Cache Machine

Archive for the ‘Geocaching in the news’ Category

Geocaching is a sport / hobby which relies on players exercising real stealth and blending into their surroundings - but every so often it happens that a member of the public gives you a quizzacle look, or - more liwhen hunting for an elusive urban micro, you unwittingly end up in an unsuspecting tourists holiday snap!

For one geocacher in Copenhagen though, the "snap" they ended up in wasn't taken by a camera-wielding tourist, by by multi-national super-company Google - who were taking pictures for their fantastic Streetview product. Check out the full picture at Google Maps.

Streetview allows any internet user to zoom in to incredible detail on a map of the world by sending cars to tour the streets of town and cities, mounted with a number of cameras taking photographs of what's happening at that moment.

It looks like from time-to-time they snap someone in the middle of something... I might have a search and see what else they caught people getting up to!

Thanks to Art Barker of SolCal4x4geocachers for finding and sharing this one!

An example geocache container

The Midland Reporter Telegram website (www.mywesttexas.com) have reported how a geocache container sparked a serious security scare after being placed in a shopping centre in Northwest Midland, Texas, USA on 13th December 2009.

The unintentional hair-raising geocacher had chosen to place a cache in a busy shopping centre, to challenge other cachers wanting to add to their cache count in an area busy with muggles (members of the public who don't know about geocaching).

Doing all the right things to ensure no-one would unearth his cache within minutes of placing it, the cacher was careful to look around and wait for a suitable time to place the cache inside one of of car park's lighting poles. Despite the care and attention paid, he inadvertantly drew attention to himself, with a member of staff at the Academy Sports and Outdoors store reporting his "suspicious" behaviour to local police.

Upon arrival at the scene, police, fire, EMS, FBI and ICE officials sealed off the area and ordered customers to remain inside the store while they used robots to inspect the unidentified object - reported to be a small plastic tube wrapped in traditional camouflage.

Following the high-drama incident, a police representative explained that this had not been the first time they had dealt with a reported suspicious package only to find out it was one of over 969,000 caches to have been placed across the world.

While geocaching across the world relies on players hiding new geocaches for other players to find, this story emphasises the need to exercise a bit of common-sense when planning to put a new cache down!