Five Seven things I don't like about geocaching

I started geocaching out of a spirit of perversity. Nothing new there.

As I am not prone to rewriting stuff - you can read my first adventures here (1) and here (2).

1 The first post highlights what has always been one of my gripes about geocaching - the need to buy a consumerist technological gadget.

And as my first post also says, I totally failed to find a local cache without a GPS. I probably wouldn't have found it with one either but that's another matter. The truth is, it's pretty difficult to go geocaching without a GPS, although ironically the last two we found in Spain (here) could probably have been found without one. So - cost of a GPS is a disincentive, and they can be expensive. They certainly are in Gib.

2 The international geocaching site is free to join. Great. But - and there is always a but. There is an elite group of members known as premium members. If people want to pay extra for bells and whistles that's fine, but when they make their own caches only visible to other premium members, that smacks of discrimination and elitism.

3 There are people who cheerfully raid the tat pots of treasure for all the nice goodies and don't put anything of equivalent value in the cache.

4 There are people who claim to have found a cache when it has been archived or is not temporarily unavailable! How can you do this? Talk about being obsessed with numbers. I know people do this because when one of our caches had been totally destroyed - someone subsequently 'found' it. I mean really, that is just farcical. There was no cache there to find, so quite simply my dears, you did NOT find it. As in all walks of life, bluntly speaking - there are cheats. (Rather polite for me, I could have been a little stronger there).

5 As mentioned above - there are people who trash caches. I doubt they are geocachers, although in a way they obviously are as they manage to find them to destroy them. But why spoil someone's harmless fun?

6 Caches in boring places, pointless places, with no purpose to them, no outstanding walks or views, and no decent buildings or history. Link here for an example of a pointless cache.

7 Not finding a cache. The truth is, if you are going to find one, you invariably find it in the first few minutes. The longer you spend hunting around, the more frustrating the whole exercise becomes. Maybe if you have found thousands of caches the odd DNF (did not find) is statistically insignificant. I guess it's just as annoying though - not that I am ever likely to be in that amazing position having not even approached 100 caches yet :D