EXPLORE THE GREAT OUTDOORS WITH GEOCACHING

EXPLORE THE GREAT OUTDOORS
WITH GEOCACHING

Last Sunday, with 3 sleep deprived children (we’d been camping the night before!), we set off on our first Geocaching adventure.

Geocaching is a treasure hunt game where you enter coordinates into a GPS device (we used an iphone) to find hidden caches (the treasure). There are over 2.6 million geocaches hidden worldwide in both urban and rural areas and there is even one in the South Pole!

Registering on geocaching.com is free for the basic service and enables you to get started straight away (this is the one we tried). You can enter a town, place name or postcode and search for all the caches in that location. The details of each cache includes the GPS coordinates and many have hints on how to find the cache. There are different sizes and types of cache. The first cache that we found was a plastic tupper wear box in Old Amersham containing a log book and some swapables. Swapables are items kids can swap e.g toy cars, plastic rings, pack of crayons. Once you find the cache, sign and date the logbook, re-hide the geocache exactly how you found it, and share your experience online.

Other types of caches are micro (typical camera film roll pots and have no room for swapables) and nano caches (these are even smaller making them harder to find!).

The basic membership is free but there is an option to buy the premium membership ((£7.99 for 3 months to £24.99 for the year) which gives you access to thousands more geocaches. I would recommend you start with the free version to see what you think as you can always upgrade.

This is a great way to get kids outside exploring. It’s educational too ☺ teaching people about the coordinate system, how to read a map and navigate. We had a brilliant afternoon and would highly recommend geocaching – forget what the kids think, I cant wait to go again next weekend 😉