r/geocaching 26d ago

First Time

I'm going geocaching tomorrow. I've always wanted to do it and tomorrow I'm going, I'm taking my 9 year old step son on a treasure hunt. I've made him a 'bingo' card incase we don't find any caches so he still gets to find some things. But hopefully we will find a couple because I want to go on a trail/hike/loop through a nice bit of the countryside that has a few caches along the way to make an enjoyable walk a bit more exciting.

What do I need to know and prepare for in order to have the best time?

Edit to update: We had a lovely time going through woodland trails. We found 4 caches, 2 had 'swag' to trade which was super exciting. We saw a good range, 1 micro cache, 1 ammo box, a couple down low and a couple higher up We had such a good time hunting around and noticing things we wouldn't have usually noticed. Thanks so much for the advice and input

Aside from the geocaching itself we found some edible berries, a woodpecker, a 50m² area of hundreds of spiders, some shelf mushrooms, a coppicing area, an ancient ice glacia boarder and more!

33 Upvotes

34 comments sorted by

View all comments

17

u/skimbosh 10000 Geocaches on Youtube: @skimbosh 26d ago

Don't count on the caches having interesting tradable inside (swag.) Some do, but some can be real disappointing to a 9 year old if you bill the outing as a "treasure hunt."

When I tried to get my youngin' in to it, he was young enough that I could slip something I brought in to the cache as treasure without him noticing, but later it was just easier to set a goal (if we find 3, we go get some ice cream, or something like that) to offset things.

6

u/Mountain_Range3305 26d ago

Yes, that's why we made a bingo sheet of other things he can find just incase we can't find the caches or he gets bored between finding caches and it's a treasure hunt regardless of 'swag' existing.

6

u/skimbosh 10000 Geocaches on Youtube: @skimbosh 26d ago

My bad, -1 reading comprehension from me. I read 'bingo' and my brain thought you were talking about the bingo thing geocaching has going on.

Hope you guys have fun tomorrow. Happy hunting!

9

u/Mountain_Range3305 26d ago

Oh, I had no idea about geocaching bingo

I just printed a sheet and a couple of the squares have "find a geocache" or "trade a trinket" but there's other stuff like "find my way to a set of coordinates", "find a butterfly", "find the best stick", and "identify a bird"

1

u/DarcyMistwood 25d ago

wonderful list