was too bad, so I used another external serially connected type,

to make it receive as good as possible, I mounted it on a cap using velcro and a wire to the palm pc,

it really worked, now I got a nice read out of the distance to cache, and an arrow pointing where I wanted to go,

ok I had to manually input the wanted position pr cache.

Another problem was offcourse the arrow did only work if I walked a quite fast speed,

so it was very hard to go in correct direction, better to use the distance to zero value

and figure out in what direction to go, to make the number drop fastest...

soon I got my first garmin.. a few of them worn out now..

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I remember riding a tricycle down my parents' driveway and hiding secret notes behind metal boxes on the telephone pole. I was very frustrated that my neighborhood friend wondered why I had to leave her a note, why not just tell her? I wrote some of these notes in invisible ink too. I guess that interest has gone by the wayside ... It sounds kind of crazy to me now but I created a compass rose on the bedroom floor and used to jump on each of the points with my eyes closed trying to develop my sense of direction. I must have been a strange little girl ... I started stamp collecting in the fourth grade and zeroed in on stamps that depicted maps. That may have been the beginning of my interest in maps and I read Totem Clan's post with interest because he described a similar fascination with maps and going to those places and seeing what they are really like and then what is beyond. I LOVED geology in college and it was largely that I liked learning to read topo maps and going on field trips. I accumulated a lot of topo maps that we first used on motorcycle rides when the point was to ford creeks and then later to plan white water canoeing expeditions. Then I began to collect antique maps from the civil war era and ones that depicted the US at various stages of expansion. Needless to say, geocaching feeds right into a lot of my apparently lifelong interests and I now collect geocoins that have maps on them.

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