WICHITA, Kansas – Now that the weather is getting so nice, many are itching to enjoy the great outdoors. But if you want something more than a walk in the park, how about checking out geocaching?
There’s something about the search for hidden treasure that appeals to the most basic sense of human curiosity. The thought of finding that chest full of gold and gems makes the pirate blood boil, but the life of a treasure hunter isn't for everyone.
Geocaching is a rapidly growing sport where hand-held GPS receivers and the Internet have taken the place of maps where ‘X’ marks the spot.
And the reward is the hunt.
“It's just fun,” said geocacher Denise Eickbush. “It's fun to hunt it, it's fun to find it, find the things in there. There's always something cool in there.”
Treasure may be overstating it a bit. Once you find a cache, it's normally filled with trinkets, known to geocachers as ‘swag.’ McDonalds happy meal toys seem to be popular and swag always swapped.
The cache's are located all over the world. There are about 5,000 different caches hidden around Kansas and about 700,000 worldwide. They vary in size from old ammo cans to teeny tins that are used to hold breath mints.
The location of every cache in the world can be found on a universal Web site: geocaching.com. Once the coordinates are loaded into a GPS, you just follow the arrow till you find the treasure.
Once the bug has bitten you, every trip, even a short one, turns into a quest.
“Even when I go to the west side of the town, cause I'm an east sider, I load up my GPS and look around,” Denise said.
What makes geocaching so much fun is the fact that even though you know exactly where you are going, you don't know exactly what you are going to find when you get there.
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