The Huffey Family: Hidden Treasure

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Hidden Treasure

Today was a beautiful day! This afternoon I decided to introduce Ethan to Geocaching, a treasure hunt game played by people all over the world by searching for hidden 'caches' with a GPS device or GPS enabled phone. I have GPS possibilities on my cell phone, so I downloaded an app that made it easy to type in coordinates and lead us to the cache. You have to know basic directions, north, south, east and west... so you can make sure the compass is pointed in the correct direction, but other than that, it is as simple as hide-and-seek!

Before we went, we drew a paper map to show where the caches were hidden, from viewing it from our online membership at geocaching.com, plugged the coordinates into my phone, and went on the hunt. With Ethan on his bike, Everett in the stroller and my prego body pushing from behind... we went out to see if we could find some of the hidden treasures at our local Copper Creek Lake.

The lake was busy with walkers, joggers, strollers, dogs, bikes, which made it hard for us to focus a lot on our hunt, but after smiling back at a lot of strange looks, Ethan found his first cache! It was called "Happy Trails" and in addition to the log that you are supposed to sign when you find the cache, it had a golf tee, golf ball, pencil, and some sort of necklace/charm thing that I had never seen before.

We had gathered a few items in a bucket, so that we could exchange our item for one that was in the cache if there happened to be something there, so as soon as Ethan realized there was a golf ball in the cache, he decided to swap it out with the golf ball he brought along. So we left a golf ball and took a golf ball. :)

I snapped a few pictures and Ethan replaced the cache back where he found it. You can only imagine how proud he was that he found it all by himself, and instantly, he became a geocaching addict!

There were 4 or 5 others hidden around the lake, but we were unsuccessful in finding the next two that we looked for, so, since we were by the playground, and dinner time was approaching, we decided to play and then eat, and will return to search at a later time.

Ethan was so into searching for the treasures, that when I told him we were going to go play, he said "No Mom... we need to find all the treasures... I don't want to play on the playground!". Yep... I would say he's hooked!