This past weekend at the GeoWoodstock VII event in Bell Buckle, Tenn. (my first-found personal cache, let it be known, an “event cache” the 3.5-inch Teletype WorldNav GPS navigator led me to without flaw), I got to meet one of the biggest trackable “travel bugs” out there. Pictured, it’s the Freightliner driven by Wisconsin-based D.J. Christie and Frank Williams, TwoTruckers on Geocaching.com and GroundSpeak, veteran geocachers. If you’re unfamiliar with the activity, geocaching I’ve heard best described by Arkansas-based FWCC driver Mark Pritchard as a “worldwide easter egg hunt with GPS units.”
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Essentially, folks hide items — ranging from simple boxes containing a log book and pen to more elaborate puzzles and multi-site caches — and record the GPS location data at Geocaching.com and other sites; practitioners then put their soles on the ground in the area around a cache site and, using their GPS units as tools, proceed to follow clues toward finding it. A great family or solo activity, geocaching has been growing in popularity in recent years among haulers looking for ways to occupy their off-time at truckstops — and get a little exercise. Christie and Williams, proprietors of the Geotruckers.com site, have bookmarked upwards of 2,500 cache sites accessible by Class 8 and other large vehicles. Look for them in my GPS feature in the coming June edition of Overdrive. Or search them out via the travel bug code pictured above via the lookup function here. Looks like they were last discovered at, you guessed it, GeoWoodstock VII…
