The "Intro to Geocaching Adventure Series" will be a small collection of geocaches placed off school grounds that are in walking distance for the students of the local elementary school. The students are ready to learn how to use a GPS to locate geocaching treasures on their outdoor adventure.
Caches will be placed around the center area of town, so students can walk from cache to cache as a school club.
If you would like to park and walk from cache to cache yourself, there is parking along Main Street (Route 20) throughout town.
This is an Ammo Can. It will be a very easy find. It may be slightly covered when it snows, but you can "plow" right through the snow, it is large enough to feel in the snow.
This cache has been placed with the permission of the Ripley Highway Department Superintendent.
Some helpful hints for my students:
LEAVING AND TRADING GOODIES
One of the guiding principles of geocaching is “take something, leave something.” A geocache hider places a number of goodies in a container when a new cache is first started. As people find the cache, they exchange goodies that catch their eye with trade items they’ve brought with them on the search.
If you take something from a cache, be sure to leave something. If you forgot your trade items, just sign the logbook. A number of geocachers just do this anyway and don’t exchange goodies. To them, finding the cache is the exciting and rewarding part of the sport — they’re not really interested in the contents of a cache.
As you find more geocaches, you’ll get a better idea of what kind of goodies people leave in caches — it can be just about anything that will fit in a cache container. There’s always a lot of discussion within the geocaching community about what is appropriate and not appropriate to leave in a cache. Here are some quick guidelines:
- Don’t leave food in a cache. Food can attract animals as well as get smelly and messy, and plastic cache containers have been chewed through by critters eager to get at a tasty snack.
- Never put anything illegal, dangerous, or possibly offensive in a cache.Geocaching has turned into a family sport, so be responsible.
- Always exchange something of at least equal value for whatever you take. For example, don’t purloin a cool antique coin and replace it with a cheap McToy.
- Try to trade up. Trading up means leaving something in the cache that’s better than what you take. Many times, caches start out with cool stuff but soon end up filled with junk (broken toys, beat-up golf balls, cheap party favors, and so on). If you can, always trade up to make the finds more interesting for everyone.
- Put yourself in the shoes of the next cache visitor. Would they find whatever item you just left interesting, intriguing, useful, or fun?
If the cache contains a Travel Bug (a to-be-taken-and-moved item that has a metal dog tag attached to it with a logo of a bug and a serial number), feel free to take the Travel Bug but only if you will remember to turn it loose in another cache that you find. Travel Bugs are meant for traveling.