Our New Family Hobby

Now that the pool is too cold to play in, our family was in need of a new hobby that we all would enjoy and didn’t take money! We found one! Our sweet neighbors to the south of us, Bob and Nancy, would often boast of their adventures around Arizona, Geo Caching. Have you ever heard of it? It’s a global, high-tech GPS scavenger hunt, you can say. All you need is a handheld GPS system (thanks Dad for the loan until we can get one) and a computer to printout the coordinates. Just in a five mile radius of our home, we can stay busy for months! And the fun thing too, these “caches” are all over the world! In fact, the last time I checked, there are 697,152 active geocaches around the world! And so far, we’ve only found six of them or so.

Once you have your print out with the coordinates and a code to decipher (the kids love to do this), you set off following your hand held device’s arrows. Eventually you get down to 5 feet of the object and then the fun begins, it’s time to locate the hidden container (varying in size), called geocaches, all hidden outdoors. It usually takes us 20-60 minutes once we get to the area, just to find it. The ‘cache’ comes in all sizes and once you find it, you sign the saved guestbook, and sometimes you take a small trinket and leave one behind. Then…you’re off to the next location, making sure to log our “find” online when we can.

We’ve found these things hidden in fence poles that we’ve had to unscrew, in a pvc pipe that was dug underground, up in a tree with a trap left for you to figure out how to lower, and more. It’s really a hoot.

If you’re ever interested, we’d love to take you with us. You’re bound for some fun, the Kempiak way!