BY Abelino Ruiz
LifeAtStart.com Reporter
Have you ever been sitting at home one day feeling really bored with nothing to do? You don’t want to spend any money or you just don’t have the money to spend. You and your friends are looking for a fun, social, cooperative activity to do. Well I have the solution to all of your boredom from here on out. Even though it’s not frequently talked about or mentioned, it is a very popular game among college students and children alike. Geocaching.
Geocaching is the mother of all scavenger hunts. It is a GPS-based game that spans around the entire globe. It’s super fun and easy to sign up.
First, you want to download the Geocaching app on your smartphone. Signing up only requires an email and a password. It takes thirty seconds. Once you are in, you’ll see a map with a whole bunch of green dots on it and a blue blinking dot. You are the blue dot and the green dots are Geocaches. There is a premium service that costs $10 for three months which unlocks all geocaches locations, but you don’t need it because there are over a thousand traditional geocaches in the Toledo area alone.
So by now, you probably want to know what this thing actually is. It’s a little hidden container with a slip of paper in it for you to sign your name and date and sometimes there are little items or toys which are referred to as bugs. You must leave the geocache where you find it and you can not take any bugs. You can, however add a bug to the container or take a bug and move it to another geocache spot. These caches are hidden everywhere in and out of the city: magnetized to guard rails, under lampposts, and even in cemeteries.
Who hides these things? People just like you and me hide them. However, you have to register the location with Groundspeak, Inc., the owners of Geocaching. Some people even have legitimate Geocaching strips of paper in the geocache for you to write your name and date on.
This is a really fun hobby and it really comes in clutch on those boring days where you just can’t find something to do, but you want to be outdoors in the beautiful weather. Currently, I have 18 logged finds: 16 in Toledo, 1 in Lambertville, and 1 in Dublin, Ohio. There are an endless number of little scavenger containers out there, even without the premium. If you spent every day for the rest of your life hunting for geocaches, you still would not run out. The community even has a geocache lingo. Tftc stands for “Thanks for the cache.” A muggle is a nongeocacher. So a muggle infested area would be like an intersection with lots of traffic. In fact, one time somebody saw me and my friends snooping around and threatened to call the cops!
Geocaching is really fun with a few friends. I have a lot of fun and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to kill boredom and have some fun too. However, if you think killing boredom means running around stealing geocaches, you’re wrong. At this point, you just have no life.