My wife got a gold star this week.  She told me about a neat site on the internet that allows treasure hunting…with geeks in mind!  She doesn’t give me sites often that I have never heard off but this week she hit one out of the park.

A friend, John Barlow, principal of Blue Ridge Christian School, Bridgewater, VA, told her about it and has experience with Geocaching.  He became my main professional geocacher source.

You can go to the site (www.geocaching.com) and find out more information about it than I can give you here, but let’s look at a summary.

Geocaching is a new sport, hobby, addictive pastime, etc. that people have started who own GPS devices (Global Positioning System).  You may have one in your car or a portable one; which lends itself more to this type of endeavor.  GPS is a worldwide satellite navigational system which is made up of 24 satellites orbiting the earth at approximately 12,000 miles above the surface.  They send data back to receivers, GPS devices, and you can see exactly where you are or where you are going.  Most have mapping capabilities for finding “that place you’ve never been to before” and tell you how to get there.

OK, on to the sport.  You can sign up as a member of Geocaching.com and then look up hidden containers in your area.  You get the GPS coordinates for that “cache” from your device and then go find it.  Is there money in it?  Nope. Is there a nice watch or diamond ring in it?  I really doubt it.  Then why do it?  For fun! 

The container may have pencils in it, a business card, sunglasses, maybe a special Geocoin or just about anything else.  The caches are hidden in places you can find but you may have to hunt for it for a while before finding it.  The deal with a regular cache is that you take something out, put it in another cache somewhere else and replace what you took with something of your own.  Then you report to the site what you put in and all the details about your find, without giving away too many details.

John told me of finding a Geocoin that began in Texas and was bound for Georgia. You find these cached coins and move them closer to their destination.  John found his first at the Grand Caverns Park, Weyers Cave, VA, in mid-August.  He and his sons hid it in Staunton, VA.  He checked its travel history and found that earlier in the summer it was in Alaska and on 9/22 was in Florida.  He said sometimes they overshoot their destination but show up there sooner or later.

Good luck treasure hunting – you may see me hunting around in Harrisonburg soon!

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