Anyone who follows me knows how much I love to geocache. There are very few books out there about my hobby, though. One author I tried to read who incorporated geocaching into his stories is a former FBI agent who thinks a “final solution” for drug addicts is okay. Yeah, he was tossed aside pretty quickly.
I saw this book on Kindle Unlimited and decided to give it a shot. Hide and Seek: Life Lessons of a Geocacher sounded to me like it would be akin to the Chicken Soup for the Baseball Fan’s Soul that I read one off-season. I mean, it says “Life Lessons” right in the title so I thought this was going to be about going to find a geocache and having an adventure and learning something from it. Maybe one geocache per chapter and what was special and why he learned something.
Instead, this is more of a “how-to” book. That’s fine as it is, it just wasn’t what I was expecting. From the blurb on Amazon:
What’s so great about geocaching? Geocaching is the outdoor recreational activity, in which participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver to hide and seek containers at specific locations marked by coordinates all over the world. But it is so much more than that! It is where it takes you to find them, it’s the people you meet and the challenge of the hunt. Gary takes you beyond the container and opens up the world of adventure around us and the adventure within us that has too often been lost. Journey with him as he tells you the obstacles, the disappointments but also the health benefits and the joy and the true treasure waiting to be found!
I was looking for more details on meeting people at events and the adventures. Instead, it’s page after page of why geocaching is good for your health and other things that really have nothing to do with actual geocaching adventures. Maybe because at the time of writing this, he only had 1,000 finds he doesn’t have the same sense of the adventure to the game that people who have found a lot more do. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking his 1,000 finds, it’s just that when I go to events I hear stories that are far more interesting than this book. I think more find or more events where he talks to people and hears these stories would have made for a far more interesting book.
It’s on Kindle Unlimited, so if you subscribe you can read the book for nothing. For someone who’s just getting into the hobby, it might be a good way to grasp some things about it that have been eluding you. For someone who’s been doing it for a while, they won’t find much here to enjoy.
Share this:
Categories: Book Reviews, Geocaching
That certainly is a disappointing tactic: promise readers one thing, as the promotional blurb and even the title clearly do, then deliver something different..
I think that if you ever sat down and wrote a book about your experiences as a geocacher and used a similar title, the results would not only be a more accurate title but a far better and richer book.
Probably. I don’t know that I would have the discipline at this stage of my life to do that, though.
Oh, I’m not suggesting that you go and draft a book, especially since you already have so much to do. But…if you ever did, your book would deliver on its promises, whereas this guy’s book clearly did not. 🙂