The units we borrowed were sturdy little eTrex Legends from Garmin that are quite capable machines. But new users need a couple hours instruction to get the most out of the little units and we only had that much time for the whole adventure. Instead, we showed everyone how to read the current location and instructed them to walk in whatever direction moved them closer to the correct coordinates.
We passed out the information on 9 local caches that we had recently downloaded from geocaching.com as well as coordinates for a practice cache in the church parking lot. Soon 5 teams were wandering all over the lot while Carolyn looked on or shouted encouragement. The light went on as each team saw the cache that had been carefully hidden in the shrubbery.The next five caches included some easy to reach but deceptively hidden caches as well as a couple in the "wilderness" area of an undeveloped park. The little kids in the group did especially well with these, possibly because they're closer to the ground, possibly because they're alert to finding things in such an environment.
We also included a couple of "offset" caches where we had to decipher clues at the original location to determine the actual cache's real location. Older folks had an easier time with those. We even picked up a "travel bug" at one of the caches and were able to show people how to look up the information on the travel bug at the local library.We had enough downloaded information for another couple of hours of searching but after 3 hours everyone felt like they had had a good introduction to geocaching and we felt it had been a successful social event.
