Geocaching with William

I had gotten my nephew, William, hooked on geocaching sometime last fall.  For Christmas, he got a new GPS, and I had been promising I teach him how to use it and would take him geocaching again.  I finally got around to fulfilling that promise yesterday.

First, I got Will set up with one of the cables I scored yesterday, and loaded EasyGPS onto his computer so he could track his waypoints.  After that, we logged onto geocaching.com and found a few caches close by. 

My sister lives near Lynches Woods in Newberry.  There are several geocaches in the park, so we had some great targets.  As we went, I showed Will how to spot impact trails and UPSs (unnatural piles of sticks.)   We talked about GPS accuracy and the need to carry a compass, too.

The first find was easy.  On the second cache, a king snake didn’t like our presence, and went into attack mode.  We gave it a wide clearance.  The cache itself was easy to find.  We scored a third one in the park, then decided to call it a day.  Besides, keeping up with a twelve year old was putting a strain on my injured foot.

I haven’t been geocaching very much lately.  It seems that most of my geo-related activities have involved Google Earth/Maps and geotagging photographs.  I believe I get the most pleasure geocaching when I go with someone new, like my nephew.   I just have to make an effort to do that more often.