On May 3, 2000, a five gallon bucket was hidden 25 miles or so from Portland, Oregon by Dave Ulmer. It contained a Delorme Topo USA, 2 CD Roms, a cassette recorder, a "George of the Jungle" VHS tape, a Ross Perot book, 4 $1 bills, a slingshot handle, and a can of beans. The gps coordinates were then listed on the internet and modern-day geocaching was born.
As Kathy and I traveled south toward Eugene, OR to visit our friends there, we jogged over to the south east of Portland to try to find the site of the original geocache hide. It was a pretty easy find, located down a nondescript country road. It is, however, considered the Mecca of Geocaching, (at least by some). I thought there would be cars lined up trying to find and log this one, but we were alone, and not a car drove by while we messed around there for 15 minutes or so.
While logging our find on the Geocache website, I saw that as of today, there have been 6,920 others who have logged finding this cache prior to us. Just because of the history, it was a fun cache.
The cache description on the net says that if you find the plaque, you should place your handheld gps devices on the plaque for a while, to allow special powers to be acquired that include longer battery life, and more accurate readings. When I read it, I thought, nice joke. When we found the plaque, and signed the log at the nearby hidden cache, we did indeed place our gps units on the plaque. You never know. :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment