For example – you don’t really need a GPSR to find a traditional cache. As long as you have access to a computer you can easily make use of online tools like Google Maps, with satellite view and street view to locate a GZ (Ground Zero). In fact, Adventures in Geocaching recently wrote an article called Geocaching Without a GPS on this very issue.

But technology is just the start of caching – there’s the containers, the tradeables items, the trinkets and stuff – the general rule when trading is to always leave something of equal or greater value.

Thankfully – again, with some imagination – this can be a cheap (or even free) exercise. Caches themselves do not have to be special containers. You don’t need to buy an “official” cache box to be a player. We’ve seen caches made from used containers that would otherwise be discarded as rubbish – so yes, a lot of the everyday stuff in your life that you throw out can be useful in the world of caching.

And what about the trinkets – try unused or unwanted kids toys and stuff. Or cheap stuff that you can pick up at markets – but again, you shouldn’t need to spend too much money.

We’ve made a decision to stick to a budget with our new hobby – yes we can buy a few bits and pieces, but lets be sensible, and we found the best place to buy supplies is from a discount shop (known colloquially in Australia as a $2 shop). Thankfully there’s three of these in town for us to choose from.

Here we found some super-cheap goodies – including small notepads which will fit nicely into our caches as logbooks, a pack of 4 cheap pencils that we’ll cut up to make 12 short pencils from, and a few cache containers. The shop also had an array of interesting little trinkets we can use as trades – such as little coloured stars, ornamental stones, and the like.

All up we spent $20 on quite a lot of stuff to set up a few caches and keep us going for about 6 months, so hopefully as soon as next weekend we’ll have our first caches out there waiting to be found!