International Geocaching Day

Tomorrow is International Geocaching Day!  As I have mentioned before, my family and I enjoy geocaching.  It is a fun way to stay active!  The best place to get information on geocaching is Geocaching.com.  Here I will show you some of the gear that my family uses when we head out on our adventures.  We usually like to make a day of it but it is possible to do them in a short amount of time.  We first decide on where we want to go.  We find that State Parks are a great place to start, there are usually a few hidden in the park so you can extend your stay.  So once we have decided where we are going to go we head over to Geocaching.com and enter the zipcode of where we are headed.  Sometimes the park websites will have thier GPS coordinates which is even better!  Then we look through the caches that are available and decide which ones we want to look for.  We make our decisions based on cache size, the amount of bushwacking involved and if there are any "warnings" like if it is a really buggy area or not.  Also we read the comments to see when it was last found and how difficult it was.  Remember we are going with a 7 year old, getting to the end of a treasure hunt and not finding treasure is devastating!  I have a hand held gps that enables us to go paperless.  I can download the caches right to it and be on our way.  We use a Garmin Etrex Venture. 

Now I need to think about what we are going to need.  If we are going for the day we will need lunch.

I made these lunches especially for today!  I did not do Geocaching.com's logos justice but I sure tried!

    "The Groundspeak Geocaching Logo is a registered trademark of Groundspeak, Inc. Used with permission."

A Geocacher's motto should always be Cache In Trash Out.  Included in our gear is always a bag for trash that we pick up along the way.

Easy Lunchboxes are perfect for geocaching. I can fit 4 of them in my backpack cooler.  I also love that the top is available to carry other things that I need like sunscreen, bugspray, small first aid kit, dry snacks, our stash of goodies to put into the caches we find.  We also bring lots of water and keep extra water in the car.

These are some cellphone pictures from our last geocaching adventure.  Dad is manning the GPS, the Littles are following and I'm bringing up the rear to make sure we don't loose any stragglers!