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How Did You Start Geocaching?


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We saw some sort of treasure hunting show on the Discovery Channel back around 2002. They did a segment on geocaching. They showed some couple caching near Seattle. When they opened the cache it had a t-shirt, some gift certificates to a restaurant, movie tickets, etc. Either caches were AWESOME back then or, as I suspect, it was planted for the sake of the show. Anyhoo, we thought it seemed like fun since we were outdoorsy types anyway (and a tad nerdy) so we decided to give it a try. Unfortunately, we didn't get around to buying a GPSr until 2004 but it's been fun ever since.

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I got started after buying a 500 dollar speedometer for fishing (garmin 60csx). I saw a menu for geocaching on the unit so I visited the website to see what all the fuss was about. Garmin led me to this site so here I am 1 month and 18 caches and counting. Being a bit of a tech junkie im now 700 plus dolars into this hobby with gps and now I had to buy a Palm PDA for paperless caching. This is so much fun I've introduced several people to the hobby.

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Flyng home from a famliy Thanksgiving visit in 2001 we read about geocaching in an Alaska Airlines in-flight magazine. Meanwhile, back at the family camp in Seattle that same day, my brother and his wife (Wienerdog) heard about it somehow.

 

We already had gpsrs so we each went out that weekend to find our first caches. Between our two teams that was over 6000 cache finds ago.

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When we were visiting "Li"s younger brother and his family in August of 2005 in North Carolina, his wife offered to watch ours and their kids and let us spend a nice Sunday morning together just the 3 of us. So he took us to two caches in a nearby park. About a month earlier, he had visited us for their parent's 45th anniversary and introduced "Li"'s older brother to the game. A month later I bought my own GPS, we went on two more cache hunts with the older brother and the rest is history, though he ("MarkSun") tended to do his own hunting from there!

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Saw an article in the newspaper about 6 months ago and thought it was right up my alley. Bought a couple of books, did some reading, then forgot about it. Few months later, some friends were discussing geocaching and I knew I needed to get out and do it. Bought my GPS and now my family never hears from me. :cool:

 

OT: Hey JEEBRA! I've seen you posting on the logs. Glad to see a fellow Montanan, let alone an East Helenan posting :cool:

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I had read an article in the newspaper a while ago and then decided to check out geocaching when I bought a GPS. I started looking into it and found geocaching.com before the gps arrived and I couldn't wait to get started.

My first geocache ended up being one that I walked a mile and went through 10 feet of briars to get to it. Plus poison ivy and walking around the edge of a lake most the way to get there. I was going from the vacation cabins on a big lake to the cache, and I didn't really know what I was doing. But still I was hooked.

 

I'm still a relative newbie with only 40 finds, but I think I understand it better now. Some of my family thinks I'm nuts to tramp through the woods through all the stick-tights, poison ivy, thorns and everything. But my little sisters like it.

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DECEMBER 31st, 2001, I had just arrived back in CT after a visit home to South FL. I was out for a walk in a local park, (no snow on the ground, but COLD), and saw a couple searching for something, GPSr in hand. I asked what they were looking for and when they responded, I thought I heard "GEODES". (You know, those hollow stones with beautiful crystals inside) I helped them narrow down the area, and we found the 2-gallon brown pretzal jar hidden in the rocks on a cliffside with the treasure in it!

 

At the time, I had a GPSr coming to me as a selected gift for something related to a large number of years with an aerospace company located in CT. When it arrived a couple of months later, I was off and running!

 

That registered cacher was TRAWLER, total found caches as of a few minutes ago for him was 51, his last visit was 8 days ago, so he's still active, but apparently still very selective about what he searches for!

 

HELLO and THANKS for the adventure TRAWLER!!!

 

GM

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Listening to a podcast, I believe it was This Week In Tech, back in November of 2005, they interviewed the host of a geocaching podcast. I can't remember the name, but he's from Southern California somewhere. Anyway, I listened to a couple of those podcasts, checked out geocaching.com, found that there was a cache RIGHT OUTSIDE MY JOB. Seriously, in the street outside. Not 300 feet from the front door of the building.

 

Anyway, within a week of listening to the original TWiT show, I had a GPS and found (after a failed attempt, it was a pretty well hid cache) the cache outside work. The rest, as they say, is algebra.

