Kim Schneider, mlive’s travel writer, has a column about her family’s recent geocaching expedition across Northern Michigan.  Excerpt and link:

HARBOR SPRINGS — We’re a little more than a mile into our first geocaching adventure in northern Michigan, and we already have fallen off course.

It isn’t the GPS unit that’s the problem: it’s Pond Hill Farm and its temptingly scenic spread of organic gardens and pastures. There are farm animals you can feed and shelves stocked floor to ceiling with treasures such as dilly asparagus, fresh basil marinara sauce and double-chocolate coated peanuts.

My 17-year-old son and his friend laugh as sheep jockey for position along the barn fence to slurp down the 3-for-$1 buckets of food. And we get waylaid again as they discover the squash rockets and compete to reach the farthest target first.

But we’re on no timetable. In fact, this family adventure weekend later will be remembered more for the detours than our hunting success — whether the “hunt” of the moment is for a hidden prize, wildlife or lost golf balls.

Geocaching provided the perfect course from which to veer. It’s an activity invented in 2000, and it has been picking up steam across Northern Michigan and worldwide. The high-tech adventure basically involves finding coordinates for hidden treasures on the Internet, seeking them out through hand-held GPS units, then replacing found treasure with trinkets of your own and writing in the provided logbook. The craze is so popular in this part of the state there are more than 1,300 public geocaches in the Traverse City area alone, according to the city’s convention and visitor’s bureau.

More here…

http://www.mlive.com/travel/index.ssf/2008/06/hunting_for_treasure_across_no.html

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