Geocaching

Last weekend Riley's Cub Scout den went for a hike to fulfill one of their Tiger badge requirements. One of the parents brought a GPS to do some Geocaching. For those that don't know, geocaching is using a GPS to find something others have hidden. See, people hide stuff in parks and other places, and upload the coordinates to a website. Others then download those coordinates into their GPS and set out hunting for it. It's really quite fun. Our GPS for our car can run on batteries AND I can download data to it.

It was fun trying to find the stuff with the other parent last weekend and we all got hooked. We joined the website, downloaded some places close to us and have had fun looking for them. So far we've found three. Two of them were big enough to hold stuff and had a piece of paper in them for you to write your name and date of when you found it. One was just a piece of paper. The others had a pen with them, this one didn't. Now we know we need to carry 1) a pen, 2) something to put in there in case it's one of those type.

Our car GPS is cool, but not really made for walking. Now that we're hooked on this, we're looking forward to the warm weather and doing it all over Portland! And we're starting to look at some good GPS's for walking. Gotta have the right toys, er, tools. ;)

What's really fun is this is something all of us can get into, even Maddie!