Scott and I were introduced to an odd 'sport' recently. Geocaching.
Basically, folks hide junk in the woods, post the GPS coordinates, description, and maybe some clues on a website such as
Then other folks take a nice walk and try to find the goodies.
We went looking for our first cache tonight. Being lazy and out of shape, the cache described as 'quick and easy' was naturally appealing. Even so, we somehow managed to walk past it a couple of times. We're not very good at this I guess. But we managed to find it with a minimum of effort. Abby came too, naturally. Abby was highly entertained by the walk, and very excited by all the other dogs we encountered. Scott and I enjoyed the excuse to play with a cool toy (Magellan GPS, Blazer 12 - Ebay cheap!), and it was more interesting than just walking Abby around the block.
We learned that (with our GPS anyway) walking at a brisk pace, as though you know where you're heading, yields the best readings. Abby seems to prefer this sort of walk as well (until she yanks your shoulder out of joint with a patented Abby-Emergency-Stop, designed to bring one to a complete halt in order to investigate intriguing scents). We also learned to turn OFF the GPS and apply common sense ("where would you hide something described as 'quick and easy', huh, how about that fallen tr - gee, there it is!"). On an unrelated note, we passed a gaggle of guys playing frisbee golf by Westchester Lagoon. I played frisbee golf once or twice in the early 90's, at a park in Northern California. When I was introduced to it, we played with regular frisbees, and a lot of the fun came from the unpredictable flight pattern of the flung frisbee. These folks were playing with some high tech gee-whiz looking disks, and they had MORE THAN ONE DISK EACH! One of them was playing caddy, and had a satchel bulging with disks. Wow. I was highly entertained.
So on the drive home (before the moose) we were kicking around a couple of ideas for 'virtual caches'. Maybe locations that build on one another, taking you from bookstore to bookstore, or greasy spoon to greasy spoon (final destination Cardiac unit at the hospital?). I also liked the concept of a 'history cache'. http://www.geocaching.com had some neat categories.
I'm not sure how I feel about leaving junk out in the woods, there's something not quite right about that... And I wonder what the local authorities think about it?
Anyhow, it was fun, and we'll surely go again.
We came home via International Airport Road, and saw moose
Look at those grins!
