I think the best thing about geocaching is this: it takes you to places you would never, otherwise, have reason to visit, and might never have discovered, even though you’ve passed that way a million times before.

The time: Saturday morning.
The place: my bed.
The question: What do I want to do with my day?

The answer: Let’s hunt for treasure!

As soon as she hears the word ‘treasure’, Little Z is ON BOARD with that idea. YES! If he’d had other plans, S finds himself roundly and soundly out-voted, but he amicably agrees and says nothing about other responsibilites, chores or hopes for the day. Sure, he says, let’s go geocaching. Should be fun, but my thought is this: perhaps this time, can we try a landscape that’s closer to the ocean, so that it’s not so covered with snow.

With that humble goal in mind, I type in a list of co-ordinates into the GPS (whom we now affectionately call “Maggie”) and everyone hops into the car. With Loki in the back seat and a bag of provisions in the front, we hit the accelerator and… Off We Go!

The farthest geocache we found was 100 km from our house — yep, we really did make a day of it. Maggie led us to a wonderfully secluded beach with a fantastic view of the strait, in a tiny little community park at the end of a subdivision that we would never have driven through, never mind stop and visit. From the road, the park looked like a vacant lot, covered in blackberry brambles. But when we began to follow the co-ordinates on foot, we discovered a well-tended trail with one hundred wooden stairs, leading down into a gully, and ending in a tiny pebbled cove. Beautiful! We found the geocache, too, and the sense of jubilant accomplishment gave us enough energy to make it back up those 100 steps to the car.

We weren’t so lucky with geocache #2. We spent an hour searching around a playground while Little Z played on the slide and the swings, but we never found a hint of the cache. Maybe it’s gone missing. Maybe some children found it and, not realizing what it was, took it home. Certainly the joggers and grandmothers strolling by looked at us askance and scowled at us with suspicion; they probably thought we were searching for the location of our latest drug drop. I entertained the idea of wearing a t-shirt that reads in big bold letters, “Don’t Worry, What I’m Doing Is Perfectly Legal.”

But all disappointment disappeared when we followed the co-ordinates to geocache #3 — ah, Maggie, you confounded us once, but you led us to the best cache last! At the end of a road, a small pyramid of stones hid a bundle of cute little trinkets. It wasn’t too difficult to find, which was nice, because we were all a little tired and ready to go home.

I love the way this activity makes me see my surroundings in a fresh way. Familiar locations become puzzles, and a simple children’s park becomes a scavenger hunt. Plus, we diverged from our regular routes, and Maggie took us to spots we would never have otherwise seen. Little Z got to play in a brand new playground, we walked along a new stretch of beach, and Loki ran around with unfamiliar dogs. Too bad tomorrow’s forecast calls for rain. There’s hundreds of caches in my vicinity, and each one offers the opportunity to see this landscape through fresh eyes.