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)

These are some of my favorite photos I took:

The Basilica

Ornate Stained-glass Windows

View of street from the top of the Basilica

View of a cemetery from the top of the Basilica

Dallas and Thomas - Windy at the Top

Wild Green Parrot

More photos are posted on Flickr:

• The Basilica (44 photos)

Thomas and I took Clover on a geocache Sunday to test out my new GPS (my old one is somewhere in the Galapagos). It was at a nearby park, Leta Thompson Memorial Park, that we’ve never really checked out.  We discovered it had a great garden for macro shots near the front.

The geocache was not found. Halfway through the hike, Clover started wimpering. I could tell she was really hot, and since she never cries, we knew she must be miserable. We decided to abort and head home. It turns out that she had a hangnail that was bothering her.

Thomas and I took a bunch of photos however:

• My Photoset
• Thomas’ Photoset

These were some of my favorites from the garden:

The walk was about 2 miles each way, and the cache was hidden at the Bromma Airport, which is a pretty small airport. We passed through a shopping area that has the Swedish equivalent to Home Depot, Walmart, and Best Buy and stopped for a French hotdog and Coca Cola Light. I was excited that I was able to use the little Swedish I’ve learned in my language class to order my meal. The guy selling the food was excited to practice his English with me.

• Airport BMA geocache page
• Swedish Picture Dictionary geocache page
• Photographs from Airport BMA cache
• Photographs of Swedish Picture Dictionary

A travelbug is a geocaching trading item that has a serial number on it. If you take it from a cache, you are supposed to put it in another cache intead of keeping it so the owner can follow the item as it travels. I’ve had 4 travelbugs, but only one still exists – the others all were stolen or lost. The survivor is a little notebook which I made into a Swedish Picture Dictionary and dropped it off in Stockholm when I was there two years ago. I asked the finders to choose a Swedish word, draw a picture, and use the word in a sentence so I can have a picture dictionary made for me. I’ve seen a couple of the entries through photographs and they’re pretty cool.

Today, I received an email that the travelbug has returned to Stockholm, specifically within walking distance to Thomas’ parents’ house. It has gone 813 miles (map in the entry photo) in two years. As long as no one picks it up in the next couple of months, I’ll be able to get it back at Christmas when I’m there.

Friday, Clover and I found the Three Points Up Geocache in the Roswell Area Park. It was a quick find, but I parked on the far side of the park, so we got a good walk out of it.

Sunday, Thomas and I went out for a more difficult cache, Walk the Log. It was about an hour away and rated as a 5/4, but I’d call it closer to a 3/3. Still, it was a cool cache. If I had ever been able to hide my own cache in the Raleigh area, it would have been just like this one. It was fun to see a cache that was implemented the way I had imagined.

The trail was pretty. It followed a creek with a waterfall, and I took a few photos.

* Walk the Log Cache Photos

When I signed the cache page, I added a note that I found a flash card and to contact me if someone had lost one there. This weekend I finally got a reply to it. The guy was very embarrassed to have lost the card, but very grateful to be able to get it back and find out who’s hands it had been in. Since he’s not a geocacher, I asked him how he found out I had it. Here’s what he said:

I thought you might wonder how I found your post. I wasn’t sure where I lost the card, and I was actually pretty sure I didn’t take it to Occoneechee, so I’ve been looking for it in my house. Occoneechee has become a favorite hiking spot for us lately and last week I was searching for info online and came across this site with pics from your trip.:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/helixblue/sets/72157594500148048/with/369423870
I checked out the geocaching links out of idle curiousity (I’m not a cacher)… about fell out of my chair when I noticed your post. I cant believe someone found the card, posted a notice on the net, and I actually saw it. I guess Occoneechee is kind of obscure. This whole geocaching thing looks pretty cool and I’m going to have to try to find the Occoneechee caches. (Don’t have a GPS device tho so it might be futile. . .) I had no idea there was a cave at the park, so we’ll have to go exploring more.

Anyway, I agreed to mail his card back to him, though he wants me to wait for the hurricane to pass. They live a bit more East than Raleigh, so they are expecting more damage. The guy was really friendly and even chatted a bit in his email about his girlfriend’s website and asked me what I was interested in. Maybe he’s just trying to get a feel for what kind of person has such important photos of them.

So, lesson of the day: If you’re going to take pornographic photos, don’t take them with you when you go hiking – that is unless you take the photos on location while hiking. :)