Having fun in nature with a GPS receiver

A few years ago Lucy and I bought a Garmin GPS receiver. It's certainly not a fancy one, but it's definitely taken us places that we may not have been and allows us to relive the journey afterwards!

It takes us places we may not have been through the fun of Geocaching:http://www.geocaching.com/. Where you hunt, via GPS coordinates, for hidden containers (geocaches). They can be of any size and can contain pretty much anything. The best things to find are travel bugs, which have unique IDs and can be tracked on the Geocaching website - most have a mission, for example to keep travelling south, or to travel to the sea! There can be riddles, questions, and codes to decipher - a Geocache can be anywhere!

The way a GPS receiver allows us to relive the journey, whether it's a walk or a camping trip, is that you can upload the journey data to the Garmin website:http://connect.garmin.com. This allows you to see where you've been on a map, how fast you traveled, the elevation, and there's even a play button which replays the journey at a comparative speed - stopping where you stop and speeding up where you speed up. Here's an example, taken from the walk we did around Cheddar Gorge recently:http://connect.garmin.com/activity/103137152. In this way we know very closely where we've been, which is definitely helpful when wild camping!