Here in Scotland, Spring is firmly here and it’s time to get out of the house and enjoy the legendary countryside and Scottish history we have on our doorstep. Of course, since we’re geeks, we can’t just visit a castle and take a walk in the countryside. Enter geocaching: the best excuse to spend a day I’ve found.
Geocaching bills itself as the sport where you are the search engine. It’s basically a scavenger hunt where you look for hidden containers called geocaches using a GPS device. You then share your findings with the online community, tracking all your finds (and those not found!). Geocaching can be a great family day out, but in our experience, it takes a little planning to get the most out of it. As much as possible, you want to mitigate the effects of the weather and the attention spans of the youngest members of your group.
Typically our first step is to set our foundation for the day. This is not necessarily where we plan to spend a lot of time. Depending on the length of the day we have planned, we can establish more than one of these bases, preferably one for the first hours of the day (lunch time) and another for the last hours (dinner time). What we are looking for is a place that is worth visiting on its own, that has bathrooms and has a place to have a picnic. For us, these are usually Historic Scotland or National Trust sites, but I’m sure you have your own local equivalents. Establishing a foundation like this has some practical purposes. It means everyone gets something out of the day, even if we’re unlucky in finding the hiding places, there’s somewhere everyone can stop for a toilet break and, given the capricious nature of Scottish weather, it gives us a ‘plan B’. Mother Nature intervenes in our plans.
Once we have established a base or bases, it is usually necessary to resort to Google Earth and the geocaching overlay (available on your profile page, but be careful with its accuracy) to search for caches that are within a reasonably short distance of the base. Normally we look for caches that have no more than 2 difficulty for both terrain and ease of finding (the scale goes up to 5). Also, we don’t want to walk more than 1 hour round trip from where we parked the car. We usually have no problem finding half a dozen caches that fit the bill. I usually check them in advance to make sure they have been found recently and haven’t logged a batch of “not found”. A quick scan of the logs lets us know if there is anything else we need to be aware of. After that, it’s a simple matter of transferring the GPX data to our GPS and we’re almost ready to go.
The last thing we have to do is pack our suitcase. I think over the years we’ve been doing this we’ve arrived at the optimal backpack content: a good balance between kitchen sink and light enough to carry around. We always pack: our GPS, spare batteries, small spare parts for the cache, thick rigger’s gloves (useful for recovering a cache from a site covered in thorns), a small first aid kit (band-aids, antiseptic wipes), antibacterial wipes for hands, binoculars (to admire the view), camera, pencils and insect bite cream.
The last thing to say is that after the initial expense on a GPS device, geocaching is not an expensive day out. In fact, depending on your phone, you may already have a suitable device; although be careful about using an expensive phone when out in the wild, as rain and accidental drops can usually withstand dedicated devices, but not phones! Packed lunches keep costs down and you might consider joining organizations that care for local historic sites, as they often offer extremely profitable memberships which, after joining, allow you free entry to their properties. That same day, the only significant expense may be gasoline. Happy caching!
