Geocoins

In addition to the six caches I found today, I also grabbed 3 geocoins out of geocaches I found today. Geo-coins are coins that people have "minted" and place in geocaches to move from cache to cache. The movement of the coins is tracked on the geocaching.com website via a unique tracking number that can be found on the coin. The person who picks up a coin (which is what I did today) logs the coin as taken from the cache it is in and is supposed to drop it in another cache within a few weeks. When the coin is dropped in another cache, it is logged into that cache for someone else to pick up and move to another cache. The website keeps track of who has the coin in their "inventory" or the location of the geocache it is placed in, as well as the number of miles the coin has traveled. Some of the coins have goals (like they want to visit certain locations, be placed in a certain type of geocache, etc), some just want to move from cache to cache.

This is a picture of the front sides of the 3 coins I grabbed out of geocaches today:

This is a picture of the back sides of the 3 coins:

The details on some of these coins is just amazing. The coins I picked up today were very nice. One of the problems with this is that there some dishonest people out there who take coins and keep (i.e., steal) them. So rather than moving them to another geocache, they just take them from a geocache and don't log them out. I've enjoyed seeing the creativity that goes into creating the coin, so its really fun to find them. The funny part is that there is a whole underground economy for these coins. They are very expensive to mint and unique, so many people who have them made end up trading and/or selling them to other geocachers. Kind of like coin/stamp collecting...some are worth more than others.