Geo-Inspiration
by David Shaw

Last November, I was flipping through an old copy of "Business Week" in the John at work and read an article it had about Geocaching. I immediately thought of my best friend, Pitufo (his current geocaching username). Since he's been a little kid, Pitufo has been burying Time Capsules at various locations, which he will go and dig up, himself, years later. I asked him what the point was and he replied, "Well Goat6500 (my current geocaching username), everyone wants to find buried treasure. The problem is that most of the cool stuff has already been found. If you want that exhilarating feeling of finding buried loot, you gotta bury it yourself because nobody else is going to do it." Or so he thought.

First, his fiancé and I chipped in and we got him an Etrex for Christmas. In the box, we placed the Etrex and a note with GPS co-ordinates with vague instructions to go there on New Years Day. When he opened his present Christmas morning, he was nonplussed to say the least. He is not a fan of hi-tech gadgets at all and had no idea what he would use a Global Positioning System for other than to follow these instructions.

On Jan 1st at 8 A.M. while I was sleeping off a good New Years celebration, Pitufo was eagerly dragging his half-asleep fiancé and their dog through the woods and over a cliff to my cache. He found his “surprise” after a few minutes of searching and feverishly ripped open the sealed envelope hidden inside a discarded tire. Inside was a laminated photo I took of Pitufo naked when he got drunk and streaked at his dad’s annual 4th of July celebration earlier that year. He absolutely DESPISES the photo(and honestly, it does look pretty bad) and has done everything in his power to obtain this blackmail-able material from me without success, so far. A note was with the photo that read, “Congratulations! You have just been geocaching. For more information, visit http://www.geocaching.com.”

Since this first find, Pitufo has gone nuts about geocaching. In the last six months, Pitufo has found over 50 caches and placed over twenty caches of his own with no sign of slowing down. I have enjoyed geocaching myself but more importantly, I am just glad that I could introduce my friend to something that he enjoys so much.

I am also glad that I have more than one copy of the skinny-dipping photo.