For Mother’s Day, my family surprised me with a hand held GPS device that could be used for playing an outdoors GPS “treasure hunting” game called Geocaching. People hide small, waterproof containers, called “Caches,” in various spots all over the world (currently over 800,000 locations). The basic idea is to locate these hidden containers and then log and share your experiences on-line.

I was first introduced to the hobby of geocaching while vacationing in Florida. Coincidentally, my first cache was located just 1/2 block away from our rental place at Sunset Beach. My second find was located in a mangrove forest along a remote stretch of beach at Coco Plum. I found caching great fun and it gave us a chance to explore areas we might not of seen on our own.

This evening, Tom uploaded some data into my Garmin and I excitedly hopped into the truck and off we went with the GPS and camera in search of nearby geocache booty (yaaarrr). We following the first set of coordinates to a park at the end of Maynard’s Line. The cache was finally located in a magnetic box stuck on the bottom side of an anchor guard rail. After I signed the cache log book, I just had to find another. This time we were looking for the Whispering Willow Cache. The compass took us near the Maple Leaf Cemetery so we headed out on foot. We found the cache in a camouflaged box in the crook of a willow tree. It was so much fun, I can hardly wait until my next adventure!

Check out to see if there’s a cache located near your home by entering a postal/zip code on the Geocaching website. You can copy/paste the different caches coordinates directly into Google Earth and get a zooming bird’s eye view of it’s exact location.