New found obsession

I’m a fairly avid blog reader. I wish I were a fairly avid commenter also, but I’m working on it.

One of things I’ve discovered from being a blog reader is that I find their contents to be highly influential on myself and my strange habits. For example: It was Lisa’s fault that I posted my reading stats for 2010 in graph form, it is Attic24’s fault that my friends and I are all making this blanket. And it is One Crafty Mumma’s fault that I discovered geocaching.

Now, I must fairly say that I use the word ‘fault’ only so as to deflect attention away from my own insanity and obsessiveness. But still, it was OCM who mentioned the term ‘geocache’ in her post – freely and without warning. What was a poor Google dependant internet junkie to do? Of course I googled it, of course I sat in awe, and of course I headed out that day to find my first cache (a mere 0.66km from my house, might I add – I could have walked there).

 

 

As soon as I uncovered my first find I knew I was a goner. Of course, coming home to log in and finding that it had been hidden by a friend whom I had known for many years and have often been a witness to some of his zanier schemes, I knew that a) If Daniel was involved, there was no way this wouldn’t be awesome; and b) he was in huge trouble for not letting me in on this earlier.

I went out again the next day, and upon signing the log book discovered that not one, but TWO of my long time friends had discovered the secret of geocaching! Not that I was surprised. It involves all the treasure-hunting of piracy combined with the technological geekiness of GPS coordinates. This was them down to a tee. And after a sternly worded email involving the denying them cookie rights, we started planning an upcoming joint cache hunt.

 

 

In the meantime, however I quickly discovered that using my iphone as a GPS left me with two major flaws in my plans to becoming Geocacher Extraordinaire – namely that it ate my battery and left me in the middle of nowhere without a working phone. Cue second trip to Anaconda in as many days (so happy to have a legitimate excuse to shop here).

This is why I am all set out ready to go on another cache hunt, but this time with a new companion. My new, yet-to-be-named (yes, I name everything) handheld GPS. I chose the eTrex H – partly cause it was shiny and yellow, and partly cause… well… the store was having a sale and it was nice and cheap.