A small group of future geocachers met today at the Baytown Nature Center, 6213 Bayway Drive for the first class in a monthly education series called the Nurture Nature Series.
The Nurture Nature Series is the first Saturday of each month from 10:00 – 11:00 am. The program is free with the regular admission of $3 (children under 13 are free) to the Nature Center. “Reptiles” will be the next topic in the series on July 2. Interested in participating? Call 281-420-7128 to RSVP and make sure your space is reserved.
Larry Houston was the guest speaker. In geocaching circles, he is known as HoustonControl and is a mover and shaker in the Houston area with over 4400 "finds" and a 110 "hides", some of which are in the Baytown Nature Center proper. Larry has also earned a Platinum Earthcache Master badge, awarded by the GSA (www.earthcache.org) and has geocached in 7 countries around the world. He is Baytown's resident expert geocacher.
After Larry ran through the history of geocaching and the basics, he turned it over to me (geocaching name: BaytownBert) and I talked about what to carry with you when you go out on a geocaching adventure. Everything from bug spray to emergency supplies.
Following up was a cacher from La Porte known as JustDucky2, who explained what "trackable items" were and even sported a tattoo with a trackable serial number. Trackable items are special dog tags or coins with a dedicated set of alpha-numeric characters that travel from geocache to geocache and are recorded on geocaching.com, when found by geocachers.
We then broke off into groups and went and looked for some of HoustonControl's permanent geocaches inside the park and a few he put out just for this workshop - which are not recordable. All and all, we had a great time and everyone attending left with a ready to hide geocache furnished by BaytownBert, with the promise to hide it after they had recorded their first 50 "finds".
No comments:
Post a Comment