Citizen Wausau

Wandering By Waypoints

by Grinning Soul on September 21st, 2008

For my birthday last March, I was generously gifted a GPS navigational device. This was a most thoughtful gift because I have always suffered from ‘lost’ anxiety. I am absolutely fascinated with maps and can analyze a road atlas or map for hours on end, but this secret obsession does not come with an innate sense of direction or patience when it comes to wrong turns on the open road. With this arrives the fear of the bob and weave of large city traffic where quick decisions and prior knowledge are critical. (I had no idea that exit would be on the left!) I love driving through the city, when I know how to get to my destination.

Someday I will graduate to downtown Chicago. Remember that tear-jerker commercial that was broadcast during the Olympics of the runner who finished the race, dead last limping, with the help of his dad? That will be me, rush hour traffic, downtown Chicago, me and my Garmin. It might just be legendary.

Another reason had my thoughts set on a GPS was the exciting world of Geocaching. I had heard about it on TV years back but didn’t quite understand the concept. Soon GPSr’s became more common place and it made sense. Geocaching is basically a game or hobby where people hide containers in public places and post the latitude and longitudinal coordinates on the website www.geocaching.com. Containers range from micros, not much larger than a capsule, to 5+ gallon pails. All containers usually have a log book, and depending on the size, various trinkets of little value to be traded. The basic rule is that if you take something, you leave something. Caches are placed and maintained by fellow cachers. Occasionally geocachers arrange meet and greets in town, the location is of course, posted in coordinates! If you want to know more about the game, please go to the geocaching.com website. It is very informative and make it easy to understand.

The best part of my first summer of geocaching was discovering all the great parks Wausau, Schofield, Rothschild, Mosinee, and Merrill have to offer. I have lived here nearly my entire life and I was clueless to many of parks, walking trails, fishing holes and nature reserves that are accessible to the public. I found my first geocache is Gaska park which is located in the Weston area, a park I had never heard of. Gaska park has a great some great walking/biking paths and is a peaceful escape.

My favorite quote of the summer would have to be one I saw on a ‘calling card’ in a local cache, “I use an 80 billion dollar satellite system to find tupperware in the woods.”