Edited by Retcon
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I was introduced to geocaching by a co-worker a few years ago. He had told me about it but I didn't actually start going out until about a year and a half ago. I was the first in my family to get a gps unit and find a cache and now I have my Dad hooked on it. We just can't get enough of it and my Dad and I usually head out together as a team to find new ones or to revisit/introduce to each other ones we have found on our own. :cool:

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I had a GPS for over a year and was just updating the firmware on Garmin's site when I clicked the link to Geocaching.com. At first I thought there was no way anybody would hide anything like that. Then I thought maybe they would but the nearest one is probably about 500 miles away. Then I saw one about 1.2 miles away. Within the hour I was doing the GPS bee dance trying to figure things out and digging through a pile of leaves to find a rusty metal coffee can.

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Not being rude, but just a little searching would find the other dozen or so times this has been asked.

 

I don't mind a new thread, but if you really are interested the info is out there and most of us that have replied before won't do so again. :wub:

 

Some links would be much more helpful :blink:

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In September 2001, we were planning to take, a trip to Scotland (scheduled to leave 9/13/01, delay until 5/02). The friends we were traveling with had stated that on their last trip they had trouble get finding their lodgings one night. Hearing this I thought that I would borrow my brother-in-laws GPS. His was one the very first available to the public, very slow and difficult to use and without a manual. Then I decided to look to obtain my own, did a web search, and found the Geocaching website. I discovered a cache in a park near where I work. Therefore, on 10/0/2001 I found Huron on the Right Track (GC965) and have been caching ever since :blink:

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Early last year I sent an e-mail to a local historian (who I had as a high school history teacher as well) and asked him about the status of an old railroad line. He said he'd never been to the area, but his friend who was into geocaching said that the feature in question was still there.

 

So I said to myself "Geocaching, eh?". After finding my first cache, I said to myself "Why am I just learning of this now?"

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I'm a member a couple of message boards for the old mid 80's to early 90's front wheel drive turbo mopars (my other guilty pleasure) and one of the members posted a thread in the off topic forum about geocaching (ClayC on here). He had just got involved in caching and was wondering if anyone else on the board was into it. He posted up a like the geocaching.com. It was perfect timing because I had just received an etrex yellow for my birthday a couple weeks before, so it was a great way to play with the new toy I had just received. Been caching ever since! I just wish I had heard of it a couple weeks earlier as I had just returned from a business trip in Denver and had my nights free for a week. This was in august so I probably had about 5 hours of good daylight to cache. Instead I just drove around making track logs :blink:

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Not being rude, but just a little searching would find the other dozen or so times this has been asked.

 

I don't mind a new thread, but if you really are interested the info is out there and most of us that have replied before won't do so again. :blink:

Of course, everyone else who never saw those old threads now have the oportunity to respond.

 

Anyway, in May 2001, I saw a segment on geocaching that aired on Tech TV (back when there was Tech TV). It looked interesting and I was tired of complaining that there was nothing to do. I checked out the website and was surprised to find a cache just a few miles away from my home. I quickly bought a Garmin GPS 3+ on ebay and a week or so later dragged my wife (then girlfriend) to our first cache.

Edited by sbell111
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I had stumbled across articles on geocaching online at least twice since it started and I was so intrigued. At the time, I never even priced out GPS units though b/c I just assumed that they would be way too expensive for me. I always kept it in the back of my mind though and thought that it sounded like so much fun and just up my alley.

 

This past summer, a buddy in a buddy group on another message board was talking about geocaching and how she'd gotten another one of our buddies hooked. She said the price of the unit they got (blue etrex) and I was all over it :blink:

 

I bought my GPSr and Palm that very weekend and haven't looked back. My only regret is that I never priced out GPSrs the first two times that I read about geocaching...

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Not being rude, but just a little searching would find the other dozen or so times this has been asked.

 

I don't mind a new thread, but if you really are interested the info is out there and most of us that have replied before won't do so again. :blink:

Of course, everyone else who never saw those old threads now have the oportunity to respond.

 

Anyway, in May 2001, I saw a segment on geocaching that aired on Tech TV (back when there was Tech TV). It looked interesting and I was tired of complaining that there was nothing to do. I checked out the website and was surprised to find a cache just a few miles away from my home. I quickly bought a Garmin GPS 3+ on ebay and a week or so later dragged my wife (then girlfriend) to our first cache.

