Saturday, January 3, 2009

Geocaching FUN!

While the kids have a little time off from school, we have been busy trying to have fun and make memories with them. One of the things we have been doing it Geocaching. If you are unfamiliar with this activity, I will give you a brief description. Basically there is a website called geocaching.com it hosts maps that have "caches" (hidden treasures as we like to call them) all over them. You use a GPS to find the coordinates of these caches. Caches are hidden all over the world and in most cities. Basically it is a huge world wide scavenger hunt. When you find a cache you put it back right where you found it then log into the website and tell everyone you found it. Some are more difficult than others. Some are tiny and some are big. We saw one that was in a five gallon bucket. It is really lots of fun to take kids to do. It is like going on a bit of a treasure hunt.
Here are a few examples of some of the ones we have found:
This one is a tiny little magnet with a screw off lid. Inside was a long skinny piece of paper you could sign to say that you found it. The magnet was stuck in a hidden place. We used the GPS to find the exact pole it was stuck to.


Here we are in a local park. Hogan found this one. It was a pimento jar, inside a rubber toy tire, hidden in a tree trunk under some leaves.

Inside the jar were all kinds of "treasures". You can add something to the jar if you like.



It was dark this night and we had to use flashlights to find them. It made finding the caches a little more challenging.



This was where one of the caches was hidden. I wont say where so as to not give it away to anyone in Corpus who goes geocaching.




Can you guess where we are? There were big drops off either side of us. The guys and the kids were sitting on the point.



We found this film canister under a rock and in a hole. Another cache checked off the list.



All the kids wanted their own flashlights. Hogan wore Josh's head lamp. We're getting serious, now. We found five out of seven of the cashes we planned out for this week.

Here we are after finding our first cache. I want to go geocaching everyday now. It was so fun.



Here is our first find. This was actually one of the easier ones.



Beck didn't care much about finding the treasure. He just wanted to climb the tree.


The kids were so excited to find their first cache.

Inside the camo jar was a tablet.


.....and some pens to sign it with. There was also a pez dispenser. We added a soft little soccer ball to the jar.
This is such a fun thing to do with your family. If you have a GPS and want something fun to do go check out the website and look it your city. You can also hide your own geocache for others to find. We made one to hide but haven't found that special place we want to hide it yet. Good luck!


3 comments:

Jaime said...

That sounds so cool. What a neat idea!

Camille, Blake, Pierce and baby Asher said...

What a great idea.. I am going to have to look it up in Singapore... I love this and thanks for the blog about it... Stephen must be apart of the family... he is alwaysd doing fun things with you guys...

Angie Campbell said...

Very cool! You amaze me with your creative ideas!!! You have way too much energy, girl! I can barely keep up with TWO boys!