Geocaching

The book I read to research this post was Geocaching for Dummies by Joel McNamara who also wrote GPS for Dummies about which I did a post a few days ago. It is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. You need 2 things to do geocaching, an internet connection so you can visit sites like www.geocaching.com which contain the locations of the caches, & a personal GPS receiver so you can find the location for the coordinates of the location of the cache. There are literally thousands of these caches hidden around the world & when you find them there's a gift inside, which you take & replace with a gift of your own then you fill in your details in the notepad which is in there & you notify the relevant geocaching site. This sport basically lets you be Indiana Jones looking for treasure although what you find is usually a cheap trinket. On www.geocaching.com there is a basic membership which is free & there is also a premium package which lets you print out a map of the location of the cache among other things. You're not allowed to bury the cache because otherwise people would be damaging the countryside. You are allowed though to bury it under a pile of rocks. It's best to get some experience finding caches before hiding one of your own. In britain there's a game called letterboxing which is similiar except you leave clues about the location of the box & there's a site dedicated to this at

wwwletterboxing.org

Geocaching used to be called geostashing but someone suggested they change due to the illegal drugs similarity. Incidently consumer GPS doesn't work in afghanistan due to the possibility that the taliban might use it to locate troops. The military have their own GPS service although in the first gulf war some allied troops were given consumer GPS due to a shortage of the military ones. The US government can turn off consumer GPS in selected areas.