Geocaching – Treasure Hunting using your Smartphone

Legal notice: Geeky Mummy is not liable for dog poo covered shoes, bramble scratches or muggle stares that you will incur as a result of reading this blog post.

Trust me, geocaching is brilliant fun. The idea is simple.

Someone hides a container called a cache somewhere for other people to find – typically they are hidden in trees and bushes. The cache varies in both size and contents but usually contains a log book for the finder to sign and some treats – think party bag toys. Finders are meant to swap rather than just take.

To find a cache you put your postcode into the geocaching.com website and hey presto, a list of nearby caches to find. Each cache has GPS co-ordinates.

So if you have a smartphone, the only additional expense is the purchase of a geocaching app. The official Groundspeak Geocachcing app is around £6. But if you have an Android phone and read the comments, you will see that everyone recommends that you use c:geo instead. It’s free and having used it I can confirm it really is very good and you can’t beat free.

We have been geocaching for about a month. Geeky Daughter loves the whole treasure hunting side if it and to be honest so do I – hubby would argue that I am obsessed but as we have been out far more than we would have otherwise I think it is at worst a healthy obsession. 16 month old Geeky Son however is not so keen, especially as he often has to be confined to his buggy to prevent him from grabbing brambles.

The biggest misconception I had about geocaching was that it would involve long walks in the countryside. Whilst this can be true, there are lots of caches in cities and residential areas, on the back of road signposts. We have quite a few in the local playgrounds and parks that are only minutes away from where we live.

So if this has sparked your interest – check out the geocaching.com website. There is a great little video on the home page that visually explains geocaching as well as the postcode search page (I recommend that when it lists the results you click on the Map this location link).

Oh and in case you are wondering, a Muggle is someone that doesn’t geocache in addition of course to not being able to do magic.

Happy geocaching. I’m a relative newbie, but let me know if you have any questions and I’ll do my best to help.

I have written the blog post simply because we love geocaching and think you’ll love it too.