I know, I know, our posts are terribly sporadic, but as usual, life gets busy and blogging becomes secondary to everything else going on, but you definitely need to know about our latest obsession; geocaching.

If you look at the container in Byron’s hands on the right, in the photo below; that is a geocache. It’s like a worldwide outdoor treasure hunt, and it’s a perfect activity for the entire family. We’re now official Geocaching around Australia with Kids 🙂

 family geocaching

It’s something we’d heard about years ago and had always said we “should” give it a go, but we’d never really bothered. Oh, how I wish we’d started earlier because it is absolutely the most fun thing we’ve undertaken as a family.

Because our travels have been a bit halted with the caravan renovation, we really needed something to add a bit of excitement for the kids, and it turns out geocaching is just that bit of fun we needed.

The kids had no idea we were heading out to have a little fun, we told them we were heading to the grocery store and piled them into the car. As we pulled over on the side of the road, with no idea what they were doing, we gave them clues about what they were looking for, and our first ever geocache was in their excited little hands.

The first day we set off to do a few that are close to where we’re staying. We did our first one on the way into town, located another small one in town, which offered a bit of a challenge and had all five of us stumped for a little while, but we had success after about 20 minutes of searching. Then, after a quick stop at the grocery store, we did another one on the way home.

family geocaching australia

It’s added a new dimension to our travels. A few days ago we were on a road trip to visit family, and we sussed out what geocaches would be available on the direct route to where we were going, and planned to do a couple of stops on the way.

The kids now keep a zip-lock bag of little goodies in the car, because there are caches that have the option to swap something out, and they are very enthusiastic about knowing if there’s caches in the direction we’re heading during trips anywhere.

So, if you don’t know what geocaching is, or haven’t given it a go, here’s some details to get you started. It’s really a lot of fun, and we’ll now be geocaching our way around Australia.

What is Geocaching?

Geocaching is like an outdoor treasure hunt, so you can see why it’s perfect for kids and families. Caches are hidden in places all around Australia and the world. Using a handheld GPS or your mobile phone, you use the GPS coordinates to try and track down the cache. They can be a variety of sizes and difficulty levels. Some contain nothing more than a log sheet that you sign to say you’ve been there. Other caches are larger and contain trinkets and goodies left by others, these allow you to swap out something in there and replace it with a trinket of your own for someone else to take later.

Who can Geocache?

There’s a massive worldwide geocaching community. If you love a bit of a challenge, a surprise and getting outdoors in a really fun way, then geocaching could be the activity you’ve been looking for! We think, for families it’s the perfect way to spend time together, face challenges and have a fun result at the end.

How do you get started with Geocaching?

We downloaded the free version of the official geocaching app from the iTunes app store. We found our first few caches using the free version and then updated to the paid version so we could use the extra features such as being able to search for geographical areas we were heading too, not just being limited to where we currently were. We suggest you take a look at the Geocaching 101 area of the offical website, and start from there.

So, please let us know if you’re a geocacher or if you’re planning to start, we’d love to hear your stories, leave us a comment below.