Director's Note : Adventures in Geocaching
By Nora Donaghy
I first found out about geocaching a couple of years ago while on vacation in British Columbia with friends from North Carolina. On the way back from a day of skiing, my friend Ken suddenly careened off the road, grabbed his GPS device and trudged out into the dark, searching for a Tupperware container as I sat in the car wondering, What on earth is he doing? The next day, a tourist sightseeing expedition of Vancouver turned into a hunt for Tupperware in 20 degree weather.Our vacation ended, and I thought that was the last I would hear of geocaching. Until last August, when my friend Wade called me from Kansas City, going out of his mind. Our friends Jen and Ken were now visiting him, and their obsessive geocaching was driving him crazy. They had shown up to dinner two hours late, sweaty and disheveled, having taken a detour from the airport to the restaurant to find geocaches on the way. They commandeered his computer to look up more geocaches. And they wouldn’t stop talking about what caches they were going to look for the next day.
After that, I knew I had a potential documentary on my hands. What struck me initially was how seriously people take the game – a hobby that most people would probably consider pretty silly. Sure, everybody can relate to the thrill of a treasure hunt. But when that “treasure” consists of a small Tupperware full of McDonald’s toys and batteries, what is the appeal? That’s what we set out to discover during this documentary. And the answer we got was that geocaching offers different things to different people – which we realize through the exploration of three very diverse subjects.
In trying to find the right mix of subjects for this film, I attended some geocaching events – one was a huge holiday party at a restaurant in Ventura County, just north of Los Angeles. In one fell swoop, I met the three subjects who would eventually be the main characters – TRUROKR, the committed family man who’s passionate about the environment and is outspoken about keeping geocaching a pure sport; the Ventura Kids, the obnoxious, trouble-stirring world’s #3-ranked geocachers; and Aerospacecase, whose participation in geocaching has helped him deal with serious clinical depression and other health issues.
I met a lot of great potential characters though my research for this film, including Aerospacecase’s mom, Shirconn, 83, and her 79-year-old boyfriend, Garagedude. I also met a wheelchair-bound geocacher, a couple who got engaged via geocaching, and a guy who likes to dress like Indiana Jones. But in the end the perfect mix seemed to be the Ventura Kids, TRUROKR and Aerospacecase. Their different personalities and geocaching philosophies played off each other nicely.
The Ventura Kids represent the competitive aspect of geocaching. TRUROKR represents the purist’s point of view, and Aerospacecase represents how a seemingly meaningless hobby can lift one’s spirits and change one’s life. In focusing on the people who geocache, rather than just geocaching itself, we intended to make accessible to the audience a subject many have not heard of. And even if the film doesn’t make everyone want to run out and buy a GPS receiver to start looking for Tupperware, I hope the viewer will come to understand what makes these geocachers tick – and maybe recognize a little bit of themselves through these uniquely interesting people.
Nora Donaghy
October 2006
Adventures in Geocaching is a documentary by USC graduate film student Nora Donaghy.