Cache me if you can!

One of the many things I love about summer here is all the little town parties scattered around the county. Just about every summer weekend, another town holds its annual celebration. Over the years, we've been to La Center's Our Days, Camas Days, Woodland's Planters Day, and Amboy's Territorial Days.

A favorite is Battle Ground's Harvest Days. I'm not sure what used to be harvested when the town got the party started in 1960. My guess is hay. Nowadays, the celebration is mostly a community-spirited parade and an ever-changing rotation of carnival rides, booths selling honey and metal garden art, and a cruise of sparklingly restored muscle cars.

A new addition to the Harvest Days last year was a geocaching contest. We knew nothing about it last year but this year the organizers did a much better job getting the word out. So a few days ago, for the first time ever, Rob and I decided to geocache together. It's ok. We're married.

Non-existent in 1960, the term "geocaching" was officially added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2012. Accordingly, geocaching is "...a game in which players are given the geographical coordinates of a cache of items which they search for with a GPS device." Probably best described as a hi-tech scavenger hunt, geocaching is mostly a way to entice geeky people outside to get some vitamin D without a prescription. (See this link for a bit more of an explanation.)

Rob did a little geocaching back in the early 2000s when we lived in California. I think it was mostly a means of using the cutting edge handheld GPS device I gave him for his birthday. I didn't join him since I was mostly on pain meds and in a back brace riveted to episodes of TLC's "Trading Spaces" home decorating show. It's good to have hobbies.

When I saw that a Battle Ground accountant (fittingly) was hosting a Geocache Contest for this year's Harvest Days, I thought it sounded sort of fun. You know, a way for me and Rob to get outside on a nice sunny day and skip our D pills for the day.

We carefully reviewed all the info we could find and dug out Rob's long-since-discontinued Garmin eTrex Legend® handheld GPS device. Dropping in some new batteries, we were both a little stunned the thing still worked.

When we checked in to register for the contest, we learned that the coordinates and clues for the 10 spots to find were going to be soon released on a website. This was cause for some concern since it turns out that geocaching in 2014 is all about using your Smartphone. And we -- especially me -- defiantly do not have Smartphones. Oops.

The way geocaching apparently works these days is you hop online to find the clues/coordinates, tap a button on your phone to locate the spot on a Google Map of some sort, and then rely on your phone's built-in GPS to guide you there. Then you get to put your technology in your pocket as you dig around in bushes or under rocks or in creek beds as you search for a little box or tin or film canister (remember film??) or some other container. Inside the container is a rolled up log where you write in your name as proof you were there. Then it's back to your fancy phone to log in that you found the cache. And that's it.

I can almost see the perplexion from here. Both about how we were going to geocache...and why.

For the how:

Ever resourceful, we left the check-in table and scoped out some free Wi-Fi at a nearby burger joint and used my iTouch (an iPhone without the phone) to find the clues. We had to do a bit of math, though, since our Legendary Garmin eTrex® GPS device required an outdated way of understanding coordinates. A fancy Smartphone would have done the calculations for us.

We then had to save screen shots of each clue so that we could refer to them when we got closer to each cache. A Smartphone would have made them instantly accessible.

Using a paper map (what?!?), we then noted the general location of each of the 10 clues and planned our route. By the time we were ready to leave the burger place, we had had lunch, chatted up the manager, refilled our drinks thrice, and had had to lift our feet so the crew member could sweep up after the lunch crowd had come and gone. Any longer and they probably would have given us name tags.

And so we set out.

In a few places, the cache was super easy to find because other cachers were already there. Other locations were easier to narrow down due to the obvious tromping of grass. A few others took far too long and required the need to restore public landscaping that ended up not being involved in the cache. Oops.

And why geocache in Battle Ground?

Well, this.

Isn't it adorable?? It's a Geocache Coin. The first 200(?!?) people who finished the contest got a coin. And bragging rights. That's it. But do you see the gnome? There's a gnome on the coin! As soon as I saw the gnome, Rob knew we were going to be trekking all over Battle Ground, in the dark if we had to, with a list of numbers with degrees and decimals points in one hand and a vintage piece of technology in the other.  I had to...HAD TO...possess the Gnome Coin.

It actually only took us about 3 hours to earn our gnome...err, coin. And I honestly had an absolute ball in the process. I got to see parts of the county I didn't know existed, I got to meet people from all over the place, and I got to sneak a peek into a world I only vaguely knew existed. Geocachers are a serious but friendly bunch. All very focused but sporting.

At our very first stop, a woman maybe 10 years my senior was excited to see us and asked us what our caching name was. I let Rob answer. Then she asked if we exchanged...something. It was geocache jargon so I have no idea what she said, but when I told her it was at my very first cache find ever, she proudly handed me a butterfly coin and then got busy on her Smartphone logging in that she met Rob's caching name "on the trail." I felt bad I had nothing to offer her. As she eyed our Legendary Garmin eTrex® GPS device, she seemed more excited about bringing old school newbies into the fold than disappointed about not leaving with an exchanged trinket. Very cool.

On the rest of "the trail," I got to meet retired couples in their 60s, a dad and his two pre-school sons, parents and their teenage daughter, and the pastor of a church whose foliage we were trying to be delicate with. Everyone (including the pastor) was having fun and was in good spirits. People also happily exchanged helpful information without taking the fun out of the hunt. We saw lots of cars from Oregon and several bumper stickers that suggested that Battle Ground's Geocoin Challenge was good enough to travel over a river for. Heck, most Portlanders think they need to pack a suitcase and maybe renew their passport before coming over to the Washington side of the Columbia. So the fact they came all the way to tiny Battle Ground to hunt for trinkets is pretty impressive.

So is this my new hobby? Especially now that "Trading Spaces" is long gone? Probably not. I would definitely do other one-day contests in a contained geography. But as much as I enjoyed geocaching, it's not worth me abandoning my trusty flip-phone without a data plan for. Although if more gnome coins were involved...or better yet, LLAMA coins...who knows??