Geo-Em

Letters To Sara: My Geocaching Adventure

SARRRAAA, WITH NO H,

Hey Girl Hey! You will never believe what I did today. You know my cousins Mason and Evan, the ones with the cute labradoodle Molly? Well we went on this treasure hunt today. Well not a pirate treasure hunt but almost just as good. It’s this new thing, (or at least new to me) called geocaching. You get some coordinates that you punch into your GPS and it takes you to the location of the hidden treasure. I can’t wait to tell you all about it! So first we had to pick which treasure we wanted to find. There are so many different ones on the geocaching website it was hard to decide. But since it was our first one ever, we decided to go with one that was highlighted as easy. So like I said they give you the coordinates, but sometimes they give you clues too. This one gave you the clue of ‘Ramp it Up,’ along with the coordinates. The title was Town Diner too. My cousins have been living in the town for a long time so they knew exactly which diner they had to be talking about, Campbell Diner. They knew that the Campbell Diner had a ramp in the front so that must be it. We hopped in my car and were off to the Diner. Once we got there I plugged in the coordinates that were listed on the cache website. Before I could even find the coordinates on the GPS, Mason had already found it. I put some pictures below of him discovering the cache.



It was in some nasty painted peanut butter jar. You are supposed to take something out and then replace it with something else, but there was so much water inside that we did not take anything. We just decided to move on to the next treasure.

Our next hunt was so much more fun. You know mommy Karyn? Well she decided to join us on this one, and you know here she was the one to find it. But I still want to tell you about it because it was a hard one. We plugged in the coordinates but it said that it was 3 miles away, so we decided to do some research on the clues to see if we could get closer without using the GPS. We discovered that it was across from the TE company in Fuquay. Yeah it was over there, across the street. When we crossed the street it was really hard to use the GPS. One minute it told us we were right on it and the next we were 25 feet away. Eventually we decided it would not be out in the open and ventured into the little wooded area right next to where we were. Immediately my mom found it. Of course you know me and my love of taking pictures of myself. I had to snap a shot of me with the cute little box. Inside were lots of sweet things. I signed this log to let everyone know that I found the cache and let Mason and Evan take a prize. Mason took a toy car and Evan took a shark tooth. We put in a bunch of marbles to replace it for the next person to search for that treasure (maybe you???).



We were having fun at this point and decided to do one more. The next one took us to a bait and tackle shop by Max’s house. When we got there we had the same trouble with the GPS but we pushed through it. We were still unable to find it, we were about to give up when the store owner came out and asked us what we were doing. I told him we were geocaching which he already knew all about. He led us in the right direction of the cache and then we used the gps for the rest. We found it in a bag under a tree right in front of the shop.



We took our loot, a bouncy ball, and left some marbles again. Then we got to talking to the store owner and he told us all about his geocaching experience. He said he took a travel bug from NC all the way to Holland. He is still following it on his computer and he said now it is in Czechoslovakia. SO COOL! We should totally do that!

Anyways, Love you girl! Hope we get to go treasure hunting soon! Love, Emilyy with two y’s!

Below I have attached a lesson plan that could incorporate geocaching in a third grade social studies classroom