Saturday, August 1, 2009

Let's get the introductions out of the way. My name is Evelynn. Geocaching.com username: evelev. You know, like evel knievel...

My husband is Brian. We live in Casselberry, Florida.

We geocache

I won't go into all the details of geocaching (because so many before me have put it so eloquently) but in a nutshell: people hide stuff (caches), post the coordinates online, and we go find it. To date there are over 860,000 caches hidden on all seven continents, ranging in size from your thumbnail to bigger than your head.


Here's how we do it

This year for Valentine's Day, my husband gave me an iPhone (I got him a stupid remote control helicopter...I was so outdone). I quickly figured out I could use it to geocache - a hobby I had wanted to get into, but never had the money for a GPSr. My first attempts were fruitless. I went to eight (yes, 8) locations before I found my first cache. It was quite disheartening, but once I found my first one, I was hooked. It was a medicine bottle hidden in the base of a light pole at a gas station. The landscapers must have thought I was completing a drug deal, but whatever.


Equipment

In addition to my iPhone 3g, I have the geocaching.com (aka Groundspeak) app, which I use to locate caches and track my finds. It's a little pricey ($10), but well worth the "cash." Combined with the iPhone's (pretty decent) camera, everything I need to manage my finds is in the palm of my hand. Sometimes we plan a day of caching, sometimes we just go. When I plan to go caching I carry my handy Hello Kitty cache-enger bag (below). It contains:

  • A mirror (essential - perspective is everything)
  • A spider-whacking stick (a must in Florida)
  • Leather gardening gloves - aren't we all more daring in leather?
  • Pens
  • A mini first aid kit
  • Tweezers - Sometimes needed to remove logs that are almost too big for their cache.
  • Insect repellent
  • Hand sanitizer
  • Hair ties (both for my hair and to attach the mirror to the stick...to look at stuff I can't reach)
  • Various tradeables and travel bugs - my philosophy is you leave something meaningful or useful, not crap you get in a happy meal. I try to leave things people will want.

I don't trade stuff as much as I thought I would. For one, most caches I grab are micros, which can hold a quarter at most. And two, there are rarely things that I want. People tend to leave whatever they found on the floor of their car.

We do most caches during the day, but we've done a few at night. At night you are less likely to be spotted, but look twice as suspicious if you are caught. During the day, digging through bushes looks weird...at night it looks criminal.

Going forward, I want to track my finds on this blog...and maybe provide some useful information for someone who's just getting into geocaching. Now that I have over 100 finds and an FTF (first to find) under my belt, I feel qualified to run a blog.

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