This weekend I went geochaching. What is geocaching? It's okay, I hadn't heard of it either until this weekend. It's basically treasure hunting using a GPS device. People hide treasures and post the GPS coordinates online so other people can go find the hidden treasure. More details at http://www.geocaching.com

Our first treasure hunt was in Anzak Park. We fired up the GPS and walked around til we got close to the treasure. It took some time getting used to the GPS and figuring out which way to go. The first treasure took us to a big pine tree and we looked all over, but we couldn't find it. Bummer. The next treasure we looked for was also in Anzak Park, but we couldn't find it either. Sometimes people find the treasures and just take them, not knowing what they are. When you find a treasure you are supposed to leave it there so other people can find it too.

We went to find another treasure in the gully in Crestwood Park. This treasure had two parts. We had to locate the first treasure, which then gave clues to the second treasure. We found the first part, but we couldn't find the second part. The clues for this treasure were kind of retarded because we had to solve math problems using order of operations to find the coordinates. The math wasn't hard, but it just seemed a little silly.

At this point we were a little discouraged, but we thought we'd try to find one more treasure, also in the Crestwood Park gully. The coordinates for this treasure took us to the far corner of the gully into a wooded area where we saw a small metal box wired to a fence under a tree. We were so excited when we found it! We opened the box to find a small notebook, some go-fish playing cards, and a plastic spider (which scared me to death when we dumped everything out). We made a note in the notebook, took one of the go-fish playing cards (pictured above), replaced it with a John Mayer card, and put everything back in the box for the next treasure hunter.

Geocaching-- fun, random, and highly recommended!