Most of the time when you’re geocaching, the cache isn’t too terribly hard to find. You may remember in our guide to geocaching, the cache itself was hidden under a grill in a park. That’s an easy to find cache. Most are a bit harder. Once in a while, however, you’ll find yourself climbing 40ft trees, scaling vertical cliffs (that you probably shouldn’t be without safety gear) and crossing raging rivers. At that point, you’re into “extreme” geocaching.

Here’s one such example of a cache in Denmark where the cache isn’t too tough if you can safely navigate the rapid across the river.

Once you’ve made it to your camping, hiking, or outdoor adventure destination, your automotive GPS will be of little use to you. They generally run on batteries and won’t easily fit in your pocket. Not only that, they a little lacking in the durability category so you’ll want to switch over to your handheld GPS unit.

While many higher end handheld devices do support turn by turn direction like their automotive counterparts you’ll find they’re much more at home out in the backwoods.

A handheld GPS unit is usually far more rugged and water resistant if not outright waterproof. They don’t frequently come preloaded with maps. Instead, you’ll need to purchase separate software especially with lower end devices. However, even if your GPS device isn’t loaded with maps, it’s still plenty useful as it can keep track of where you’ve been so if you get hopelessly lost you can still backtrack.

Also, if you know the coordinates of where you’re going, it can also point you in the right direction.

Which brings me to one of it’s more common uses these days, geocaching. Geocaching is a great summertime activity and one that can keep the kids entertained for hours on end. I’ve talked about geocaching at length in my guide to geocaching post and video so I won’t repeat that all here, but it sure is a heck of a lot of fun and if you haven’t given it a try, I highly recommend it.

I have been writing about geocaching quite a bit the last couple of weeks, plus Gary put together a great beginner video on geocaching while I was gone as well.

My first geocaching excursion was fun, with the exception of the run in I had with a cement wall where the cement wall was the definite winner and my inattention to my surroundings and not noticing a hornets nest a couple feet above my head when our group parked our bicycles resulted in an angry hornet stinging my son on his hand.

I thought my second excursion was going to go a lot smoother especially since we met up with family members who had already found the first two caches we were looking for but wanted to have my husband, who was on his first geocaching experience, and myself find them too. We were with my nieces and nephew who were so excited about showing us how to geocache that I didn’t have the heart to tell them I had already been on my first excursion the week before.

Although the kids were under strict instructions not to tell us exactly where the first cache was they made it pretty obvious by pointedly sitting on a bench and not looking at us. So my husband and I both got down on our hands and knees to look under the bench. He found the cache. I got about an inch from a yellow jacket nest (don’t know if I mentioned that I’m allergic, but I am).

My sister-in-law said “Only you would find the yellow jackets and not the cache” Yeah, I felt special.

So when we were hiking to the second “already found” cache my sister in law whispered that when we got to the area that I should look on the right side. That seemed easy enough. Then we got to the area which was by a bridge so it seemed obvious the cache was on the bridge somewhere.

Since I’m a good listener (some of the time) I immediately started searching on the right side of the bridge and found a nest of bumblebees (yep, I’m allergic to them too). I started to back away but from the obvious body language of my sister-in-law and from my niece pointedly looking over the bridge I knew that cache was close to those bees. So I kept one eye on the bees and the other searched for the cache. I found it but not before a major hint from my sister-in-law who said that the hint given on geocaching.com about the cache being camouflaged meant that it blended in with its surroundings and that it was not the camouflage of greens or tans I was thinking of.

The cache blended in very well. It was painted the same color silver as the bridge. I kind of think whoever painted the bridge did it when the cache was on it and painted right over the top of it because the paint looked pretty fresh.

I didn’t get bit either time because I was careful and because I had a good coating of insect repellent on.

We were just getting going so we biked a couple miles up the road to look for some more caches.

The next one was in the woods and before we got 30 feet in I was getting bit like crazy (so much for the insect repellent being effective - even a second coating of it didn’t help much). We found the cache but I headed back out of the woods while my nieces and nephews went on to find the next one which they got really excited about because it was a fairly big plastic container with a large variety of trinkets inside so they all took one out and put one in from the backpack they carry with a supply of them tucked inside.

While you are reading this I will be at Governor Dodge State Park geocaching. I’m hoping I will be able to report the excursions there as being injury and insect bite free. Cross your fingers for me!