Data Hacking

260 Part IV — Playtime
One variation is the use of travel bugs. These are trinkets that move (with the help of other geocachers,
of course) from geocache to geocache. Their movements are logged online and their
progress monitored.
Just think about it for a moment and I think you will be impressed. I can take an average lunchbox
and place it anywhere on the Earth (with a view of the sky) and give you those coordinates,
and you will be able to navigate to it to within a few yards thanks to a handheld receiver, access
to a constellation of satellites orbiting the Earth, and billions of dollars of hardware.
Once the GPS has taken you to within a few yards of the cache, the rest is up to you. You
might need to have a good scrabble around the place before you find it. However, at least you
are now looking at scouring an area a few tens of square yards (see Figure 11-3) . . .
FIGURE 11-3: A smaller area to search in
...rather than hundreds of square yards (see Figure 11-4)!
So how do you find the cache in the last 20 yards? Many cache listings, but not all, will provide
clues as to where the cache is hidden, such as “in the roots of the rotten tree.” Of course, you
will often find that there are many such rotting trees in the search area. This is where your
GPS skills really come into play!