Flashes of Panic

TBP, esq. at Unbillable Hours went geocaching. He’s got commenting turned off, so I have to make my comments here.

I’ve played around with geocaching for nearly a year, though I haven’t been out much in 2004. (There was one weekend last year where I hunted up seven caches, which isn’t bad out here in Western Massachusetts but would be small-time in the eastern part of the state.) I’ve even placed two.

The appeal of geocaching is that it takes you somewhere you might not ordinarily go. For me, it pulls me out of the five or six miles between home and work and helps me explore this area by seeking out little boxes. It’s definitely an odd sport; there’s seldom anything in the caches you’d actually want to have, unless you’re the age of my nieces (and a lot of people do this with their kids, so that’s A Good Thing.) But there’s a brief rush of accomplishment when, for example, you’re staring at what appears to be a blank rock wall, and suddenly the one rock out of place practically jumps out at you and turns out to have a tupperware container behind it. I suppose that feeling must be similar to those Magic Eye things I could never see.

But I think it’s reasonable to say that I would never have explored places like the Keystone Arches, for example, without geocaching. And if running isn’t getting me outdoors as much as I’d like, well, caching will fill in the blanks.