A Geocacher’s Perspective

This article was originally published on Cache Up NB. It has been mirrored here for archive purposes only.

On Boxing Day of this year I will have been geocaching for 5 years. In that time period I have found my share of caches all over the place. From micros to regulars to traditionals and puzzles, I’ve pretty much seen most of what can be done with geocaching out there. It doesn’t change the fact that I still enjoy the hobby quite a bit. One thing that has changed in that time, is my perspective of the world around me.

As an avid geocacher, I no longer look at the world around me as just the place I live in. Instead, now that I’m familiar with the world of geocaching, I see things from a different perspective. No, I’m not getting all philosophical on you but I am going to point out a few things that I am sure you no longer look at the same way as you did prior to being a geocacher.

Let’s start with a parking lot, say at Walmart or Sobey’s. I am sure plenty of you can remember the first time you ever encountered an LPC (lamp post cache). You would be looking around and around for that little container and having no luck. Then you’d touch the skirt and realize that it moves. The realization that you could lift the skirt up and find something underneath hits you. You may only be searching for a magnetic micro, but somehow the revelation that those skirts move up and down seems like you’ve discovered the atom. How could you have NOT known the cache was under there.

Now as experienced cachers, when your GPS leads you to a parking lot, you immediately dart your eyes to the lamp post that is closest where the arrow on the GPS is pointing. You just automatically know where it will be. You never look at a lamp post or parking lot quite the same way. If you see a person standing near one of them, before you may have thought they were just standing around, but now you’ll be wondering if there’s a cache under that post, or if that’s a geocacher.

Then there’s the casual Sunday drive. I’ve always been someone who loves to drive. I’ll hop in the car and go for a drive. I can’t count how many times I have been out driving and have seen a car parked along the side of the road. Sometimes you’d see nobody around the car, but other times you’d see a person or two entering the woods. Before I was geocacher, I simply thought that the car had broken down and people were waiting for someone to come by to help them. Now as a geocacher, I find myself looking to see if the people standing beside the car are holding a GPS unit. Are they caching? Is there a cache in the woods there?

Last, but certainly not least, I find myself looking at objects and places differently wondering if they’d either make a good geocache container, or a good hiding spot. It seems that since geocaching is a big part of my life, it seems to bleed into other areas as well.

How about you? How has geocaching affected your perception of the world around you?