Adventures in geocaching
We went geocaching on Sunday, and it was even more fun than I’d expected. This is our first find:
For the uninitiated geocaching is where people hide small boxes of goodies in various locations around the world, publish their locations (longitude and latitude) on the Net, and let others — with the aid of a GPS system — find them. When you find a cache of goodies you can take an item (provided you leave one in return) or leave a note in the log book.
We spent a short time trekking round Box Hill on the Snow White cache — seven hidden boxes, together providing a clue to an eighth one.
For me, a walk in the countryside has always been less about the journey and much more about the destination — ideally a nice warm pub. But if the destination of a nice a warm pub is supplemented by several mini-destinations — one of which in our case contained a Little Miss fridge magnet — then all the better.
I was honestly sceptical last year when I heard about OpenStreetMap. It’s a project which aims to do for atlases what Wikipedia has done for encyclopedias. I was sceptical because I never knew anyone who (a) was techy enough to own a GPS device, (b) was geeky enough to contribute to a creative commons project and (c) liked geography at school. In fact, I don’t know anyone who liked geography at school, let alone also fulfilled the other criteria. But then none of that takes into account the fun of tramping through forests without having to worry about getting lost.
Of course, it wasn’t my GPS box we were using. So inevitably I’m off to do a bit of window shopping now…
