Some of you asked about this weird thing the boys and I do, so I will give you a brief rundown on what it is like, geocaching downunder. https://www.geocaching.com  is the official website.

They call it the world's largest treasure hunt and in a way it is. Simple. You join for free or upgrade for a very small annual fee to 'premium' which gives you access to premium sites, these often being bigger/better or more challenging caches.

Okay. You check the map on the app and see what's around you. There could be any mumber of hidden caches, one could even be next door. The concept is two-fold, you have people who hide caches and then leave a set of coordinates and you have people who find these caches, based on these coordinates. Sometimes there are cryptic clues; sometimes you must solve a series of them to get to the final, big cache.

It gets funny. We were at the strip of park dividing the Primary School from the beach opposite. The road was divided by this strip of green, which had a few large trees, some flagpoles and a memorial to WWII. The 'cache' was supposed to be right there. I had four boys with me. They had the coordinates on their phones. The cache was 'micro' meaning small. Really small. We must have looked odd, holding the phones up, counting paces, walking around trees and poles, arguing about distances and directions. Traffic was going up and down the busy road and we were tooted at, and stuff was yelled out of car windows. Never found that one, despite going back there and enduring the same embarrassment several times...

Then there are some which are very clever indeed, People go to a lot of work to 'hide' these caches, often in plain sight.

This twisted and rusted bit of wire was a plug, and once you pulled it out, there was a small plastic tube inside, where you recorded your name and the day you 'found' it.

Sometimes you had to do weird things. Like climb the side of the freeway overpass and yeah, try reach a crack in the concrete!

But some! You would find yourself deep in the forest, butterflies flittering around, kookaburras cackling, and no trail - 'bush bashing' as we called it, scrambling over fallen trees and crashing your way through waist-high vegetation... One time it was just Dylan and I and we got caught in thin trailin gvines which grabbed on to your clothing and - well you couldn't move! The had these tiny raised hair-like thorns and we had to fight to free each other from their grasp - at one point we just stood and laughed because we were both covered in these vines and were trying to reach out and untangle each other. The cache, when we eventually reached it was spectacular! A big toadstool 'house' filled with all sorts of 'goodies' from around the world! The etiquette is if you take something, you must leave something behind see, so the cache always has 'treasure' in it, if it is of the larger variety.

Sometimes you might find 'geo-coins' or 'travel-bugs' or other 'collectible' things. Now these make their way around the world, getting picked up from one cache and dropped off in another. The idea is to move them along, cache by cache and follow their travels around the world. We once found a geo-coin which had begun its journey in Norway, travelled through Europe, the Americas, Asia and finally reached us downunder. Six years it took! There was the log, and we could see exactly where it had been and who had moved it each time!

The little red English telephone box gives you an idea of what a travel-bug is. The geo-coin is in the little plastic bag. This was our 'treasure' from one cache, things we took home and replaced by other things we carried along with us...

There are degrees of difficulty. Some we may bever find as they lie deep in the ocean, or on top of Mt Everest! There are millions scattered around the world, and whenever we travel the country, we always stop and look for what's around. We once found a cache hidden behind a square of rusty metal on a fence post; it took us over an hour to spot it! We searched the area over and over, I mean we were right there, the coordinates said we were on top of the thing! We knew it would be a clever one - the clue said so - but the ingenuity of the person who hid it almost beat us!

I can think of no better activity for a family or a group of friends to do. It takes you out of your house, sends you around your neighborhood; places you might pass every day and not notice, or it may send you scrambling over rough terrain, be it cliffs or rocky outcrops. You might find yourselves deep in forests or pasture lands, the local park, or a tourist attraction, where you must dodge 'muggles', a curious term used to describe others who do not know about geocaching. You have to keep the cache a secret see, because any random by-passer may find it and not knowing its purpose, destroy it!

Some of the caches have eluded us for years. We go back over and over, we see online that others have found them in between our visits but still, we have to record the dreaded DNF on the website, meaning "did not find".

There was one we found on our fifth attempt. It was hidden in the crook of a large tree, covered by leaves. One of the boys spotted something shiny and they scrambled up it, and there it was finally, and we could then record TFTF (Thanks for the find!)

Then there was the one that was a little... well you be the judge. It was deep in a forest. We finally reached the spot. There were trees everywhere, and thick bush below. We searched high and low. We searched so long we were just about to give up. Then Marcus spotted a short branch that didn't look quite right. It was an odd shape... Again, the climb up the tree and well...this:

The boys had fun with that one! But by far our favorite so far has been the castle. It was nestled deep in a forest. We trudged through mud, slipped and fell often, climbed over and under fallen logs, cut through dense undergrowth then came to a small clearing. The sight of this 'castle' inthe middle of nowhere was rewarding to say the least!

Lots of treasure in that one!

So that's geocaching downunder. There are hundreds of thousands still to find. We have about a hundred surrounding us here in this suburb. That's the beauty of this treasure hunt. A cache may be your next door neighbor's mailbox. Or it might be in the park you take the kids to each afternoon... You never know what you will find, or where the coordinates will take you. You can just take a short walk from your house or make a day of it, picking an area and 'exploring'.

See the seat below? There's one right there. Looks simple right? Never found it.

I hope at least some of you explore this fascinating treasure hunt idea further, and get out of the house, go on adventures! Take the kids, take the dog, go alone or in a group, it doesn't matter. What matters is you're out there exploring, be it your neighborhood or the 'great outdoors'!