The best-laid plans
Me: “Hi, my name is Nathan, and I’m a geocacher.”
Support group: “Hi Nathan.”
Yes, I’ll admit it, I’m addicted to geocaching. It’s an organized outdoor activity that uses the GPS satellite constellation; if you have a hand held GPS unit, you can find things that people have hidden places. It’s basically an abuse of a multi-billion dollar government satellite array to find $10 worth of tupperware and trinkets somebody hid out in the woods. I guess it’s no worse than using the same technology to navigate your car to the grocery store, but it’s far less practical.
The way I got into caching was because of my bagpipes. I was practicing in a park near on the way home from work when I lived in Pittsburgh, and as happens when one pipes outside, it tends to attract passersby. This particular group was a father and son; the son trundled off to some part of the park carrying something that looked not unlike a cell phone while his father stayed to chat with me. He told me about “this stupid little game” (his words), and how they could have used my help on a puzzle cache a while back; one of the clues was written in Gaelic. I found his assumption that I know Gaelic because I play pipes fascinating (I play mahjong but don’t speak Chinese), but I was intrigued by this activity he described. After ten seconds with a search engine I had a name: geocaching.
A year or so later I actually got a GPS unit, and have been caching ever since. There are caches all over the world, so anywhere you go you can probably find some caches nearby. It extends the time required for a drive if you’re stopping for 15 minutes every few miles, but it is pretty cool. It’s pretty geeky, but I do enjoy it.
So I went out geocaching today, as I often do on the weekends. I started the day with 92 finds (actually a low total compared to some people who are truly obsessed), and had planned to find my 100th cache. I spent the time walking between the first three or four caches I found composing an introspective and reflective blog post about my 100 finds, but unfortunately it will have to wait: I was forced to stop after finding 7 new caches due to failing batteries in my GPS. I usually carry a backup set, and ironically the one time I don’t have spares is when I need them. I did stop at the store on the way home (the whole point of the trip into town) and debated buying batteries so I could go back and grab one more, but I have a plethora of AA’s at home and nothing planned tomorrow after school. Wait until then for that blog post; in the meantime here are a few photos I took this afternoon. They are from the top of Cathedral Ledge and White Horse Ledge, overlooking North Conway and the Mount Washington Valley. Yes, those are rock climbers.
