G is for Geocaching

The actual detective gear we gave the birthday boy.

My ex-husband had always wanted to go geocaching, so for his birthday one year, some friends and I planned a geocaching adventure. My husband got a GPS for his birthday and we identified some caches located around one of our favorite Seattle area parks. For those of you who aren’t familiar, in geocaching, you get some coordinates from a website that lead you to a little treasure trove. You use your GPS to find it and once you’ve located the treasure, you take something that someone else left and leave something of your own for the next person to find. Then you can write about your adventures.

So picture this. Five pretty tech-savvy people, GPS in hand, Sherlock Holmes detective hat worn by the birthday boy, heading out to a park we are fairly familiar with. We had several caches to search for the and first one was pretty easy. We got excited and maybe a little over confident as we moved on to cache number two. We must have walked miles around that park without finding what we were looking for. At one point, we were wading through chest-high grass and by the time we reached the end of the field, my friend and I were all red, swollen, watering eyes, sneezing our guts out. It was pretty miserable. Especially once we realized that we’d walked a slightly wrong course (the right one was mostly on the sidewalk that ran parallel to the field of hay fever hell!)

We eventually did find the second geocache, though with slightly less enthusiasm. No one was feeling particularly cocky as we headed home. But looking back on the night, it was actually a really fun adventure. Geocaching is very popular and I would strongly recommend trying it out. Just take some extra allergy medicine before you go! 

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