Nerd Alert

The other day while running I visited the Great Pyramid of Giza AND the Colossus of Rhodes. Sounds like I ran a long ways huh and maybe back in time? Thousands of miles in fact, possibly across the ocean. Yeah, no, I'm impressive but not THAT impressive. My travels were all thanks to a little thing called geocaching.

For those of you who aren't hip to the lingo these days, geocaching is where you use GPS to find containers or "caches" that other people have hid. Basically its like urban treasure hunting. Urban dictionary, like always, probably does a better job of defining it....

Geocaching is a sport that is perfect for nerds. The participants can use their computers and high-tech Global Positioning System devices to hunt down and dig up objects that have little or no intrinsic value. Think if it as an Easter egg hunt for adults who have not yet grown up. Peter Pan prancer-types, mostly.  
OR

A sport in which the participants
1) Loiter suspiciously in public places that lack adequate security
2) Hide an unknown package in a high-traffic area
3) Brag about it at www.geocaching.com
4) Dare others to go find and open the package.

"Sorry I missed the wedding, but I did rack up 10 more geocaching finds!"

So basically, geocaching has proudly brought nerds and hiking together for 13 years now.  While i really don't count myself as a nerd, I will admit I did download a geocaching app on my phone awhile back that my brother had told me about. It shows you all the caches within like a 10 mile radius of you, which is pretty cool because there are way more around you than you think and a lot of them are pretty easy to access. I remembered that I had it on my phone the other day when I was trying to decide which direction to go running and was intrigued to see how many were nearby where I live and found a bunch. This one guy had made a bunch of caches named after the 7 wonders of the ancient world and hid them all within a mile or two of each other and challenged people to try to visit them all and if you did you collected clues at each of them to a secret message which once you solve it leads you to one final cache which is suppose to be like the grand-daddy of all the caches. So I've been hitting them up on my runs.  2 down 5 to go until I'm in on the secret guys. And no I'm not going to share my loot with you.