Ramanan's Musings

February 2, 2012 was when I officially joined the geocaching bandwagon and registered a user name at the geocaching website. The first family hike for geocaching was at the local Vasona park and while the record suggests that this was our first cache, I think we only found this one on our second attempt. At this point, you are probably wondering what a geocache is? A geocache is usually a container of some sort containing at least a piece of paper that we call a log. Object of the exercise is to find this container which is usually hidden in plain sight and sign the log to get credit for the find. Of course, containers come in all shapes and sizes and some are really devious. The cache owner posts the GPS location of the hide on the geocaching website and folks can download these coordinates onto their smart phones or GPS devices.  The really hard to find containers are the little itty bitty ones called nanos . These are very small and really blend in with the surroundin...

I feel almost guilty that I haven't written anything in such a long time.Writing is a passion of mine but I hardly make any time for it. I blame the people in my life - they want me to do my share of the chores!!. Anyways, rants aside, my goal this year is to fully document the new shared family passion - geocaching . The 4 (soon to be 5) year old and I have been hiking the hills of Almaden this past year and we have been raking in the geocaches. The little one is quite the hiker and I am a better man for it - okay well, maybe that is the nice way of saying "I lost a few pounds walking all them hills". I hate to call it a sport because that brings in all the competitive connotations but it is a great family activity that everyone should look into. Some of us eager ones are so hooked that we challenge ourselves by trying to achieve crazy goals such as one cache per day for at least a year!! Yes, that's right - my goal is to reach 365 days of continuous caching wit...