Since our entire lives have moved online and we’re all as wired as someone who has just gulped down ten cups of coffee, why should our Easter egg hunts be old-fashioned? This year, give your egg hunt an upgrade and embark on a high tech search with “geocaching.” Geocaching is a craze sweeping the great outdoors in which people use GPS coordinates to look for hidden treasures.
The organizer gives the participants GPS coordinates of the first stash, or cache. Using a GPS-enabled device, the hunters look for the cache–which could be a simple weatherproof container like a Tupperware box or thermos–hidden somewhere outdoors. A container typically contains a log book for the finder to sign, a few trinkets, and the coordinates for the next stash. This ensures the treasure hunt keeps going on till the seeker finds all the caches. For the Easter variant of geocaching, event organizers are planning to hide the stash coordinates in plastic Easter eggs.
According to enthusiasts, this high-tech treasure hunt is good fun and can also be exhausting, as GPS coordinates only take the hunter to within six to 20 feet of where the treasure is buried. Once the GPS has done its best to get a seeker to the desired location, it’s anyone’s guess which rock or tree hides the cache.
Naturalist Jill Snyder, who is organizing one such geocaching event this Easter, told the Associated Press that these hunts can reveal the searcher’s inner child:
“If you loved looking for Easter eggs as a kid then geocaching definitely is for you…. You approach finding caches in the same way that you would an Easter egg except that you have a GPS to guide you.”
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