I went to San Diego in January for a mathematics conference, and I was eager to do some caching there, especially since pfalstad and FSU*Noles have several puzzle caches that are duplicated in San Diego and the Twin Cities.
The chairman of my department was also at this conference, and I mentioned to him that I was planning to take an afternoon to rent a car and hike around the hills up by Escondido. It turns out that he grew up in that very area, and he told me that he was interested in coming along for the hike and that he'd be willing to drive.
Now, I don't have a problem advertising my obsession with geocaching. I wouldn't have a blog otherwise, I suppose. But it was with a fair amount of hesitation that I came clean and told him that I was planning to go geocaching. Not always a good idea to reveal an all-encompassing hobby to your boss. Anyway, he said that he was (still) interested in coming along, and it turns out that we had a very nice time. The culmination of our caching route was his finding a plastic lizard with a micro-cache shoved inside, wedged between two boulders, at the top of a significant hike up a rocky hill in the Mission Trails regional park. Good stuff.
Since then, he tells me that he mentions geocaching to lots of people, with a variety of responses. "Oh, I've heard of that." "Why would you want to do that?" In fact, his family puts together a monthly family newsletter, and his geocaching expedition got coverage this month. I know, it's not the Star Tribune, which had an article (discussed in the MnGCA forums) on page one last Sunday about GPSrs and geocaching, but I'll do my small part to spread the good word.
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