Do You Geocache When You Travel for Business?
Geocaching, for the uninitiated, is an interesting hobby and cultural phenomenon whereby people place containers, called ‘geocaches’ somewhere (anywhere) in the world and then give hints to where they are to others who can then try to find the ‘buried treasure’ themselves.
The hobby was born a number of years ago when a mobile phone with a GPS receiver was first used to record the precise coordinates for a geocache container. (Ammunition boxes are preferred but practically anything can be used so long as it’s sturdy and durable.)
It’s sort of like a scavenger / treasure hunt for world travelers and in fact is becoming quite popular. Geocachers hide their ‘booty’ all over the globe and search for others too, most of which actually contain very little, if any, actual treasure.
No, the joy in geocaching is the thrill of the hunt and the joy of discovery and, in most cases, the person who finds a geocache simply records some basic data about who they are and when they found it, placing it back where it was when they finish.
Which begs the question of frequent travelers – Do you Geocache when you’re traveling on business and do you or have you ever arranged your business trip so that you can engage in geocaching?
It’s an interesting question to be sure. The fact that these ‘finds’ have little real value is very intriguing, considering that many people go to great lengths to hide them and/or find them. There’s no prize, no trinkets, heck there’s not even a glass of good red wine waiting when you find a geocache. With no viable reward it would seem rather ludicrous that someone would arrange their travel to accommodate this interesting hobby and yet there are many who do and their numbers are growing.
So again to the question at hand, which is simply this; do you make special arrangements when you travel so that you can geocache? Have you gone out of your way, changed plans, changed flights or booked extra trips just to geocache?
There may not be any treasure in those containers but the info that you give is in response to my query will be treasured, I promise.
That looks fun. Is There any website or app about this?
I wanna try…
Not during business travel though!
I haven’t gone out of my way or changed plans, but I certainly try to grab at least one cache on each business trip. It’s a great way to explore a new area and a good reason to get outdoors, especially after sitting behind a screen all day.
Actually, I think tracing geocaching to GPS-enabled phones is a bit off, time-wise. We’ve been geocaching for close to 15 years — long before phone GPS units. We had an early, non very accurate unit for years, and still use a non-phone handheld GPS for geocaching.
More info can be found at http://www.geocaching.com
@Philippe – you can sign up for a free account at http://www.geocaching.com . It is a lot of fun and you can be as casual or serious as you want.
To answer the question – yes, but my husband is much more serious than I. He had a conference 6 hours drive away from home and took over 12 hours to make the drive to get geocaches in counties he had yet to visit.
You can find a lot of caches using the GPS in your smartphone, but do be aware the accuracy is not great, so you are making it harder on yourself. On the other hand, I have seen poor college students check out the location on google maps and try to memorize the spot because they didn’t have any handheld unit.