If You Hide It, They will Come

I have fallen for the Geocaching Addiction, thanks to Holly from And Sew It Is. I was asked in the comments from my last post what it is, so I will give you the short version, as it isn't really quilting related. Well there is a little bit later on.

Geocaching started in 2000 I think, when the US Govt made it possible for civilians to get an accurate GPS signal and fix. Before that only the military could get an accurate fix. After this happened a guy in the US thought "if I hide something in the woods and post the GPS co-ords on my website, will anyone use their GPSr to look for it?" Someone did, and the whole thing started from there. Now there are Geocaches hidden all over the world, and a bit of a subculture of people who go looking for them, just for the thrill of the find. Once you have a handheld GPSr and a way to log onto the internet, the rest is free. The original cache was buried near where Holly lives, and she has been there.

Geocachers hide a geocache, give the GPS co-ordinates, rate the difficulty of the terrain and "the hide", log it on the internet, and other geocachers go and look for it. Sometimes they are at a beautiful scenic spot at the end of a long bushwalk, other times in a suburban park or even in the centre of the City. The other issue is that it's important that the general population (or 'muggles' as per Harry Potter) don't see you extract the cache from its hiding spot, nor see you put it back. This can be the hardest part, sometimes requiring 3 or more visits to the hiding place to grab it without detection.

The cache can be the size of a thumbnail, magnetically attached to something (see Holly's blog and the bridge), a 500ml plastic food container, an ammo box up to a 20 litre drum hidden in the bush. Depending on the size there are different things inside - if tiny there is just a log book to sign your name - up to toys for the kids to swap, or even dressup clothes and a disposable camera to take your photo all dressed up! Some are intentionally easy to find, others practically impossible.

When you've found it (or not found it) you log it on the internet, describing how it went. Some logs are really funny, others give little clues, others record a find only.

The other part of it is that there are Geocoins and Travel Bugs that travel from cache to cache, moved by people then logged on the internet. This way the owner, and anyone else interested, can follow its progress by its trackable code. The red Chinese Flag coin I found in a cache has as its goal to continuously travel between the US and China. I knew of a cacher going to China so I put it in the cache at the airport and she picked it up and it's now in China. The Berlin Bear Travel Bug (above) started his journey in Berlin in 2002 and his goal was to reach a town in the South island of New Zealand where the owner's brother lives. I passed it to a visiting Kiwi cacher, and he took it to NZ, where he has nearly reached his destination. I also moved this lovely coin - there are some really beautiful ones.

Now to the Quilting Content of this post. Holly and I have decided to each send a Travel Bug off, hopefully to reach each other. She lives in Oregon, USA and I live in Queensland, Australia. We are going to attach a quilty keyring to our travel bugs and call them "Got the Quilting Bug" North and South Hemisphere, to tell between them, and let them loose. We can follow their progress on the internet.

As my 8 yo nephew and I were scrabbling in the bushes the other day looking for a geocache, my Father who was waiting nearby told us he thought we were mad. But my answer to him was that it's a bit of harmless fun, that gets you off the computer (good for kids these days) and into the outside world. It's amazing how far you'll walk if you think that cache is just around the next bend! Lots of families do it together, and there is friendly rivalry between people to be the first to find a newly hidden cache, sometimes running into each other in the bushes at 2am!

So that's Geocaching. What intrigued me was that I found out there were 2 geocaches on the 2 x 1 km island where I live. The thought of these people coming here especially to find them, doing so secretly possibly right under my nose, just about killed me. I had to know. If you want - or "need" - to know, go to www.geocaching.com and have a look. There is a feature where you can download a little thing that puts all the geocaches in the world onto Google Earth, so wherever you look you can see where they are. To do this you have to log in, it's free, but I suspect if you go that far you will probably end up hooked anyway...