Geocaching in Brussels
Last week, a friend asked if I could help introduce her kids to geocaching. Sure! Thomas and I are big geocaching fans and I’m always excited to get new cachers hooked.
Geocaching is a treasure hunt using your GPS. People have hidden treasure boxes all over the world and logged the coordinates on Geocaching.com, sometimes with riddles to solve. You can look up the coordinates, plug them into your GPS, and find them. Most geocaches have small prizes in them, and the idea is that if you take a prize, you replace it with a new one to keep it always full.
On Friday, my friend, her kids, and I headed into the forest and found three geocaches. Here they are with their prizes.
In the first cache, I left a travelbug. Travelbugs are items that have been marked with a special dogtag with a serial number. These items are not to be kept, but instead, if you take one, you’re expected to log it on geocaching.com and move it to a new geocache. That way, the owner can track the journey of their travelbug. I’ve launched several travelbugs over the years, but only 3 (not including my new one), are still traveling. The longest has been going around Sweden for almost 5 years. I also dropped one off in Atlanta before I moved, and it’s already traveled over to Italy.
Last month, Thomas and I went to a Brussels geocaching event set up as a flash mob. A flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse. Our flash mob met in Grand Place, and when the clock struck 19:15, we opened our umbrellas for 15 minutes, hopefully capturing it on the Grand Place webcam, and then quickly left.
Unfortunately, Thomas and I don’t geocache as much as we used to, but I had fun with these caches. If you’d like to see some more photos from the Umbrella cache, they’re on Flickr:
- Flash Mob Event Cache (12 photos)
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You know, we went through a spell where we weren’t caching much, it lasted almost a year, but we’re on our way back now. :) Great geocaching post! I’ve been intending to write one, just haven’t gotten to it. Love the umbrella flash mob! How fun! We did one last month too. :)
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You are too cool Dallas! We want to geocache too sometime. Let us know the next time you have a flash mob in our neck of the woods. Fun, fun, fun!
This is neat Dallas! I had never heard of either geocaching or flash-mobbing prior to your post. :)
I love the umbrella thing! How fun is that?
Alex thinks this sounds really fun and I do too… I hope we can try it soon.
Something else that’s fun… meeting a new friend in a new town. Thank you so much for introducing us to new foods and sights. We went back to the fry place and Alex ordered a sandwich that was amazing good! We all enjoyed your city very much. I am going to love your Belgium posts more than ever now that I have become familiar with the area.
This sounds like fun! I’ve never heard of Geocaching! And what a cool idea to track your “travel bug” across the Globe! :p Kind of reminds me of the Garden Gnome in Amélie! Do your travel bugs send you photos as well? ;)
I have always wanted to try geocaching. I may have an iPhone 3G soon, which means I get to jump on the badwagon too. What an interesting way to expore our new country.
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