From: Susan Ladd
To: Herb Everett
Sent: 7/27/2006 1:38 PM
Subject: I know what I want for my birthday…A handheld GPS. I want to go geocaching!
Okay, so I thought she was a bit nutty, but she told me that she had just read Katie Reetz’s story about geocaching, and she was jazzed.
For Susan, asking for a tech toy is a bit out of the ordinary. Usually, she requests earrings or some other flavor of jewelry.
I passed off the request as sort of a joke until I read Katie’s story. The family-friendly aspect of it is really appealing. And Abby would love it. It marries two of her favorites: hunting for things and cleaning up the environment.
A couple of years ago, I thought about starting a tech column and one of the ideas I had was a story about geocaching:
Geocaching is an outdoor sport that involves the use of a Global Positioning System (“GPS”) receiver to find a “geocache” (or “cache”) placed anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small, waterproof container containing a logbook and “treasure”. Geocaching is a unique take on an earlier game called Letterboxing in that it uses two recent technologies, the GPS and the Internet. Participants are called geocachers.
The above was from an outline I created back in 2004. I’d heard about it in a podcast and the idea was to marry geocaching with podcasting. It’s sort of happening, but not to the extent I though.
The best news is I’ve got at least one item for my list for Susan’s birthday.
2 Comments
I read the same one.
followed a link from mikey (above) and must encourage you to do so.
we started in the spring of 2002 (http://www.amusings.net/clg/june2002/06_25_02.htm)
and haven’t stopped since. we’re up to 478 found, but some folks who started well after us are at 1000.
it’s tons of fun, it’s great to get out, the kids liked it initially but my 14 year old hates it now (she hates everything) but we make her do it because it is good family time.
go for it. enjoy.