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Geocaching with Kids

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Don’t worry, this one is simple and awesome.

So the treasure always changes.  Some show you great destinations.  Some are puzzles and riddles, or they may even have multi-caches that lead you from one cache to the next using clue after clue. Geocaching even have travel bugs that have unique ID numbers that are able to be tracked at geocaching.com and you can see where the travel bug has been, with some traveling the world.

Geocaching is great for long road trips with kids because it gives you an excuse to stop along the way and go find some “treasure”.  The kids get a mini adventure along the way, release some energy, have a fun and are ready to head off again.  You can either plan ahead and look up geocaches online before your trip or if you have a smartphone can look them up and even use the GPS feature to get close and have the kids do the rest.

To simplify the process even further, especially for kids, what if their GPS was already pre-loaded with hundreds of thousands of Geocaches?  That’s what the new Geomate Jr from Brand 44 co is. Not only is it a kid friendly GPS, but it is one of the least expensive ways to get into Geocaching, costing roughly $70, which you’re unlikely to find even a base model GPS on the market for under $100.

The Geomate Jr. is designed with kids in mind.  It is basic with only two buttons to navigate through the different screens and select options.  It basically has an arrow that points the direction and a number telling them how far it is to get to the cache. It is very simple for kids to use.  But the simplicity is also a limitation in that the Geomate Jr. isn’t going to give you any more than an arrow for directions, i.e. no roads, topography, etc. to help you get close to the next geocache if you happen to be miles away.   That limitation can be overcome with planning ahead and looking up directions at geocaching.com or by plugging the coordinates into your smartphone. Then when you are close enough, the kids run the show.

Geocaches often will take you to areas that are off the beaten path.  I recommend looking up caches in advance so you’ll know if you need to plan to bring any extras like hiking shoes or hydration packs to access longer caches.

One lucky reader is going to get a free Geomate Jr. from our friends at Brand 44 Co.  To enter, leave a comment telling us about your favorite outdoor adventure you’ve taken with your family (yes, it must be an OUTDOOR ADVENTURE). 

For additional entries:

1.  Subscribe to our email feeds (upper right side) and leave a comment that you did.

2.  “Like” Geomate Jr. on facebook and come back and leave a comment that you did. 

So if you are looking for a simple, fun everyday adventure that you can have with your kids, try geocaching!

We would like to thank Brand 44 for supplying the Geomate Jr for this review.  As always, these opinions are totally our own and are not influenced by anyone else. 

About Jessica Averett

Hi, I’m Jessica, a mom of 5 kids and married to my favorite adventure partner. I love to bike, ski, camp and hike. We've visited over 40 countries with our kids, but are equally happy on the road as we are exploring our home state of Utah.

262 thoughts on “Geocaching with Kids”

  1. My favorite outdoor adventure was a multiple day raft trip on the Dolores River. Two awesome grandkids in the raft, made even the quiet rapids exciting every time.

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  2. Our big adventure was camping at the Grand Canyon with two little kids. The baby had a gastro bug that made my husband and baby have to get new clothes at the gift shop 🙂

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  3. I love your blog and posts! I’ve subscribed to emails. One of our favorite family getaways with lots of young kids is to Little Wild Horse Canyon with a side trip to Goblin Valley. This last fall trip, I tried to use my husband’s Garmin to do some geocaching down there, but I really couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t know about these kid friendly Gps’. My son would LOVE it!

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  4. Oh so many. Cycling from Amsterdam to Venice was a lot of fun. Especially the Alps (well going down anyway). Nice post. Love geocaching. Such a simple fun hi tech lo tech do anywhere activity.

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  5. Subscribed and liked.
    Our favorite family adventures had to have taken place in Mammoth Lakes California, maybe hiking to Devils Post-pile or biking down the mountains from the lakes at the top. Such a beautiful town.

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  6. My favorite outdoor adventure with my family was kayaking by myself while my mom, older sister and little brother followed along in a canoe. I also love going for hikes in the summer (and winter!) with my family and our dogs when I’m home from school on break.

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  7. One of our recent favorites was spending the day sledding at White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. It was a cloudy day-perfect temperature, and the clouds helped the landscape to change constantly. Beautiful and we didn’t hear one complaint from our little ones all day!

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  8. Our favorite putting is the most current, because they always seem to get better. Yesterday our family did not subscribe to the Black Friday madness and spent our day rock climbing. Mom,dad, and three boys (7,4,4 years old).

