Anybody heard of this hobbie? I saw this on one of the forums I like to peruse.

Excerpt:

If you’ve never heard of geocaching, you can think of it as part treasure hunt, part scavenger hunt. People all over the world hide items - anywhere…in the middle of big cities, out in the countryside, on tops of mountains, in caves…just about anywhere. If you shop at WalMart or eat at Cracker Barrel, you’ve probably walked right past a geocache and never known it. Geocaches can be anywhere from downright tiny to insanely huge.

Once the cache is hidden, the hider uses a handheld GPS receiver to get the latitude and longitude of the location. The hider posts this information online at geocaching.com. Once the cache is posted, people then try to find the cache. They plug the coordinates into their GPS receiver, which will get them typically to within 20′ of the cache. Sometimes you find them, sometimes you don’t. It’s part of the game. When you find a cache, you sign the logbook that is in the cache, to prove that you were there. You also log that you found the cache online. Geocaching.com tracks which caches everyone has found.

Some caches have “trade items” - this is where the treasure hunt part of the game comes in. You can take something out of the cache, and put something else in.

Another aspect of the game is trying to retrieve a cache in a busy place without being seen by people who don’t know anything about the game. People who aren’t aware of caching are called muggles (taken from the Harry Potter books.) You always have to be on the lookout for muggles when caching.

It’s a great game. It’s one of the few activities that can really be enjoyed by younger and older people alike. I’ve met a lot of really neat people geocaching. I’ve also gotten to see lots of places that I would have never known about had I not ever learned about this activity. It really is a huge amount of fun.

If you’ve done this and have any stories I’d like to hear them.

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