yotogi.net

so i started getting a bit anxious to get back into the swing of things at work. i have another week off, however. not that i am complaning a bit. i need the break, and when i get back i know that i will be very, VERY ready to start up again.

in my free time around the house, i have been playing a couple of games that i got for christmas. final fantasy tactics advance is wonderful on my new gba sp. and uru has made me fall in love with the myst universe all over again. while surfing around the uru website forums, i can across a reference to something that i had not heard of before, geocaching.

back in 2000 when clinton made GPS technology available to the public, people started using it for backpacking and general land navigation. in celebration, the first cache was placed, and within 3 days visited by 2 different people. the sport of geocaching has its roots in an activity called letterboxing. letterboxing worked by placing stamps in special boxes. people sought out the boxes and placed the stamp on their own logbook, and in the logbook in the box indicating that they had been there.

geocaching works very much the same except the contents of the cache are not limited to stamps. in addition the the fun of finding hidden boxes based solely on GPS coordinates, some caches contain items for the finder to take. the only provision for taking an item is leaving an item. sometimes these items are not trinkets, but special travel bugs with identification information that allows them to be tracked as they travel from cache to cache.

so melissa and i are going to go out tomorrow and try to find a cache or two. i went out today to get the hang of using the GPS itself and found it really a pleasure to use. so much in fact that i spent a little over an hour walking around playing with it. i covered a little over 2 miles and had a wonderful time. my legs hurt a little bit, need to remember to stretch. if you are at all interested in geocaching, check out the geocaching web site. very cool stuff IMO.