[Aditya]

Fresh Ways to Have Fun Outside

Are you looking for fresh ways to spend time with your friends and family? Outdoor activities getting a little boring, are they?

With your fast-paced life gaining speed all the time, it’s easy to stick to what’s familiar — but is that any way to live? Let’s take a few minutes and look at how easy it is to break out of the same-ole-routine and into the new with wholesome activities near home and out of doors. Read on to see why it’s tough to beat having fun with friends and family outdoors in the fresh air.

We’re not alone out there

One of the first things we notice as we step outdoors and into nature is that we are not alone. Life surrounds us. So the first thing to do is to slow down and have a look around.

While you’re looking, why not do some bird watching? It’s fun, easy to do and inexpensive. All you need are birds, and they are everywhere. Make a family game out of it. Who can find the first bird with the color blue on it? How many ducks are on the pond? Are they all the same kind? You get the idea.

But be careful:

Once you start bird watching you’ll find it difficult to stop. Before long you’ll have a good pair of birding binoculars and a field guide for your part of the country. Then you’ll be a bird watcher with birding fever. The best part of bird watching is spending time with others outdoors. Birding is a hobby you’ll love for the rest of your life.

Are you a techophile?

If you need a sport that’s a little more high tech, give geocaching a shot. Geocaching is the sport where you use your handheld GPS receiver to find caches hidden by others using their GPS receivers. This is something you can do by yourself, with friends or with your children.

Geocaching teaches outdoor navigation in a fun and interactive way while allowing you to explore your own neighborhood and beyond. You’ll learn new words and phrases such as cache coordinates, travel bugs, micro-caches, benchmarking and geoteaming. All you need is internet access and a GPS receiver. Some GPS receivers retail for many hundreds of dollars, but many models are available for around $100. Although the sport is active in over 200 countries, most geocachers enjoy playing the game in their own neighborhoods. It’s awesome!

If a GPS receiver isn’t in your budget right now, perhaps you might give letterboxing a try. Letterboxing is similar to geocaching in that you are searching for a hidden treasure, but in this case it is called a box, not a cache, and you use clues versus coordinates to locate the treasure. There are other components to the letterboxing game, such as rubber stamps and log books. Letterboxing is inexpensive, loads of fun and addictive.