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Date: 5/18/2021
WESTHAMPTON – Westhampton resident Nancy Ronan recently self-published her first children’s book titled “Comet Goes Geocaching.”
The book, which mainly stars her Bright Spot Therapy Dog Comet, was originally written by Ronan two years ago. During that time, Ronan had a hard cover book created through Shutterfly, and would take the book and Comet to Westhampton Elementary School so students could read the book to Comet.
Ronan had a template to follow through the Bright Spot Reading Buddy program. Other people who are a part of Bright Spot Therapy Dogs Inc. also created their own books based on their own dogs through this template.
After her daughter wrote her own book about self-help for teens, Ronan said that her daughter became familiar with the self-publishing aspects of Amazon, and helped Ronan with her book about Comet.
“My daughter reformatted ['Comet Goes Geocaching'] to work with Amazon self-publishing format,” said Ronan, who added that the book is out now to the public.
The book follows Comet and his friends going geocaching. Geocaching is a GPS, coordinate-based treasure hunt. The way it works, according to Ronan, is people can get a free geocaching account and download the phone application on Geocaching.com. People who geocache would hide and coordinate the cache through the app.
Others will then look for the cache through the app on their smartphones, or by using some other GPS device.
A cache can be anything from happy meal toys to little trinkets, depending on the container. If you take an item from the container you find while geocaching, you have to replace it with an item of equal or greater value, according to Ronan.
“I did a lot of geocaching with my dogs, because I like to take them hiking and walking” said Ronan. “So when I was going to make my first reading buddy book, I wanted to make it a little different.”
Because Ronan had so many photos of her dogs going geocaching, she thought it would be fun to introduce the geocaching hobby to children. The book even contains an introduction to the activity. “It’s a great family activity,” Ronan added. “For the kids especially, it’s very exciting.”
According to Ronan, her dog Comet is very good at sniffing out the containers, especially since many people will use old peanut butter jars as containers for the cache. “One time, I was with some friends of ours, and there were a series of caches up a mountain, and they were all peanut butter jars,” she said.
In the book itself, there are pictures of Comet exploring different places. The book also talks about how Comet likes to go geocaching with Ronan’s other Therapy Dog Clementine, as well as with other family and friends.
Ronan hopes that her book will inspire families to go out and try geocaching as a new family hobby. She is planning to write a series of books about Comet’s adventures. “Comet Goes Geocaching” is the first of the series. Ronan believes that the next book will be titled, “Comet Goes to the Farm.”
“We’re working on the photos for that one now,” said Ronan.
Those looking to purchase “Comet Goes Geocaching,” can do so on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Comet-Goes-Geocaching-Nancy-Ronan/dp/1735925527/. Those interested in learning more about geocaching can visit https://www.geocaching.com/play.