My Geocaching Adventure!

So a pastor friend of mine from Ohio, Mike Cole, and his wife Trinda have been down visiting this weekend. Escaping the cold up north etc.

So yesterday, (Sunday) afternoon, Mike tells me that he wanted a GPS device for Christmas. To which I'm thinking, "Are you serious? Why? All is does is give you directions to places right?" But then, he whips it out and starts showing me all the stuff it can do. Oh... my ... gosh... that thing is SO cool!

So then he starts telling about this thing called Geocaching. (www.Geocaching.com) Basically you go to the geocaching website and put in the address of wherever you are (in the world), and it will tell you where all of these "Hidden Treasures" are near you! It gives you the exact GPS coordinates. It's a Global Treasure Hunt! So there are like millions of these Hidden Treasures all over the world now, and you use a GPS to go and find them.

Enter Scott Drummond. So we go over to Pastor Scott and Kirsten's last night for dinner and when we get there Mike starts telling Scott about Geocaching. To which Scott whips out his computer and we put in his address... What happened next feels more surreal then actual, but it's true I tell you. True.

After we successfully had broken the code (like Tom Hanks in the Da Vinci Code movie) we had what we needed for our Adventure.

Before we know it, we're running to my car like Bank Robbers! The GPS (who we named Suzi) is giving us directions to a Hidden Treasure in Scott's neighborhood! It was like the coolest thing! We get within a hundred feet of the Treasure and then we had to search and destroy on foot. MIke is holding the GPS unit and telling us the coordinates as we walk through this woods. With every step, the intensity was rising! I swear there was a mote with a dragon and an alligator in it as I crossed this rickety log bridge!

After 15 minutes of searching in the woods, Scott yells out, "Hey, hey guys right there!" Sure enough, he dives in to this clump of trees and pulls out a camoflage ammo box. We open it up and there are all kinds of Treasures in there! (Stuffed animals, golf balls, key chains, etc.) Every person who finds it leaves something behind and can take something with them as well if they want. There was a log book, so we signed our names. (All the while I was totally watching for the cops and stuff!) (I was going to leave a Next Level Church card, but Scott convinced me that would be lame.)

After a few minutes of enjoying our Global Treasure Hunt, we stood, made our way out of the forest (it was a big clump of trees) and returned to our All Terrain Vehicle (my car) victorious! The other guys only suffered a couple of wounds (read, burrs stuck to their flip flops) and I escaped without a trace on my crocs. (I could have simply washed them off had their been any mud on them).

A few minutes later we were back in the safety of Scott's house, surrounded by our wives who would never know or even hope to understand the danger we had been in, how we had risked our lives, and the adventure that would probably bond our friendship for a lifetime! We didn't even try to explain it to them.

So I think I found a new hobby... Geocaching. Talk about something that doesn't look anything like my life! Dragons, and gators, and forests and adventures and firey motes. It was all real. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

I gotta run, I'm pricing out GPS units online...

Matt