 

I think I saw that same segment and I was interested at the time, but I had no $ to by a GPSr. I forgot about it until sometime in 2005 when I finally bought a cheep garmin geko 201. I didn't start till about a year ago and now I am hooked.

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I have been a paid informer here on Earth for the alien grays from Zeta Reticuli for the past twenty years. When I met with them in early April 2005 at one of their smaller saucer craft, hidden in a circular clearing in a wilderness forest, for my monthly debriefing/reprogramming of my brain implant, they informed me that I would need to purchase a GPS receiver, as the locations for all of our furture meetings would be communicated to me by subspace radio only as a set of GPS-compatible coordinates, rather than the directions/map info which they had provided up until that time in advance of our monthly rendezvous. So, I went out and -- using the slightly radioactive US currency which they had given me -- purchased a Magellan SporTrak Pro. After about three weeks of playing with the GPSr, I got bored and, having heard for years about geocaching, decided to visit the geocaching.com website and hunt a few geocaches.

 

Interesting side note to all of this: at the time that I first joined the website, I was quite impressed at the "fact" that the GC site had over a half-million member accounts, and that it listed hundreds of thousands of caches, with the number growing daily. I must admit that I was also quite impressed at the "fact" that several thousand of the account holders were also active on the geocaching.com forums. Of course, all that awe turned into jaded disillusionment :wub: when I later discovered that, aside from myself, the only three "real live" flesh-and-blood members of the geocaching.com site were Mark/Snoogans, Ed/Alabama Rambler and Dave/Leprechauns, and that all the other hundreds of thousands of "geo accounts" were really sock puppet accounts operated by them. Same for the thousands of geocaches out there across the world, aside from the caches which Sue and I eventually placed: those many caches turned out to have all been placed by Mark, Ed and Dave under their various sock puppet accounts. And, of course, the same turned out to be true for the national forums: I discovered in time that all the so-callled "participants" -- aside from myself -- in these forums were really sock puppets operated by Dave, Ed and Mark. Sheesh! :blink::D Imagine my disappointment when I discovered the scam! ;)

 

 

:o

Edited by Vinny & Sue Team
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How did I start geocaching? Pesky kids, that's how.

I had purchased a yellow etrex to use for finding boundary markers in remote areas, worked pretty good for that. When I finally got a little time off my daughter and I took a trip up to our fishing camp in Sandy Creek, NY. My sisters were up there with my 5 nieces. Six girls aged 1 to 10 tend to get bored real quick at fishing camps. I'd been taking sunfish off hooks all day for these kids and really wanted to relax a bit. The girls would not allow this, so I grabbed one of their stuffed animals and the etrex and took off. I hid it in a sea of stored boat trailers and marked the coordinates. I walked back, gave the GPSr to my daughter and said "go find it". The girls loved the game and it allowed me to relax in 20 minute increments between different hides....which was priceless. Come to think of it, the first time I was told my coordinates were off was by an 8 year old holding a stuffed monkey. After we got back to Jersey, I googled "GPS games" and the rest is history.

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I had read about geocaching several years back in a magazine or newspaper, can't remember which. Spring of 2004 I was trying to come up with ideas on how to train some of our new fire crew members on the use of GPS and somehow dredged geocaching from the depths of my memory. I got back to the office and looked it up, then went home and mentioned it to my wife. Long story short, we've been caching for close to 2 years, and really love it.

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I actually was "caching' a few years before Geocaching began.

Back in the 90s I had a Magellan trailblazer I used while hunting in Maine, and the Adirondacks.

We used to hike into the backcountry before the season and Cache some Items we needed come hunting season.

Having only two decimal places and SA in operation at that time you couldn't get as close as you can today, but it worked.

I Learned about Geocaching when I went out and bought a new Garmin.

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Ran into geocaching pages while researching which GPS to buy for my husband for his birthday. He's a truck driver and I thought a GPS would help him with his job (it does!).

 

When I gave him the unit, I mentioned this quirky game that people played using the GPS and told him there were some of the "geocaches" hidden near our home. We wandered out to try to find some of the caches and have been hooked ever since.

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About 2 years ago, my sophomore year in high school, a kid that sat in front of me in math class had a GPS out and was playing with it. I asked him what it was, and why he had it. He explained to me about a field trip that his electronics class had taken to find the Old Tower cache. I was intrigued and immediately tried to find it. After many failed attempts, it got put on the back burner. Now that I'm out of highschool and in college, I have alot more time on my hands and decided to get back into it. Found the Old Tower cache two days ago!

