We found a geocache!

On our class's field trip on Wednesday, we traveled to the Osaka Gardens in South Chicago. While some people in the class were looking for a mysterious plaque explaining the origins of the garden, a couple of students had a different mission: to find a geocache. For those who don't know, Geocaching is a modern-day treasure hunting game. You go to a website, find coordinates for a geocache, travel to the coordinates, and begin your hunt.

Other than the play, finding that geocache was the highlight of the field trip for me. The best part of geocaching is that it is %100 user generated content. Geocaching merely started as a website. After that, people from all over the world participated in building and finding geocaches. A dad in Kansas could become a Geocache connosseiur. An accountant at a villiage bank in Northern California could make the most devious geocache known to man. I think that geocaching embodies the American spirit of individualism and opportunity. Every time you find a geocache, there's a log inside the cache where you write the date and your name. As long as that geocache exists, your name will be there, signifying that you accomplished the feat of finding the geocache. Creating a geocache is like an artistic statement; you receive no money for it, yet put it out into the world just so others can see it. It is an embodiment of free speech to place geocaches in the wild. There is also a sense of connection in geocaching. You follow the clues of a cryptic poem by a complete stranger, yet when you go to find the cache, you feel a strange sense of connection to the person who put it there. Then you go online and post a review of the cache, seeing others who also found it and feeling like a part of a community. I hope to see geocaching become an american tradition in the coming years, where families organize outings around a geocache on a nature trail. As a final note, here are some creative caches. Can you think of any good spots?