In November of 2002, I was picked to be one member of a four member training team for our new Garmin GPS backpack units. I had worked with the Trimble survey grade unites since January of 1997 but had not keep up with the civil technology very much. Other then buying my husband a Magellen 315 for hunting.
In January of 2003, I was sent to Fort Worth for a 5 day intense train the trainer course. The instructor briefly touched on the fact that a "new" sport had been started since the military had stopped spuffin the signal and I believe he even told us of the website.
We finished training but had to wait until the 77 units we were to do train on were delivered. They didn't arrive in the state until the first of Novemeber 2003. Our state engineer does a training for all state engineers every December and ask me and one of the other trainers to do a presentation on the new units. I wanted to make it fun, not just a boring training session so, remembering the fact about the "new" sport of treasure hunting I got the idea to do just that. The training was in Atkins, Arkansas
at one of our construction sites that we were going to tour. Using the construction headquarters a the epicenter, I went out 2 miles in all directions and hid a note and a candy cane for each player on a two man team at 10 different spots. At 1 mile out I hid a note for each team and one candy bar and a coke for each player of the first team to reach one of 5 locations. Two team were given the coorindates of one of the 5 locations place and they had to race to that point. When a team reach that location they would get the coordinates to the last location. The first team to the last location (the epicenter where they started) received a gift certificate to dinner at Applebee's. The second place team got dinner at McDonald's and the third place team received two dollars a piece to buy a coke and candy bar of their choice. We had 10 teams of two and it was so funny watching these guys.
I love treasure hunts!!
After that I became a member of Geocaching.com. I was hooked. However, the new units had just came in and training had to be provided to 77 people, plus my husband changed jobs and is now working every other weekend.
That took until April. My best friend and her family moved in May to Alaska, so now we have the time. Every other weekend we are camping and caching, but on the weekends that he works we try and find ones around Little Rock.
Hopefully we can get up to Searcy soon. I think Woodwalker9 has some very interesting sounding ones that I'm really interested in finding.
Our biggest problem is the girls. Do not finds are not very enjoyable to them and Cinderella_00 really doesn't like the tall grass.
We are working on that. The more we find the better we will get on figuring out hiding techniques and Cinderella_00 is now required to wear jeans, no matter what.
But our numbers are still low.
It may take us a while to reach a 100 and more but don't rule us out. We'll get there, just not as fast as everyone else.
Call us the tortoise family.