Friday 17 May 2013

Tricksy

Pathways by foundimagination
Something that I thought I would try, and on a whim, bought an app for, is Geocaching.

From what little I'd heard about it on various blogs, I figured it was a little like orienteering, which I'd loved as a kid, so I set out with Jay and my iPhone and this app, and we navigated our way to our first Geocache spot.

And then I got confused.

What I remember about orienteering is that you'd use the map and compass to get you wherever and then there'd be an easy to spot marking or whatever and you'd know you'd done it correctly, so I figured Geocaching would be the same!

Except that it's more like hide and seek once you get to the general area.

I wonder if it might be a little bit easier if I had an actual handheld GPS rather than my iPhone that at times has a range of accuracy that's not entirely helpful, but still.  Jay and I have found ourselves in the "right" spot but with no idea of what we were looking for or where we might find it.

The first few times this was very frustrating.  Especially when we went back to the same spot a few times and still could never find anything.  I was starting to feel either really dumb or really bad at this whole thing.

But we gave up on that particular tricky spot and went to a few new ones and then we discovered that Jay is really good at hide and seek and we started finding things!

It's pretty exciting the first time you find one, and I could see it being lots of fun to get into.

I'm still not very good at it, as I get to the general area and then have no idea where to look, but Jay's super good at finding things, so we make a pretty good team at it.

As with most things.

3 comments:

Jonathan Beckett said...

That last line had all sorts of hidden meaning behind it :)

Just Sayin... said...

Are you new to this? I know several people in the geocache commuinty, surprisingly small. ;)

Victoria said...

I is! ;)