My thoughts and memories on the 10th anniversary of Geocaching in Australia, or in my case Canada.
I first read about geocaching in an article from the local newspaper. They were talking about how fun it was as a hobby, with the minimal investment of a GPS receiver. I decided to look up my area to see if any geocaches were nearby. I found geocaching.com but didn't like the fact that I had to sign up in order to view the coordinates, but after learning, by the caches title, that one was hidden close by I created an account and got the coordinates. Only one problem, I didn't own a GPS receiver, so I hemmed and hawed about purchasing one, till I found someone that would come with me and use their auto GPS receiver. Well that lead to my first geocache find, but my next wouldn't be for some time.
With the boom in popularity of automotive GPS receivers, I was eager for an alternate excuse to bye one and geocaching gave me that reason. Hopping on the bandwagon I ended up with both automotive and hiking GPS receivers for Christmas, needless to say my second attempt at geocaching came in the winter. Winter caching coupled with my inexperience with geocaching and the cache types, lead to some fruitless searching, like looking all around a sign for a cache not knowing the sign was a clue for a multi-cache, doh
![Doh #-o](./images/smilies/eusa_doh.gif)
. After a few finds I was hooked and my friends soon joined in on the fun.
Although the learning curve was very steep I finally got the hang of things and was soon placing my own caches. The school of hard knocks aka the geocaching.com reviewers soon made it apparent a great many things like how the “guidelines” were more of “written in stone laws” and things like cache proximity were a major nuisance even when you were aware of the other caches. These things, thankfully, lead me to seek out other geocache listing websites, which is when I discovered Geocaching Australia. Although the name implies Australia, and I'm in Canada, I found it to be the best global geocache listing website for my use.
Over my year and a half of geocaching I have come full circle from my first hide at an unusual historic ruin, through the numbers race of roadside micros, back to the realization that geocaching is about the unusual places it can take you and the thought that can, and should, be put into a cache. I fear that the future may be glum for me as I realize that once I have found all the caches in my area, there may be no need to revisit them and nothing to do but sit back and wait for a new cacher to place his first cache and race out to find it. I hope the good locations will be cause enough to revisit the area, and that creative geocaching, things like moveable caches, will continue the thrill of the hunt.
Congratulations on the anniversary of 10 years of Geocaching in Australia, and thanks to the hard working team of Geocaching Australia, may the future be as bright. ![Clapping =D>](./images/smilies/eusa_clap.gif)