News Release

For immediate release
January 5, 2009
Media Contact: Donna Abbott
410-723-8609 (office)

Ocean City participates in MML Geocache Trail

Ocean City, MD - The Town of Ocean City is participating in the Maryland Municipal League Geocache Trail. On January 1, the Maryland Municipal League, with the help of sponsor/partners, the Maryland Geocaching Society, ESRI, KCI Technologies, Inc, Local Government Insurance Trust, Stearns & Wheler, LLC, and the Hagerstown-Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau, became the first state league in the country to launch a statewide city/town geocache trail.

MML is using this innovative approach to promote awareness of and visits to Maryland’s cities and towns, with the goal of helping to stimulate economic development in Maryland’s municipalities. This effort taps into the rapidly growing high-tech tourist trade that is not limited to any particular age group. Discovering a geocache, is very much like going on a treasure hunt using a hand-held GPS (Global Positioning System) to plot map coordinates to locate the treasure or “cache.” The geocacher must access the official geocache website www.geocaching.com, go to the MML account and download or manually enter the map coordinates for each cache on the Maryland Municipal League Geo Trail; then use the GPS to find the caches.

A geocache trail is a series of geocaches tied together by a common theme. The theme of the Maryland Municipal League Geocache Trail is “Celebrating Maryland’s Cities and Towns.” The trail is comprised of 78 city/town caches located in the 11 MML Districts throughout the state. A collectible, highly coveted geo coin will be given to the first 500 geocachers who locate a minimum of 22 city/town caches throughout the state.

To be eligible for the coin, geocachers must pick up a passport at any participating visitor center, use the stamp in each cache on their passports and write in the cache code word. After at least two municipal caches in each district are discovered, geocachers may return to one of the county visitor centers and have their passports validated to receive a collectable coin.

Locally, geocachers can obtain their passport and coin at the Ocean City Visitor Center, located in the Roland E. Powell Convention Center at 40th St. in Ocean City. The Ocean City Visitor Center is open daily from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Among the many interesting things you will find in the Ocean City geocache is a special edition Ocean City pin.

Geocaching is a great way to explore all that Maryland cities and towns have to offer. Discover municipal Maryland by blazing the Maryland Municipal League Geocache Trail. You may download a list of participating cities/towns and the participating visitor centers with addresses and hours of operation from MML’s website www.mdmunicipal.org.