What is your primary reason for geocaching?

1queenand4jokers · Senior Member

What is your primary reason for geocaching?

Prairie Jeepin · Member

Can the poll be made multiple choice? I found it limiting and not really accurate for me to pick just one answer. I couldn't decide on one, but make the following post to explain.

My primary reason is for the fun of exploration adventure. Since as young as I can remember I have always been an adventure explorer. As a child my idea of fun was not playing at the park, not doing sports, not playing board games, not watching cartoons or other tv shows, not even playing with toys...

I liked to go out on my bike and explore places I hadn't been to. A new neighbourhood, the local creek or lakefront, abandoned buildings, contstruction sites, anything not normally easy to access or open to the general public, places most people didn't go or want to go to. The bike was a means to get to the adventure as well as a test in itself to see how far I could get before I had to walk. I guess from an early age I was interested in mobile exploration/adventure. I've been that way ever since.

As a teen in Edmonton I, with likeminded friends, wandered in the River Valley, explored various locations around the city, infiltrated abandoned buildings and otherwise went into places we shouldn't be. By this time however we were using both bikes and cars as some of us were coming of age.

As a young adult with trucks/cars of my own, the adventures became further away. Long distance exploration took the place of city-bound travels. My first wife and I used to load up our car every weekend and spend a day driving around Alberta looking for ghost towns or abandoned farmhouses or other long forgotten, unmarked historical locations/places. The research was part of the fun for me, the actual "find" was a reward for long hours of painstaking mapping, cross referancing, and hours of digging for information to pin-point these typically remote and overgrown sites.

It remains the same all these many years later. Jeepin', exploring, and goecaching all together like a well oiled machine. The fun and the adventure is still there. But the long hours of research have been replaced by a few minutes; and the paper maps have been replaced by a little hand-held map machine using high-tech US Government equipment. This is not to say that I don't still do full scale adventures that require hours and days of research, mapping with real maps, and myriad other activities, I do. But, Geocaching has become a great little way to provide and manage bunches of "mini-adventures" in between my larger more detailed ones.

Such is the reason for Prairie Jeepin

1queenand4jokers · Senior Member

Thanks Jeepin' for that response. Nope I cannot change the poll now but feel free cachers to share your stories! I think ghost town caches would be very interesting. I have a ghost towns of Manitoba book and it is fascinating. Just so much reverts back to private land. But a series of caches on ghost towns would be great! Hope to do some or all of your caches this spring/summer and see the Peace Gardens. Strange that I'm almost 40 and yet have never been there.

Prairie Jeepin · Member

quote:
Originally posted by: 1queenand4jokers
"...But a series of caches on ghost towns would be great! Hope to do some or all of your caches this spring/summer and see the Peace Gardens. Strange that I'm almost 40 and yet have never been there. "

Aye, a ghost town series would be interesting for the history buffs out there! I'll get working on that over here, I know a few semi significant sites/places (yet nothing now exists) close by.

I only have 1 official cache to date, but there are 3 more planned. I hope to get most of them placed and approved before summer.

I just turned four-oh last week (30 March)....... first thing I did was run out and get my grey hairs chopped off ...and I've only been to the Peace Garden once myself. If you go, make sure its during a full bloom season or it isnt worth the trip. They don't (or havent been) keeping it up as well as they should lately. Its glory days are long gone unfortunately.

PJ

-- Edited by Prairie Jeepin at 11:48, 2005-04-07

junglehair · Senior Member

Can I answer "All of the above"?

It's so hard to pick just one reason why I love geocaching.

I love photography and there are so many opportunities to take great pictures while out geocaching;

It's a great way to get off the couch and away from the TV. I almost never even watch TV any more;

I love the puzzle caches and have been known to attempt to solve some in locations I know I will likely never even get to to look for the cache;

I have always been fascinated by GPS technology - you'd probably never guess that by the fact that I own 3 GPS units myself and work with mapping grade GPS units;

I enjoy writing and reading the logs from interesting and/or challenging caches;

I love to read the logs when people find my caches;

A little friendly competition never hurt;

Logging my 1000th cache find recently was very cool (thanks for the shout out on the home page by the way!);

I love finding places I would never have known existed if it weren't for geocaching. Especially when you are new to an area. I probably know Rochester better now than most people that have lived here all their lives;

And one of the best things about geocaching.... the people! I have met so many wonderful people, from all walks of life. It is great to be involved in a sport where age, sex, race, religion, sexual orientation, and social status don't matter. It doesn't matter if you have 1 find or 1000 finds either we're all just geocachers.

dutch53 · Veteran Member

Like some of the others, I thought that most of the list would apply at one time or another. I am pleasently surprised to see that my top three choices are the top three of the majority of the people voting. Thanks for the work that you put into this poll, Queen. It will be interesting to see how others vote.