I’ve been working hard lately and was looking for an excuse to get outside and run around. Enter geocaching! I had never done it before and it sounded like the perfect thing to give my girlfriend and I one more reason to stay outside.
I didn’t really know where to start when it came to geocaching. So I hit up Google. Hmm geocaching.com comes up first, seems like a good place to go for info. The site isn’t beautiful but it’s very functional. Throw in a set of coordinates, an address or town name on the search box on the main page and you’re off the races.
Confronted with a list of geocaches in the area you can go through the list and see details or you can search by area using a google map. I wanted to go somewhere that had a few but would be a good hike as well. I hit search with google maps and up comes a map. I looked around Nanaimo and there were a bunch. We settled on the end of Superior Road in Lantzville for our adventure. You can see the geocache in the google maps and get information about it from there. Clicking on it brings up a little window that enables you to get more details, book mark it or send it to your gps. If you have a Garmin GPS and Garmin communicate installed you can click write to gps and voila, you have the geocache information stored on your gps.
Make sure you go into the details and get the hit for the geocache before you head out hunting. There are some gps that will display the hints on the unit but you have to be a paid subscriber to get that information from geocaching.com. I was not aware of this at the time of the excitedness and the beginning of the hunt so it caused some problems later. Unable to view the hints we were got the geocache waypoints but had no idea where they would be.
We checked when we got back and apparently a couple of the caches had some wonky coordinates. Be careful of these! Do some research on each of the caches before you head out to get all the information you need.
The hike was very pretty but we were a little disappointed that we couldn’t locate any of the geocaches. Look out next time, thought, we’ll be back with a vengeance!