Muggles No More

I've wanted to try geocach*ng for a while now.  It seemed like something Sarah would enjoy, given her love of the outdoors and a good challenge.  One August day, armed with a bag of "swag," Sarah and I joined my friends Chris and Beth, along with their daughters MacKenzie and Kayleigh, to see how it's done.

Geocach*ng is basically a treasure hunt using a handheld GPS unit or an app on a smartphone.  People have hidden geocach*s all over the world and posted the coordinates online.  To play, you log onto the website, find the coordinates of a nearby cache, enter them into your GPS, and navigate using the screen.  The GPS can get you pretty close (within 20' or so, if you're lucky) to the cache, but you need to do some searching at the end.  People have posted hints online that can help if you get stuck.

In each cache, there is a logbook to record your achievement.  Depending on the size of the cache, there is also "swag," or little trinkets that people exchange, taking one and leaving another.

We searched for seven or eight caches and found five.  Upon locating our first cache, we were no longer "muggles," or people who don't geocach*.  The first one we found was a nano, a tiny cylinder just big enough to hold a rolled-up slip of paper for the log.  The last one, which Sarah was the first to spot, was a plastic goose with a canister inside.

As I expected, Sarah enjoyed the thrill of the hunt and the sweet taste of success.  She returned with a little metal flag pin, a small rubber bear, and a sticker.  I think we'll purchase a GPS unit some time in the near future so we can geocach* whenever and wherever we like.  Thanks for sharing your expertise, Beth and Chris!