It all started at New Years Eve 2009…when I was looking at the new year about to start and thought “what adventure are we going to have in 2010?” I started to surf the web and found the FIFA website.

This triggered all the things people said about how great Germany was and the atmosphere. I’ve wanted to go to Africa and this seemed like a great way to combine a new place to explore and the World Cup 2010. So I put in my bid for 15 tickets and waited…..

Feb 28th 2010 – An email arrived with “Congratulations you have 7 tickets….and we charged your credit card $3,000″

So the next few months were planning out where to go and what to see.

Of course, I thought “I wonder if there are any geocaches in South Africa?” and not really expecting much….

I ran a few pocket queries and woah, was I surprised….this is just a few miles of Cape Town…

And this picture is a 10 mile radius. Incredible amount of South Africa geocaching!

We ended up with ~50 South Africa geocaches and got one in every city with a football match we attended. Not bad.

To see more about the football, you can see this geocache blog post with a short video on the goals, cities, games, and fun!

You can search an area for geocaches by typing in a zip code or a city or even coordinates and it will show you what geocaches are in the area, what type they are, and whether you have found them or not. When you find a geocache, the symbol will become a smiley face representing the fun you had in finding it.

This series we did in San Diego is an awesome trip on a bike ride (greatness #2).

Series: Power Cache Power Trail

The best thing about the adventure was when we got back and got to see a geocaching map full of smiley faces Yeah!!!

A 5/5/ geocache is one that is Level 5 difficulty and Level 5 terrain. The scale is from 1-5 so it is the hardest one out there. I’m not sure how many exist but in the San Diego area I think you are looking at maybe 10 of these.

The email crew decided to make it a geocache event and hike together to the location. We scheduled it for Jan 2nd to welcome in the new year and to start getting those extra holiday cookies off our bodies.

I’m not sure what I expected, the reviews suggested it was quite a difficult hike, but I’m young and reasonably athletic, so no problem, right?

Well, this ended up as a 9 hour hike in the attempt to get the 5/5 geocache El Capitan GCDAO6

Alas, it was not to be today – but the geocaching crew that went did get loads of caches on the way up – and are determined to go up again in a few weeks.

Happy New Year – this was a great 14 mile hike – great way to start the year!!

el cajon

Map your trip with EveryTrail

The best way for me to get a view of geocaches in an area – and I use this for any trips is to use the Google Maps feature on the Geocaching member site. I type in a location (like a zip code) and …ta-da…the results are available to see.

Details of some of the San Diego Geocaches I’ve found include: a Podcache in Balboa Park and finding all 70+ geocaches on Black Mountain.

First I had to set up my GPS with the caches along the route. You can’t just just load up all the geocaches in each region because you will likely hit up the limit on your geocaching device. I’m using the Garmin Colorado which has a limit of 2,000 geocaches. So instead you need to set up a “route”.

I went to Google Earth and created a route. I saved the file with a .KML extension which is the extension needed to then be imported into the geocaching website.

When the route is uploaded to the Groundspeak geocaching website, you can run a query to show all geocaches along your route based on your needs. I set it up within 0.5 miles to the route so I would not make a big detour – had to get to the new location eventually! And here is the map with the caches on the route.

Ended up only finding 10 caches on this geocache road trip because we drove through the night, and we wanted to get to our final location. But it was still a fun break for a morning to geocache in the middle of nowhere!