Friday 6 August 2010

Geocaching, A Modern Day Treasure Hunt.

As you probably know by now, I love the UK canals. It doesn’t matter to me if I’m walking on it, spying a glimpse of it while driving past, taking pictures of it or just reading about it. To me, the serenity, the peacefulness, the natural wonders, the man-made wonders, the wildlife, the friendliness of the boaters, even the industrial architecture is all appealing.

Since before our first – and so far, only – narrowboat trip, I’ve been reading blogs written by people who travel or live on the canals. As a matter of fact, I follow quite a few of their blogs, so many of them that I have some listed here to the side, but most of them are still in my favorites on my web browsers on two different computers. I’m still adding them to this blog. I honestly hope none of them will mind me having their links on this new blog of mine, as I probably should have asked first.


Do you like to hunt for treasure? Love a good Scavenger hunt? You might love this too!

Last week I was reading through some of the narrowboat blogs in my favs. Grannybuttons, who I’ve been reading for years has a new post. He found his first Geo-Cache! He explained what it was all about and said he had “an app for that” on his iPhone 3GS. After reading it, I thought to myself, “Ooh, that could be fun”. But I didn’t think the Mr would be interested in it, so I didn’t mention it to him. I did wonder if there might be a geo-cache app in my Android market though.

Geocaching is an international treasure hunting game where you use a GPS to hide and seek containers with other participants. When you find the treasure, you take it out of its container and replace it something of equal or greater value. Write in the pad that's also left in the container, then gloat about it online. It looks fun and its Free!

Yesterday, while the Mr was looking online for our Sunday destination, he somehow managed to get onto www.grannybuttons.com. He read the post and turned to me and said “Have you seen this?” I smiled slyly and replied, “Yes, it’s in my favs, Im going to add the link into my blog next week. Why?” By then he was practically squirming in his seat with giddiness and says to me in a slightly higher pitched tone “But did you READ it? It sounds like this geo-caching could be fun!” I giggled and nodded and agreed with him. Then we decided to leave so we could get to our destination.

Last night, after rewinding from a very strenuous day, the Mr got on the pc and starting doing a bit more research into geo-caching. The more he read, the more he got excited. He found www.geocaching.com and signed up to a Free Basic Membership. He saw maps, longitude-latitude co-ordinates, hints and locations and got even More excited.


Apparantly, when I took this picture on Saturday, I also may have taken a shot of the location of the treasure. According to the Geo-cache website, there is a something hidden in a park near this green flower fountain.

Then he started looking on the maps for places near where we live. OMG! When he saw how many little hidden treasures were in our area, he was practically jumping out of his desk chair. He exclaimed to us, SoldierSon aka Kid3 is home on leave. “Look! They're all Over this area”, “OMG! Look how many are near work!” “I eat my lunch in that park, I’ve sat on a bench probably 50 feet from that one!” “OMG! I park my car right next to the tree where it might be!” His voice getting louder and louder with each little find. “We shop there! I think I know Exactly where this is!” Watching him like this was Absolutely Fantastic! He was like a kid in a combo toy store/candy shop who’s been told you can have anything you want.

Then he looked up where we went yesterday. He could barely stay sat down by now,it was like he had Mexican Jumping Beans in his pants. He said to me, “You know where we parked? We walked right past one on the way on the way to the canal. Right past one!” He looked further on “We passed three today! You know where we sat down to have our juice, we were probably FIVE feet from away from it!” Suddenly he yelled at me with a groan of disappointment in his voice “Remember where you stopped to take pictures at the Lock, there was one RIGHT THERE!” but he couldn’t hide his excitement.


I was probably stood right on top of a goodie when I took this picture. *groan*

It was practically all I could do to keep him in the house. He kept saying if we don’t have anything else to do weekends or just want to go for a drive but don’t know where to go, we’re going on a Geo-cache hunt. I have a feeling today on his lunch hour if he has time, he’ll be looking, searching. As for me, I’m wondering when we’ll find the first of GrannyButtons buttons. Yup! This is going to be fun!

By the way, while he was giddily telling me all this, I did look in my Android market and I searched for a geo-caching app thinking, “Oh boy, how much is this going to cost?” Well, I found one! And it’s got good raves, 5 stars and best of all…. It’s Free!

Thank you @GrannyButtons for turning my Mr into a kid again. I think I love you! And Christine, of course!

Let the hunt begin!

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