Julian Cope presents Head Heritage | The Modern Antiquarian Forum

Teasel

18 posts

Re: GeoCaching

Jan 22, 2003, 18:34

Short answer: I don't really know

Longer answer (at the risk of adding even more off-topic spam to your forum, but since you asked...): lots of things...

A good proportion of humans like to collect things, be it stamps, train numbers, china figures, money, visits to locations, or whatever. Geocaching fulfils this collection urge.

Finding interesting places I'd not otherwise have come across, is high on the list. (eg a cache in Wales which is accessed via the footpath round the Maen Ceti burial cairn was far more interesting than yet another tedious cache in the middle of a pine forest)

The "secret society" thing: knowing something about a place that few others are aware of is kinda fun. (eg it was weird doing Mountain Rescue training on a rockface less than 30' from a cache I'd visited, and no one but me knew it was there)

You'd be forgiven for thinking that finding a 9" square box using a satellite navigation system accurate to a few m is dead easy. Actually it's not, and the challenge and "thrill of the hunt" adds to the experience.

It's something I can do either as a family, with friends, or on my own. More so than hill walking, where I tend to want to go at my own pace and get frustrated when I'm with people with a significantly faster / slower natural pace.

It adds a bit of purpose to a walk. Not much, admittedly, but it could just make the difference between going for that walk, despite the rain, or just spending another couple of hours at the TV / PC.

The sense of community; reading about other people's experiences and such. You get to interact, albeit in a small way, with lots of people with similar interests.

It fits in with my green (small g) principles. The sort of love of, respect for and spirituality in the outdoors that I try to encourage in Scouts and Guides. Perhaps that's why the "litter debate" hits a raw nerve for geocachers, just as it does for you guys!

Anyway, it was an "advert" for geocaching that started all this, and I've put in my 2p worth, so this will be my last post on this forum, I think!

In reply to:
Re: GeoCaching (Rhiannon)

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Re: GeoCaching (Squid Tempest)

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