Years ago, I read a blog article about somebody's experiences with geocaching. I had never heard of a geocache. The article explained that they are modern day treasure hunts, whereby somebody hid a box of goodies somewhere, along with a log book, and posted the coordinates (as obtained by a GPS) on the web. Other people would then hunt the cache down, take one of the goodies and replace it with something else, and sign the log book. The chap writing the article in question had got some paperback novel as a result of his geocache, and the whole idea sounded fun.

So I got a GPS, and set up an account on http://www.geocaching.com, and started doing geocaches. There are two main types of cache. Single and multipart. Multipart ones were the most fun, as the final cache location would be determined by things you discovered on the way. It was a great way of keeping children entertained on walks too.

As well as the usual goodies, you might also stumble across a travel bug in a cache. Travel bugs are small items, each individually numbered, which travel from cache to cache. If you find one in a cache, you log it online. Once logged, you find out who owns the travel bug, where it has gone so far, and what its goal is. For instance, I found one travel bug that wanted to visit Australia. I found others that just had a purpose of roaming different countries. It was fascinating seeing where they had already visited.

So why am I having a rant about geocaches? Well, for two reasons. Firstly, the quality of the goodies has gone totally downhill. Where once you would be swapping CDs for books, now everybody seems content to trade freebie gifts from happy meals and the like. Secondly, there are just too many caches! Its ridiculous. Where once you would get a multipart cache with clues at various locations, now you get a cache at each location. So a five mile circle might have 20 caches on it. I even saw a 38 mile circle with over 100 caches! Its just ridiculous. No wonder all the goodies are so shit. You can't put 20 decent items in 20 separate caches right next to each other. So why not combine them all into one multipart cache, and have decent booty?

Don't get me wrong, Geocaching is still fun. But at the moment there seems to be too much quantity and not enough quality.

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