Wednesday, June 25, 2008

My Geocaching Quest

Since my travels have been taking me all over the U.S., I decided to try to find a geocache in every state. (If you don’t know what geocaching is, read about it at geocaching.com). When I get to a new state, I try to have the coordinates for a geocache close to my hotel. Sometimes, it’s really close to the hotel (such as a geocache I found on Time’s Square in New York City -- see picture below). Other times, I have to take quite the hike (such as in Dallas walking 3.5 miles in muggy heat).


The thing I like most about geocaching is that it usually leads to fun parks and interesting landmarks that only locals usually know about. For example, I found this running trail in New Jersey. As I was jogging back to the car, I literally almost ran into a deer on the trail. I’m not sure who was spooked more, me or the deer.

It’s been fun adding a geocache or two to each of my trips. It gives me a bit of exercise, too. I’ve been making decent progress on hitting the list of states. I’m tracking it on a map in my geocaching.com profile (I copied the most recent map below). It’s a pretty long process to get all 50 states, but it’s been taking me to fun little places. This month, I added Massachusetts and Texas to my list of states. That brings me up to 15 states.