You Don't Have to be a Pirate to Hunt Treasure

J.R.R. Tolkien once said “Not all those who wander are lost.”

You may have noticed people “wandering” about in your area lately. If you have spoke with any of them, maybe you discovered that they are involved in an interesting new trend called Geocaching. Geocaching is a type of treasure hunting for the 21rst century where participants navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates and then attempt to find the “geocache”. Geocaching was invented by a man named Dave Ulmer in Portland, Oregon as a way to celebrate President Clinton’s decision to turn off the signal scrambling that limited civilian use of GPS. He hid a bucket of trinkets in a wooded area outside Portland and announced its location in a posting to a USENET newsgroup.

Within a day the original stash had been found. Within days more stashes had been hidden in California, Kansas and Illinois and the worldwide hobby was born.

Here is how it works: Go to www.geocaching.com and create an account. After logging in you type in the zip code of the area you would like to visit and it will list all the caches in that area. The only rules are; if you take something out of the cache you must leave something of equal or greater value, you must write about your find in the cache logbook and they ask that you log your experience on the website as well.

From Eau Claire, Callensburg, Rockland and Knox there are 57 caches. Using The Foxburg Inn as your destination get away center, you could find all of the caches. Call today to reserve your room and Happy Hunting!!