Yarrr! So it's me treasure ye be after, is it?

One night, while sitting around a bon fire at the neighbour's house, I was introduced to the new game of Geocaching. It is exactly what it sounds like: little (or moderately sized) containers filled with all manner of trinkets and the like set in place by members of the global Geocaching community. This game is truly world-wide for there are caches from Oshawa to Austria and all points near and far and the object seems to be to get people out and exploring.

How it works is as follows: someone decides that they have a suitable place to hide a container, so they fill it with items and place it in a safe spot where it is not likely to be found by those not looking for it. A log book and information page is included, and the coordinates are recorded. These coordinates are then uploaded to the Geocaching website, where they are made available to all participants. To find a cache, the coordinates are entered into a GPS and it guides the user to the general area of the cache, where it is then up to them to search around for it. It is very much like a modern treasure hunt. If the cache is found, it is acceptible to either take the contents and replace them with something else or take nothing and leave nothing. There are collectable coins and dogtags and other Geocache related objects to be found, but for most, I think, the adventure is the real prize.

A quick look at the website shows that there are differing sizes of containers and different levels of difficulty: some caches can be driven to, whereas others may need a boat or ATV to get to. There are other caches that are much like the box within a box within a box trick played at birthdays and Christmas. The initial coordinates given only reveal a box with more coordinates in it, so that the seeker goes from cache to cache until they are eventually rewarded with the final one, several containers down the line.

Jenn and I had a house full of kids on Sunday so we thought it would be a great adventure for them to go on a search for treasure. We had them draw up treasure maps while I found a nearby cache. I realize that drawing maps to an as yet discovered trove is difficult, but the kids didn't seem to care about the incongruity of it so we didn't, either.

The Treasure Hunters, eating freshly picked apples from our tree.

Near us, on a road that is not extremely busy, is a tree that is for some reason covered in shoes. It's not a tall tree, it's nearing fifty feet, but there are shoes right to the top. I thought this would be sort of interesting for the kids, so we chose this as our destination. With the coordinates suitably entered into my GPS we set out on our treasure hunt amid talk of presumed bounty and the niggling fear of residual pirates and their ghosts.

The Shoe Tree.

See? Shoes on a tree.

Looking for the treasure around the tree. Nope, not there.

We stopped for some lunch and then continued on and when we were a few kilometers away, we gave the kids their first clue on the treasure map: look for a tree with shoes. Although most agreed that trees don't wear shoes, the kids couldn't stop looking out of the windows. We drove past the tree with no one noticing. Not even me, even though I was sure it was around here. Somewhere. A quick 180 degree turn and we were closing in on our target. Lauren was the first to spot the tree and it wasn't long before we were all out of the van and searching in the bush, under rocks and behind trees for a container.

My GPS was accurate to within 5 meters that day, so it should have been fairly easy to find the cache. It wasn't, though. A combination of me not synchronising my GPS to the format of the GPS used by the person who hid the container (I noticed later that the information was available, I had just missed it) and it being our first attempt at finding a Geocache container led to a longer than anticipated search. It was nearly going to remain unfound until Jenn, who was just about to give up, noticed a white lid tucked into a small cave of rocks. When the kids heard Jenn call out that she had found it, they all ran to be the first to retrieve it. We found some nice moss to sit on and we opened the small, plastic container. Inside it was a logbook, a note about Geocaching, some shoelaces, a pair of Barbie pants, a car which Owen claimed immediately, a Dora the Explorer key chain and a small bottle of bubbles. The loot was evenly distributed, shockingly without incident, and we replaced the contents with some items that we had brought along. We logged our find of the cache in the notebook and put the container back for someone else to find.

Finally! The loot!

Being the brave pirates that we were, we decided to reward ourselves with ice cream cones on the drive home.