4 Geocaching Before you read In pairs, discuss which things you do in your spare time. Use the following questions as a guideline: • What are the spare time activities you like the most? • Why did you take them up? • What is the effect of your spare time activities? Reading: Go geocaching a) Read through the text and make a list of the words you don’t know. b) Look up the words online or offline and add the definition to your list. Geocaching is an entertaining, adventurous game that involves hunting for a hidden “treasure” using a hand-held satellite navigation device or GPS (we bought our basic model for £84 online). The idea of the game is that someone hides the treasure – inexpensive toys, trinkets, key rings, special pencils, etc. placed in something like a small plastic lunchbox – out in the countryside, in a park, up a hill, along a riverwalk or even in city centres. They then share its location on the official geocaching website – geocaching.com – and other geocachers use the location data to go out and hunt for it. Once you find the secret cache, you sign the logbook that’s in the box using your geocaching username, swap something inside for an item of your own, hide the box where you found it, then enjoy the rest of your walk and go home to log your find on the website. It counts the number of caches you have found and keeps a record for you of where you’ve been. We set up our first cache with the friend who had introduced us to geocaching. We chose a walk along the towpath of the Forth and Clyde canal, which runs from Glasgow to Falkirk and is very popular with families, dog walkers and cyclists. We filled a box with some goodies – pencils, novelty rubbers, key rings, batteries (you need AA batteries to power your GPS) and spent a couple of days wandering along the canal to find a good hiding place before registering it on the site. We had our first visitors the very next day. The website is full of great tips about getting started, but essentially to get going you’ll need to create a free account with a username and put your postcode into the search facility, which then generates pages of caches for you to browse through, starting with those closest to your home. You pick one that you like the look of and note the location and any extra information about where you are going, plus a few extra clues, such as “under a pile of logs” or “in a hollow tree stump”. The site also tells you about the terrain involved, whether it’s flat and buggy or wheelchair accessible, so you can pick something that suits everyone in your search party. It’s a good idea to take a good map of the area as well. The GPS only tells you the shortest possible way; it can’t tell you if there is a river or a hill in the way, so you sometimes have to be prepared to make a small detour. You’ll also need to take along something small as a “swap” if you want to take anything from the box. The GPS will guide you to within about six metres of the cache. The boxes are never buried, but usually hidden so they’re not obvious to the non-geocaching public, but can be found with a bit of searching, using the clues on the print-out. […] The website is run from the USA, where geocaching began in May 2000, but it covers 2,000,000 caches in 221 countries all over the world. You can search the site for caches by postcode, by country or even by the username of the person who hid them. We have taken our GPS with us when visiting friends and family in other parts of the country and taken them for great walks to places nearby that they never knew existed. (Jane Munro, The Guardian; adapted) 1 2 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 52 Free-time activities Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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