Over the last couple years, I've started getting into Geocaching. For those who don't know that hobby, it's like an Easter egg hunt for adults, assuming the Easter bunny is rather quirky and (sometimes) sadistic in his hiding spots. Players use GPS handheld devices to locate the caches (the Easter eggs), and with the advent of smartphones, everyone has a handheld GPS now. The caches can be big, like an ammo can or lunchbox. Birdhouses are common too. Or they can be small, like a film canister. Or they can be evil, like a bolt that's not really a bolt, but a magnetic hiding spot tucked underneath a bench. Caches will all have a log for people to sign once they've found the actual cache, and you can record your finds online too. They can be very involved too. Some are puzzles that you have to solve in order to find the coordinates to the actual log. Others can be multiple steps, finding one cache that leads you to the next, which leads you to the actual log. Like I said, if the Easter bunny was quirky and sadistic.
I've enjoyed it though, because they get you looking at the places around you in a little bit different way, noticing things you might not. Or making average places (like boring suburban Central Texas) seem a little more interesting. Caches might be up hiking trails or in the middle of a shopping mall. Often people will place them near landmarks or points of interest or scenic views. Pretty fun to do as you're travelling about.
And now all of this has been background leading up to the point of this post: the Berlin Wall.
No, seriously.
Geocaching does challenges every so often, asking players ("cachers") to find caches with x-many favorites (like Facebook Likes for geocaches), or find one that's a puzzle cache, or whatever. This time it was finding one that had a certain number of favorites. Near where I live in Honolulu, this was the closest. It was also really cool.
Honolulu Community College has a piece of the original Berlin Wall. The piece of the wall is incorporated into a memorial, the Berlin Wall Freedom Monument. The wall was erected, protected by glass, with concrete wall sections extending out from either side, to give a greater impression of what it must have once been. A bit of trivia, they oriented it the way it was in Germany: plain side facing east and the graffiti covered side facing west.
When they set up the memorial, this was only the third piece of the wall in North America, so something very unusual. And it's still there on the HCC campus, tucked away between academic buildings behind the library.
And on a more somber note, in the 20-odd years since it was set up, the Freedom Monument has expanded. Right near the wall in the same little lawn, is a memorial to the 9-11 Trade Center attack, with pieces of rubble from the towers and from the Pentagon.
So, if you're in the area, it's worth the little detour as you drive to Pearl Harbor from Waikiki (or whatever other tourist stops you're hitting). And I wouldn't have found it if someone hadn't hidden a cache there!
