New Activity: Geocaching

There is not much exciting or blog-worthy going on in my life at the moment. I’m still in this weird funk, but sort of optimistic that I’ll get out of it soon. I seem to start being more organized and a bit more active and I’m trying to keep that up this week without over-doing it. Besides procrastination I might also have a tiny problem with pacing myself or my activties. It’s not I’m doing too much in the sense of being exhausted, but in the sense of spending too much time doing it.

Reading the “Wilderness” novel series is one of these activies. I’ve started book 4 a few days ago and still like the whole story a lot even though the focus of the story has shifted from the novel with which it all started. I have a hard time putting the books down even though I know there are more important things I should do. :-)

Another activity which threatens to take up (too) much of my time might be “Geocaching”. I tried that last year with a phone app, but without much success and somehow I never got around to join Steffi once on a Geocaching tour before she moved to Munich. I always wanted to try it for real though and a week ago I finally did. I had booked a “try out geocaching” afternoon and it was a lot of fun. I knew I wanted to do that again and only a few days later I had ordered my very own first handheld GPS, a Garmin eTrex Legend HCx.
I got a great deal at Amazon, about 30% reduced price. If I had just wanted to use it for Geocaching I probably would have bought a basic handheld with less features, but I know me and I was afraid that maybe I would get tired of Geocaching after a while after all. So I decided to spend some money on a mapping handheld which allows to put digital maps on it as well, to use routing and all that. It will go on a cycling tour so much easier and it especially should help me to not get lost while I’m on a tour again (that happened to me two weeks ago, because I didn’t bother to take a map with me).

I tried finding caches in the city after work last Thursday, but even though I always got to the coordinates where I was supposed to find one, I never did, probably because they all were micro-caches and I just haven’t really gotten the sense of where and how those tiny tiny boxes could be hidden. And probably also because I didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself while I was looking for that tiny hidden cache in town in broad daylight ;-)

So, for starters I knew I had to go looking for larger caches and that’s what I did on Friday morning. I only found one of the two was looking for, which was a bit of a bummer, but I still had a great time in the forest and I knew that I would love to do that again soon.
My parents took us hiking a lot when we were little but I didn’t really spend much time in the forest or hiking anywhere else in the last 20 years or so. Geocaching might just be the right incentive to get me back into the forest or more outdoors after all. My brothers are mocking me, that I wouldn’t hike out of my own free will but needed a “treasure hunt” to get me back to do it. But I don’t care… And as they still want to borrow my eTrex for cycling tours soon, they quickly stopped mocking me.

While I was walking various paths through the forest on Friday I rembered how much fun but also stress relief this can be. For the latter alone I should get back soon. And to come full circle, there were a few moments when my mind turned back to the Wilderness series and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking “climbing up Hidden Wolf to Lake-in-the-Clouds must feel just like this” ;-)

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2 Responses to New Activity: Geocaching

  1. steffi says:

    super, das freut mich :-) viel spaß noch, und vielleicht schaffen wirs ja doch mal irgendwann zusammen. komm doch mal nach münchen!

  2. liljan98 says:

    Vielleicht schaffe ich es wirklich mal nach München (zum Deutschlandcup fahren mein Bruder + seine Clique diesmal ohne mich), dann müssen wir auf jeden Fall gemeinsam mal auf die Suche gehen. Es macht echt Spaß, auch wenn ich bisher noch gar nicht so viel unterwegs war…

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