Integrating the Derivative

Kari and I made our first geocaching trip today! In case you don’t know what geocaching is, here’s a description we found on a card in a geocache container today: “Geocaching is a sport which uses a multi-billion-dollar military satellite system to find tupperware in the woods.” That about sums it up! You can read more about it at geocaching.com. The basic idea is that someone sets up a container somewhere and uploads the coordinates so that other people can locate the container using a GPS unit or maps. Then, if you so choose, you can swap out objects in the container (be sure to bring something to put in there!).

Kari’s dad gave us his old handheld GPS so we used it to locate our first geocaches in Branstrom and Arboretum parks in Fremont. We went to Branstrom first. The first geocache was located clear at the back of the park so we had to walk quite a bit. We had to backtrack when we went up a wrong path once, but eventually we were able to find it. We signed the log and left some foreign coins from my collection for the next person.

We weren’t able to find the second geocache in Branstrom. It’s actually a multi-stage cache with seven total stages, I believe. We’ll go back and try to locate the first stage sometime in the future.

Lastly we went to Arboretum Park. Arboretum is fairly small so the GPS was virtually no help at all. It’s about ten years old so I’m not really sure how accurate it is. There were some little kids playing nearby that actually pointed us in the right direction. They must have talked to people searching for the geocache before because they knew what we were doing and exactly where the geocache was.

All in all it was a lot of fun! I recommend it if you can get your hands on a GPS.