Mini Treasure Hunt

Tonight my boyfriend and I went Geocaching. 

For those of you who don't know what it is, it's like a mini treasure hunt. Anyone can do it. You go to geocaching.com or get the app and you look up caches near your location or wherever you want to go. You find them by coordinates so you need a GPS or if you have the app it just tells you which direction to go and how far. Caches are usually little plastic boxes or tubes of some sort. The two we found tonight were a greenish-camouflage color. Sometimes they say "Official Geocache Container" or something, or sometimes they're just waterproof boxes like a film canister. Inside them is a roll of paper or tiny notebook. When you find it, you're supposed to write the date and your name, initials, or if you come up with some fancy Geocaching nickname. In some of them there's also a small object. You're supposed to take it and leave another new object. Nothing too fancy. It's just a little treasure for the next person to find. 

I had never really gone before tonight. In the past I had looked up ones near my house, and accidentally stumbled upon one at a park right down the road. We found that one again tonight and wrote our initials and found a collector coin and left a ColdStone gift card with about a dollar left. That was all we could find in the car. We weren't prepared. We saw that there was another one down the road a little ways. It was dark, we went at 8 PM and I live a little ways out. It was on this road that they stopped maintenance to. It was behind a gate and it was gravel and muddy and grass was grown on top. My dad has always told me that a meth lab used to be at the end of that road. It was quite creepy in the dark I must say; no one around, no way for cars to get back there... not to mention the possible meth-addicts in the woods coming to eat our faces off or something. We kept walking, following the path our phones showed. We had headlamps, but they didn't do much so I just got the flashlight on my phone. We heard a loud buzzing noise the farther from the road we got. I was starting to get really freaked out, but we were so close and I wanted to find it. I didn't know this, but after looking around for a couple of minutes Jared told me on the page for the cache it said to go in daylight hours. Well, it was pitch dark. More challenge right? We arrived next to an electric pole, the source of the loud buzzing. There were little paths near it and posts, so I figured it would be right there. We looked over and over near one post in particular,  Jared told me the map said it should be 2 feet away. Suddenly I saw a little path. He was just about to give up when I saw a tiny little canister hanging from a tree branch. I felt pretty awesome. It was dark and spooky and it was a minuscule thing to find and weird that it wasn't on the ground. there was only paper inside, no prize since it was so small I'm assuming, but it was still fun. We signed our names and ran the heck out of there! It was a fun little adventure though.

I think Geocaching is a fun activity for when you're bored, need something to do for a date, or something with your family. It's an Easter Egg hunt for big kids! Sure, it may sound kind of nerdy, but everyone has a nerdy side and this is fun. It can be challenging depending on where you go and how far you're willing to take it. It's good exercise because it can sometimes require a hike and it gets you outdoors. I would recommend it to people of all ages. All you need is a GPS or smartphone!