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  9. playing in the yard counts right?? there are other adventures that we have enjoyed more but i still think its great to get out and play when we can while still being close enough to a bathroom and not having to pack our meals.

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  10. Camping and exploring different waterways for our canoeing adventures. Canoeing a new river or lake always seems like an adventure because we find such different things than you can see from the shore, and we never know what we’ll find.

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  11. My Dad has alot of woods behind his house so we always go looking for whatever is interesting and check out the ponds with fish in them. We even try to make fossils for them to see when I am dead and gone. Good time good times.

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  12. One day I took the 11year old scouts geocaching and they loved it so later when I had some time I took my two boys to the same places and they fell in love. Now we can’t pass those locations without them running over to check and see the new items. My older boy keeps telling me to find new places to look.

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  13. We do nature hikes. We strap on the boots and blunder through the tide pools, we hike along the lagoon and the wetland. We catch and release snakes so that the kids can see them up close. We love the outdoors.

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  14. Our favorite outdoor adventure is going to the lake,mountains and exploring so the boys can see new things. Thanks for the giveaway!

    aemgeg4 (@) yahoo (dot) com

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  15. A favorite outdoor adventure occurred this summer. While camping in the area, my family decided to check out Devil’s Postpile National Monument. We did not know that we were in for an all-day adventure. With no real agenda, we had a blast exploring local trails and playing at a bubbling stream.

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  16. We love taking the kids on hikes not too far away. Our recent favorite was Elephant Rocks in MO – the kids loved climbing on the rocks.

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  17. we have taken several favorite outdoor adventures with our kids. Our kids love to go hiking, kayaking, skiing, fishing, hunting. We go on horse trail rides and that is a lot of fun as well. We live outdoors. Camping is probably one of our favorite. One of our favorite is probably camping in Tennessee with no electric/water or anything. We had a wonderful family time, lots of wildlife came to visit and it was great!

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  18. Camping and hiking with the kiddos has been my favorite family adventure. I also have a blast canoeing!

    Geocaching is actually really fun! Ironically I haven’t done it yet with kids, which will be even more fun!!! Thanks for the reminder!

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  19. A favorite outdoor adventure that I have taken with my family was near Eureka, CO. We hiked up a stream bed toward a waterfall. At each turn of the stream my husband told the kids to wait so he could go ahead and see if there was path they could pass on. Needless to say the kids couldn’t wait and trailed him to the top. It was a lot of fun exploring together and seeing the wonders of nature.

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  20. We went on a hot air balloon ride over Napa Valley with my 2 teenage sons, my husband, my 89yr old Mom and my brother and his family, all in one basket. It was FANTASTIC.

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  21. My favorite outdoor adventure was camping with our 4 kids this past summer…for 5 days! It was long, but it sure was fun! And the kids had a blast!!!

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  22. So far my favorite is exploring the redwood trees in the rain in Klamath, CA back in June! It was awesome.

    thanks for the chance to win.

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  23. My favorite thing is camping we go out in the middle of no where with no cell phone signal and almost no radio stations even, and we just enjoy nature

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  24. we love “treasure hunting” (geocaching) with our kids, we make a habit of doing it while on vacation and have found some really cool out of the way spots 🙂

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  25. The closest thing we’ve come to “outdoor family adventure” since having four children was driving around the White Mountains of NH and stopping here and there to see the view or throw rocks in a river. That’s because our littlest was a teeny baby. We’re really looking forward to the time when we can get into hiking, boating, and the like with them. I’m fascinated by the idea of geocaching and I bet my kids would LOVE it!

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  26. We love to go hiking on one mountain in particular about an hour away that’s fun and challenging for the younger ones but still fun for the grown ups.

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  27. My favorite outdoor adventure was our most recent camping trip with our kids. We went on a few hikes and our kids were finally old enough to keep up for the whole hike! They would love geocaching! We tried it once around a state park, but the caches weren’t kept up and were disappointing.

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  28. An in-law owns a beach house so it’s an easy vacation that’s not too far away that we can take advantage of once in awhile. there’s a nice stretch of private beach to enjoy, and a campfire spot we make use of as well.

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  29. i also liked Geomate Jr. on fb. i commented on a different giveaway not realizing you had an article about geocaching already, whoops! but wow it sounds even more fun!

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  30. we love to go camping. We live in the mountains so we rough it, the only way we know how. in a tent with no water or toilets. We shower from water in a solar bag. Our youngest was only 3 months old when we went camping this summer.

