Many of you are probably familiar with the sport/hobby of Geocaching, using multimillion dollar satellites and a GPS to locate plastic containers all over the world. For those that do not know about Geocaching check out Geocaching.com for more details.

My family and I, accidentally, got started with geocaching back in 2008 while planning a trip to Prince Edward Island. I was researching information on the province like campgrounds and scenic locations for the trip when I came across “I’m a Little Teapot” GC8A2C with geocaching,com in the description. We had no idea what it was at the time and curiosity got the best of us. It was a place that wasn’t mentioned in any of the travel information we had looked at but after viewing images taken by geocachers we knew it was a place we just had to visit while on the island. We were not disappointed! This was a beautiful location where most tourists would probably never venture to. From there we also discovered Thunder Cove. With the sound of the water crashing the beach, we knew how it earned its name. Back then all we had was a gps mounted in the vehicle for our travels. It wasn’t meant for geocaching at all but we didn’t care about finding a cache, only a scenic location.

Basically the same scenario played out in 2009 for our trip to Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy. Still no gps worthy of geocaching but I had at least created an account on geocaching.com. We chose a few places on the island that sounded like what we were looking for and printed out all the info from the site. For anyone who has never been to the island you soon realize that you do not need the help of geocaching to find scenic views, the island has vistas around every corner! Anyways, even with our crappy gps we did find four actual caches.

We didn’t buy a good gps until 2013, when we planned on returning to Grand Manan. Not only did we find out-of-the-way locations but actually logged a few finds and thus began our journey into geocaching. I am not the kind of cacher who runs out for a FTF (first to find) or one who wants to rack up the numbers. As of this posting we have only logged 75 finds. We do enjoy getting out locally for the “hunt” and plan on doing it more as time permits. It is great exercise and fun for the entire family.
If you enjoy the adventure of exploring new areas that you may have otherwise overlooked or if you are a photographer looking for something out of the ordinary, you should consider geocaching. Take what you want from it and I guarantee you will enjoy it.

For those interested, we started a group on facebook for local cachers to connect. Ottawa and Outaouais Geocachers

I will post some images taken from some of the locations we have discovered over the next few days. Here is one taken near GC7C60 Southwest Head, Grand Manan NB.