For the first time in a long time I tried geocaching again yesterday. Things have changed a lot since I first started ten years ago. Before I would use a Garmin handheld GPS, which took 10 minutes to boot up, 30 minutes to enter a GPS coordinate (because there was no keypad), and was big and bulky to lug around. Now I can download an app for my iphone and use the built-in GPS to automatically load up the nearest caches to find.
Yesterday on my lunch break I sat in my office and checked for the nearest geocache, and was surprised to find that it was just 100 feet away. Turns out that someone had hidden one right in front of my office. In front the the office there are two historic train locomotives – one of them is the first bullet train in Japan. They get a lot of foot traffic, and so I can see the attraction of hiding a cache there.
So I walked outside to try and find it. Since I was so close I thought it would be easy, but I couldn’t get it. For one, I’m very familiar to all the security guards, so they were smiling and watching me walk around. If I did find the cache, so would they, and I’m sure they wouldn’t understand. Also, looking around for something hidden is a pretty suspicious activity, and as a foreigner I stick out pretty well. So I gave up the search, and went back inside.
But I’m not giving up – every day I walk by the spot, so I’ll keep my eyes open and try to grab it later. Something else fun to do on my commute in to work.
Today Kuniko leaves for her study camp, and she won’t be back until Saturday night. I’m on my own for a couple of days, so we’ll see what trouble I can get into.
