My coworkers Cheryl and James recently got hooked on geocaching, and James spent most of the day on Tuesday getting me hooked as well.  On Tuesday night I got home and decided to take the kids for a treasure hunt.

So what is geocaching?  Geocaching.com defines it as:

Geocaching (pronounced geo-cashing) is a worldwide game of hiding and seeking treasure. A geocacher can place a geocache in the world, pinpoint its location using GPS technology and then share the geocache’s existence and location online. Anyone with a GPS unit can then try to locate the geocache.

Put more simply and as I described it to the kids, someone hid a treasure for us to find and I use a map on my Blackberry to find the treasure.

There’s stuff hidden all over the world, below is a map of all the treasures available in Milton (click on the map to be taken to the geocaching website).

Here is what I did last night:

• Visit geocaching.com and signed up for a free account
• Typed in my postal code on the Hide & Seek page
• Clicked on the cache located in the park near us
• Plug the longitude and latitude into the GPS
• Go for a walk

Once we got close to the area via GPS, we had to rely on the hints that were published within the description to locate the cache.  It was near a standing dead tree, on the north side of a fallen tree.  Even with the hint it took a good 10 minutes to locate what looked like a tennis-ball can hidden under some loose bark.  The kids dissected the cache and signed their names into the log.  1 down and 646,632 more to go.

The types of caches get more advanced, and next time we’ll definitely bring something along to swap out of the cache (you can take something from the treasure so long as you replace it with something of equal value).  This particular one had some stickers, a keychain, and some coloured glass beads.