Geocaching...or Trinket Chasing?

Geocaching. Please tell me someone has heard of this. Courtney enlightened me today to an activity that apparently has been around for YEARS. And I literally mean around me - at Walmart, the elementary school, in a creek bed, Home Depot, maybe the gym...

I've never heard of such a thing until Courtney was telling me her and her boyfriend use their spare time to hunt. About an hour's worth of conversation at work today lead me to conclude this is a huge hide and seek Easter egg hunt for crap.

So, if you have never heard of this, where have you been? In a hole with me. There's a website and an app!! Holy moly! As I understand it, people will post longitude and latitude coordinates on a website leading to a location where an inconspicuous package of some sort has been left for capture. It can be anything, mostly something of little value no one wants, but you have to find it to figure that out. Once you find it, you log into the website and acknowledge you were victorious and leave something in return. And this goes on and on and on. Some locations have stayed strong for years.

That's basically the gist of it, but let's talk about the website - geocaching.com. It's pretty intense. In a discussion forum format, users will create a geocache with small hints and as folks find and re-populate the site, they discuss it. Some morons will give away the exact location of the trinket and ruin the fun or give further hints. {The idea is to never get caught while searching for the exact location of the item.} So, the website will tell you the approximate size of what you are looking for, if it's safe to go at night, if it's kid friendly, is parking close by...etc. Really?!

Then there's another catch - there may be nothing in the wrapping but a passcode or card. If there's a passcode, you simply log into the website and announce you found the geocache and move one. All that searching and there may be nothing? Or there may be a card wishing to "travel" to certain locations. For example, when I go on vacation to New York I can geocache. {because I would have nothing else to do in the wondrous city of New York? Right.} I can log the history of where the card has travelled across the country.

I could go on and on about this because it is just so bizarre to me. I think it has to beg the question, what if someone uses it in a malicious way? To lure a certain type of person to a remote location? Plants a bomb in a box? Leaves a sawed off finger? Scary Mary.

I was explaining the concept to Bo over dinner and he was as interested to hear about it as I was to explain it. I told him...there's a large decorative waterfall/fountain/pond-ish entrance to our subdivision made mostly of rocks piled together. I'm going to go buy a fake rock and put some Happy Meal toy in and post it. It would make my day to drive home and see someone trying to secretively turn over EVERY rock looking for what will inevitably be a let down. Bahahaha!

Someone please comment on this post and tell me if you have heard of this? I'm baffled and even more confused that it has survived over so many years.