For this post I wanted to keep it Geocaching relative though and talk about some of the cool caches I found during my time visiting California. On a down day I had during my trip to San Deigo (Carlsbad) I wanted to do a little hiking and hit up a nearby park where I did some geocaching. The weather was great, as it always is in San Deigo and the park was only a few minutes away from where I was staying. Plus it wasn’t anything too difficult since the fiancé and her sister weren’t really up gaining much elevation that day.

There were a decent amount of geocaches along the couple mile stretch that we hiked. I think I found about 7 or so at that place, a few I disregarded since it required walking through picky bushes. I’ve taken my fiancé out geocaching before, so she knows what it’s like though I can’t say she’s as big of a fan as I am of it. She tends to like the ones that are right alongside a foot path or easy to get to. Her sister though had never been before nor knew what it was. I always try to describe it to mugglers (non geo-cachers) as pretty much being a ‘grown up scavenger hunt’. That seems to be the easiest way to get the concept across. He was hesitant until I told her that some of the caches have little trinkets and gifts in them that you can exchange things you have for, I think the idea of there being a tangible reward in it for her convinced her.

I downloaded the GeoCaching App for my phone so I used that to navigate to the first one on the trail, which as we got closer to I gave it to my fiancé’s sister to find. It’s always funny watching someone look for a cache especially when it’s in plain sight but they can’t see it. She eventually found it with some help from us and letting her know that sometimes they may be disguised as something more than just a small tin ammo can. As the day went on we found more and more caches, some of which unfortunately didn’t have the coins in them that I was hoping to find. I’ve yet to find a geocache coin despite some of the caches I’ve found indicated there should have been one in the inventory. The day I do find one I’ll definitely write a post about it and share some stats on how many caches I found until I actually got a coin to exchange.

Back to the story of the day, it’s always interesting to see the various items people leave in exchange for much cooler ones I’m assuming. Almost like they found a neat cache they wanted and didn’t really have much to trade for it so they figure “ehh sure I’ll throw this used gum wrapper in there”. It is quite funny at times, and almost reminds me of the packrat mentality. For those unaware of what packrats are, they are a rodent that will find things throughout your garage or storage area that they want and take them, they then replace the item with random junk they collect such as sticks, paper, or small stones (assuming you won’t know the difference).

Anyway some of the items I found in the caches ranged quite a bit: a noise maker (which her sister took), a lego man (which she then traded the noise maker for), a business card for an online nursery with palm trees for sale (I guess if I’m ever looking to buy palm trees online I’ll know where to go now!), a bouncy ball, and a few other little dollar tree style toys. What did the girls I was with leave in exchange for the things they took, well nothing too exciting, a Macy’s coupon in one and a subway coupon in another from the weekend paper. The coupons wouldn’t have been too bad had they not been ready to expire in a few days. Yep my fiancé and her sister are the type that trade uncool things for cooler things.

Anyway, I think that overall it was a great day not only because we got to get a little exercise in and enjoy the weather but also just inviting someone new into the Geocaching world. After we finished she had told me she’ll need to get her husband out finding some as well. I think I just expanded the geocache world by two people…many more to come!