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  31. My favorite outdoor activity is kayaking with my family, racing across the lake is such a rush

    Littlemamameow at gmail dot com

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  32. Our favorite outdoor family adventure was hiking up a bluff not to far from our house. It turned out to be more challenging than we had originally thought (no real path), but the views were amazing and it’s something we’ll always remember.

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  33. We live up in the woods in Pinetop, AZ… we do a lot of hiking around here. I love taking my kids for hikes up in the tall pines and enjoying nature and the fresh air!

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  34. Our favorite outdoor adventure with the kids is Geo Caching!! We started it a couple years ago and have went in lots of different states.. our home state of Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and Arkansas! The kids love it and so do we:) We also took our son white water rafting.. our daughter was to young to go at the time, but once she is old enough, we will take her too!

    [email protected]

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  35. Our latest outdoor adventure was in Bryson City, NC! We hiked with our boys and made targets into a hill for BB Gun practice. Fun Thanksgiving memories <3

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  36. We are all rock hounds so we love to go rock hunting. We have found some awesome rocks and other treasures on our adventures.

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  37. we have gone on some geocaching hike we have only found about half because I am not good at reading the complicated gps I bought. I am getting a little better.

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  38. My favorite outdoor adventure we took with our kids was a trip to the Smoky Mountains in TN. We live in AR and never see much snow, but my 2 and 3 year old boys were beyond excited to go on a hiking trip through the snow.

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  39. My favorite outdoor adventure was when we went hiking in the mountains. We accidentally took the wrong, longer trail – but saw a beautiful waterfall that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. And met another set of hikers with a cute puppy named Porkchop.

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  40. During the spring and Summer we like to take our kids to Mt. Spokane for hiking along the trails and creeks. They love looking for new bugs and learning about the area around them.

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  41. It has been a while but I had a great adventure with my son (who is disabled-Down Syndrome) and my mom. He wanted to take a walk through the woods which I have been in years ago but not for a while so we followed him and boy did we get a work out climbing under tree branches and over,etc. the whole time I was hoping I would be able to remember how to get back out (there’s no way he would be able to do that). We did but it was a lot of fun and I will always remember that day (it was so out of character for all 3 of us).

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  42. last year we went camping and digging for herkimer diamonds in herkimer, ny. that was a great outdoor adventure that yielded plenty of awesome gems!

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  43. We took our 2 year old son to the creek to explore. He got soooo excited when we found a crawl fish. The look in his eyes as we examined everything is a look I won’t forget

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  44. We have a tiny park in our neighborhood and there is a back way to get there. My kids call it “going on a bear hunt” because it goes through a wooded area. So much fun! momlovesdeals at gmail dot com

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  45. We are all about family and outdoors. We walk, bike, hike, boat, swim and sled together and more. We had a really great canoeing adventure when one canoe flipped one dog swam to one shore the other dog went to the other shore and one child and I were pinned against a tree in the rushing water for a short period of time as the cooler opened and our ziplock baggie with our keys went floating off (which we thankfully recovered) lol. We love spending time together outdoors but enjoy a nice restful time as well.

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  46. My favorite outdoor adventure was hiking in the Rocky Mountain National Park. We then drove to the pinnacle and had a snowball fight with the kids in mid-summer. Too cool.

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  47. There is an island near our house that you can only get to at low tide. Even then we have to take off our shoes and cross over the mud flats. Once we are out on the island our family spends the day exploring the tide pools, playing on the beach and feeling like the world is miles away.

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  48. We would go to very remote areas of Arkansas so my dad could go fishing. One place we would go didn’t even have an existing road leading to the water. We made our own path. We would swim, picnic and jump back in the car when a herd of cattle came meandering through. That was many years ago, and I still remember it.
    [email protected]

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  49. my favorite outdoor time with the kids was when we was in the uk and we went for a long hike in the new forest,,beautiful scenery wild ponies on the forest rabbits birds deer everything and we come across a stream it was a wonderful time

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  50. We have a membership to the Wilds in Ohio. That place is amazing from walking the wildflower trails to all the animals. We see something new each time we visit!

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  51. I love going out camping with my family. The girls gather wildflowers and help gather wood. We all roast and sit around the fire. It’s very enjoyable.

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  52. the favorite outdoor adventure that we went on as a family this past summer we went to Indiana, with all 5 of our children and went to a cabin and let the kids experience hiking, campfires, walks by the lakes, and cooking over the open fires…. IT was the best few days that we had as a family:)

    Reply

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