Geocaching with Brian

Say what? Remember during easter when your parents used to hide eggs and you're super excited to search every nook and cranny in your house just to find those damn white eggs? Well, geocaching (pronounced as "gee-yo-cash-ing") is like that. This time though, you're searching for items hidden by different peeps. And it won't be inside a house anymore. It's scattered all over the world. Yep, it's like a big-time treasure hunt.

Brian introduced us to this sport (yep, it's a sport!). With his cellphone that has a GPS software, he can track down where the nearest cache is. When he visited us in the Philippines last time, he did some geocaching and found a cache in Luneta Park. Cool!

Oh, when you do find the geocache box, you can take an item but you have to leave something behind too. Plus, you have to sign your name on a piece of paper and state what you're leaving behind. Then you have to go to their website, Geocaching.com, and tell your story (you have to be a member to do that). Normally, a geocache item has a dogtag and you have to indicate the serial number for identification purposes too.

Sometimes, you will find a travel bug. This is interesting because the one who left this item behind wants the item to travel. For example, if I found a travel bug in the Philippines, I could take it to Ashburn and hide it somewhere in the village. It reminds me of the wandering gnome.

People can be very clever when hiding their items so it's not that easy. Even though you gotta GPS gizmo, you have to do the search manually. Brian hid one of his items inside an old sprinkler box. Shhh! Don't tell him I said that ;oP

And so, after work today, Ogz & I had our baptism of fire. Brian got his cellphone and it pointed us somewhere about 10-15 miles from our hotel. It looks like Marauder's Map in Harry Potter.

We drove over to a park named Gary L. Pittman Park. We started walking and Brian used his cellphone as a compass. The first item we're looking for is surrounded by roots (according to the clue given in the website). Unforch, after digging and getting my hands dirty, we still couldn't find it. It was cold too so we decided to find another cache. A group of boys were playing soccer nearby.We had more luck with the second hidden item. We found an opened canister hidden under a tree, containing various thingamajigs. Brian left an action figure and wrote down his name (along with ours). By the way, a non-geocacher is called a Muggle. I found out later that he didn't take any item.On to the third cache. We continued walking and found a fenced-in area with a concrete drainage. Brian suspects that the item is hidden down there or around the area. It's too risky to jump over the fence and it's pretty cold so we didn't pursue it anymore.Before we went back to our hotel, we inspected once more the surrounding area where the first cache is hidden. Unforch, we still couldn't find it. Oh well, at least, we got one. I enjoyed my first geocaching experience. It would've been more fun if it's summertime though. I couldn't feel my face afterwards. It felt like chicken breast straight out of the freezer.