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A fellow teacher who was doing his Masters Degree internship got my husband started one summer. They were suppose to be working together, supervising summer school, but ended up talking geocaching instead. We borrowed a GPS from the school and used that for a week or so and then went and bought our own unit. We have been caching ever since. We love it. The guy who got us started doesn't cache anymore or very little. He thinks that we are obsessed. Can you geocache too much?

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I had heard about it on some TV show and read about it in a magazine, which I don’t know. Every once in awhile I would heard something. It sounded cool, but I never got the whole story. Then one day my boss and I were TDY and sightseeing on a day off. Something made me think of it and I mentioned it to him, not even remembering what it was called. Turns out he was a cacher as well as his boss. When I got back home I stopped at the first gadget store and bought a GPS. Both bosses have let it slide, but I’ve been going pretty steady when the job allows.

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In May 2005, we were planning a Mediterranean cruise, and my daughter suggested we hide a travel bug in one of the countries we visited. I asked her what the heck a travel bug was, and she told me about geocaching. I went to the web site and read about it and thought it sounded like lots of fun. I signed up, but didn't buy a GPS right away. We took the travel bug with us, and my daughter's b/f brought his GPS, but never got a chance to find any caches. (If I'd known then what I know now, I would have MADE time to cache!) I didn't think too much about it again until my daughter was home for Thanksgiving 2005, and she borrowed the b/f's GPSr and took me out looking for a couple caches. Even though we didn't find the caches that day, I was hooked! A week later I had my own GPSr, went out and found those 2 caches and haven't looked back!

 

I just wish this sport would have been around when my kids were younger. What a great family activity it is!

 

:unsure:

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Funny... I just wrote about how I got into the game on my new MySpace.com page. Visit it here: WowWhoaWeeWa's MySpace Blog

 

I also copied and pasted it below as well.

Caching In...

When geocachers get together, the question "How did you find the game?" is commonly asked. I thought it would be appropriate for my first blog to be about how I discovered the game of Geocaching.

 

My curiousity sometimes gets the best of me. For example, I can easily be driving home from work and make a random turn onto a back road some where, just to see where it goes. To assist in these random adventures, I thought a GPS would assist in navigating. So it began.

 

In May of 2006, I decided to research a bluetooth GPS reciever for my Verizon XV6700 PocketPC phone and decided on a Pharos Bluetooth GPSr. With it came the voice guided navigation software and I managed to find free software, Vito Navigator, on the internet to measure distance and point direction.

 

Now that I had the hardware, I needed some places to visit. I decided to Google "GPS adventures" and geocaching.com was one of the first sites returned. I checked over the site and did a search for nearby caches. Sure enough, I found "Why Cough--Gotta Cold??" was down the street from my place of work. So, one day after work, with my GPS in hand, I went off to find this cache.

 

And so it was; a hobby, a way of life was born. I've since upgraded to Garmin GPSMAP60 CSx and ditched the bluetooth GPS/phone set up. Although I only have a little over 200 finds, I look forward to new adventures and new finds!

Happy Caching!

~WowWhoaWeeWa

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We started geocaching on our Christmas Eve, My brothers fiance brought it up, we got excited and much to her suprise out popped 2 GPS units (must have been a sign), she called up her brother (a geocacher) for adivce; he said dress warm, and bring extra batteries and more than one flashlight (it was about 11pm).

 

We headed out to find this geocache near my parents house which was in the middle of a woodlot next to a lake and there was no moon out. In our excitement we had forgotten extra batteries and about 100m from the cache (which was about 500m in dark forest trail marked with spray painted trees).. the lights dimmed and when we got to our location we had no light to search by (needless to say we did not get it that night)... We had to walk back along the lake and use the gps to help us cut through one section of forest (luckily we had marked the car!)

 

We went back the next day and found it, it was 1 meter over from where we had had our first demo on where we could expect to find a cache (demonstrated by my brothers fiance). It was quite the adventure.

 

Best part that night was getting back to the house and my brother pulls out an LED light for their dog's collar he had had in his pocket (and which we had repeatedly asked him to look for)... he was a bit sheepish, but the night wouldn't have been memorable if we had seen our path, or found the cache!

Edited by Tared
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