Geocaching Part 2 – What to Take With You

Geocaching Part 2 – What to Take With You

For beginning geocaching with kids, you really don't need to bring much. The most important items are:

a GPS device of some sort

a pen or pencil

'swag' or small items for trade

That is really all you need for basic geocaching with kids. We use a low end basic dedicated GPS device when we are heading out on a hike, and we use a geocaching ap on my smart phone for urban, or city geocaching. I'm not really qualified to review or recommend GPS devices, so I won't do that here. I'll just say that my kids don't have trouble using my little Garmin etrek 10. There are many other choices, some with much fancier features, like color maps and all kinds of cool things. However, price goes up quickly with the features, so you probably want to make sure you really love geocaching before you invest in a pricey GPS just for that purpose.

When we use my smart phone, we use a free ap called c:geo. Geocaching.com has it's own ap that is supposed to be very good, but I have not tried it. I just tried out c:geo because it was free, and it usually works well for me. When it doesn't it is usually because we are out of phone reception range – that's why we generally use the phone only for city stuff.

I have read that the geocaching experts say that a GPS designed for car navigation usually do not work well for geocaching. I think they are good at getting you to a general address, but for geocaching you need to get to within at least a few feet of the hide for the best chance of finding it.

Regardless of what type of GPS you use, you should sign up for a geocaching.com account. Most aps will need to sync with your geocaching.com account to work and if you're using a dedicated GPS device, you'll need to account to download the cache data into your device. There is a free option, as well as a paid option that includes a few perks. The free account is plenty to get you started geocaching.

It's good to bring a pencil or pen with you in case the cache you find doesn't have one, or the one in it is bad. There will be a log in each geocache for you to sign in order to get credit for making the find.

'Swag' is the term used for the tradable stuff inside many geocaches. It's usually small, and cheap stuff. My husband calls it junk, but the kids love looking through it and picking out something to trade. The geocaching community policy is that you should trade 'even or up' when trading swag. This is to prevent the quality of the swag declining even further. So for example, it would be considered very bad geocaching etiquette to take a mini maglite and leave a nickel. As an example of the sorts of things we often find, and leave: stickers, buttons, plastic craft jewels, small toys (happy meal type stuff), coins, rubber bouncy balls, etc. You should never leave candy or food because that will only attract animals and bugs.

Next time: Part 3 - The search!

Geocaching Part 1 - Planning

Geocaching Part 1 - Planning

I promised awhile back to write a more extensive post about geocaching with kids. However, I don’t want to overwhelm with a super long post, so I will be dividing the process up. So here is part 1: planning your geocaching outing. Spring and Summer can be a great time to try out geocaching if you’ve never tried it before. We went out today and found three caches. I’m going to give an account of what we did as an example of how geocaching works. I’m going to do my best to avoid including any details that might provide hints about the location of the caches we found so I don’t accidently share any caching spoilers.

First, I visited http://geocaching.com and pulled up the map of the Regional Park we planned to visit, to see what sorts of geocaches were there. What I consider when planning a geocaching outing with my kids:

-          The difficulty rating for the cache. While 3 and 4 star difficulty caches are very rewarding for me to find, my kids usually lose interest in searching well before I do. I stick to 1 and 2 star, maybe 2 ½ when they are caching with me to keep it fun.

-          The terrain rating. For this I stick to a 3 ½ star rating or under, even on my own because I’m not all that fit. I don’t want to have to do any climbing or other difficult maneuvers to reach a cache. There may be a 3 or a 3 ½ I won’t be able to get to, but so far those have been obtainable for us even if slightly tiring if they are up a steep hill or something similar.

-          The size of the cache. The kids love the cheep silly ‘swag’, or treasures that are available for trade inside some geocaches. Micro caches are often to small to hold any swag. I try to make sure most of the caches we will be searching for on an outing are ‘small’ or larger. Sometimes a hide is so clever and fun on its own they enjoy finding it just for the sake of finding it (as I do) but usually, they want the swag.

-          The hike involved. We are tackling longer hikes as time goes along and they grow, but I still have to consider a hike length that will keep things fun for them. Sometimes we will skip the hike all together and focus on finding ‘urban’ caches. These are ones that are hidden in parking lots, or neighborhood playgrounds, or sometimes inside local businesses. We found one on the bookshelf at our library! The downside to urban caches is that they tend to be small because it is harder to hide a geocache in a busy area. It can also be harder to search in a high traffic shopping center, for example, without strangers wondering what you’re up to.      

           

For your first geocaching outing consider looking for a ‘beginner’ cache. When you visit http://geocaching.com and  under the “Play” tab pick “Hide or Seek a cache” then enter the area you want to look in, you will be shown a list of caches in that area. Caches that the hider thinks would be good for a beginner will be highlighted in green.

Next time I’ll go over what to take with you on your geocaching outing.

Geocaching – Fun Stuff to Do Anywhere

Geocaching – Fun Stuff to Do Anywhere

I've wanted to write a post about geocaching for a while now, but couldn't decide where to put it. I can certainly be done almost anywhere in the Bay Area, but I think it could deserve it's own full review like the Thursday activities get. So, I decided to do both.

This week will be just a quick introduction to geocaching, and in a future week, I'll write a more expansive post with ideas to take you deeper into the hobby of geocaching.

Basically, geocacaching is a treasure hunting game played with a GPs device, and the website geocaching.com. There are other websites as well, but this is the main, and most popular one as far as I know. The website offers a few different ways to search for nearby caches. You can enter an address and get a list of geocaches close by. I personally like the 'search on the map' function. It gives me better information about where a cache is than just how many miles from the entered address.

Not all geocaches are kid or family appropriate. There are a number of different attributes that can be added to each cache listing to describe it. For your few outings, you may want to look for caches that are labeled as "kid friendly" or listed as "beginner" caches. I've hunted for caches along busy roads and other places I wouldn't have wanted to take my children. That's another reason to check out the map on geocaching.com before heading out to your hunt – make sure it is an area you'll all feel safe.

Luckily, most are very family friendly. If you have a popular walking trail near you home, or park, or regional open space, there are great odds there will be several geocaches there for you to find.

What my kids like best, is the swag. If you are looking for a cache labeled 'small' or larger, then there may be small toys, coins or other little items inside. If you bring small items to trade, you can put in your item, and take some other trinket out of the cache. My kids have traded for things like beads, rubber bouncy balls or matchbox cars. Try to keep the trades fair, so the next kids to come along have something fun to pick out too.

We have a hand held geocaching GPS, but you can geocache with just a smartphone ap if you don't have a GPS. (Car GPS devises don't work well for geocaching). Geocaching.com has their own ap that costs $10, but I have used and like c:geo, and it is free. You do need to go to geocaching.com and sign up there for an account first to use c:geo and some of the other free geocaching aps out there.

If you're ready to get started, the geocaching.com website can walk you through finding your first cache. Otherwise, I'll be back with even more geocaching fun for you and your family another week.