Go on a treasure hunt! Go Geocaching

I've been Geocaching since way back in 2001 shortly after the removal of Selective Availability from the Global Positioning System on May 2, 2000. I love going out and finding new places, so today I thought I'd tell you a little more about this hobby and some of the different experiences I've had throughout the years.

Geocaching is like a high tech treasure hunt. People all over the world have gone out and hid ammo containers, Tupperware, and other containers, recorded the GPS position, and then post the coordinates on the Geocaching website. Nowadays you can use a traditional GPS device like the Garmin that I use, or use apps on your phone to go out and find them. Caches are usually hid in some of the hiders favorite places, and I've found places I would have never found without going out geocaching.

The person hiding the Cache will fill the container up with little goodies to be traded and leave a log book in them. I will usually take things with me to trade if there's something I'd like to trade. Most of the time however, I will just sign the log book that I was there. Geocaches after they have been public for a while tend to diminish in quality of items in them because people don't usually trade equally making the cache usually filled up with McDonald toys and things like that.

This was my daughter's first 'treasure hunt and she loved it. I think it's a wonderful thing to do with family. It get's you out of the house and into some adventures. You also never know what you may find as you are out caching. Here, my daughter found this leaf and just carried it around. To me it was just a leaf, but it was the biggest leaf she had ever found and she was fascinated by it.

Recently, I was on deployment and flew into Sasebo Japan to get on my ship. I did a couple caches there in Sasebo that were pretty awesome. The one in the video up above was up a trail to the top of Mount Akasaki. It was pretty awesome going from normal trees to a bamboo forest. It was like we were in Mortal Kombat. Haha.

We hit port in Okinawa shortly after and I met up with a friend on the island that had a car. We went to a cache that was one of my favorites in a while. Here is a picture of the beach near where the cache was.

I had searched for nearby caches and found one with a lot of people that had added it to their favorites. I figured we'd go to that one cause tons of people loved it. I did not expect what I'd find. We were following the coordinates and came upon a small trail into the jungle. We followed it and found a Torii Gate and steps going up in the middle of this little jungle.

We went up the stairs and found the mouth of a cave. The cave went into the hillside pretty deep. There were crawlspaces in there and it looked like it went even farther than we went in. This was a living cave as well, the stalactites were dripping. It was pretty amazing. It took some time to find and we had to go back out to where we had service to read the hint only to find it was inside, but not too far in. The cache has rusted some, but the owner painted on it. But it was pretty awesome to find in this beautiful location.

(Had to use the phone flash to take a picture of the stalactites. Also our phones were our lights cause we didn't know to bring flashlights, or maybe we would have explored deeper in.)

I've found some amazing places throughout the years caching. If you haven't done it before, give it a try. You'll never know where you may end up! If you have been caching and have a favorite one feel free to share in the comments below. Thanks for checking this out!

Photos/video taken by me @yomikibagami