Treasure hunting for the masses

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'Soup Guy' goes to Antartica
Bell is an avid traveler who has been to all but three continents – Antarctica, Australia and South America. So he made the destination for his “Soup Guy” the one he felt would be hardest for him to get to — Antarctica.

“My daughter was a little sad Soup Guy was going away, but I told her he’s coming back home,” said Bell, 38.

His childhood, plastic blue, Early American frontiersman toy had become his oldest child’s favorite. She called it Soup Guy because to her, the image of the frontiersman with his musket pulled back looked like he was stirring a pot of soup.

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Bell has just created a new cache for the toy and placed it in there. “We’ll see where he goes,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.”

He has been geocaching in earnest for 2 years, having discovered the activity as a way to use GPS units with his students.

Hide and seek
“When I started geocaching, it gave them a way to hide and seek stuff,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun if you look it as a treasure hunt and good exercise.”

After traveling to Philadelphia for a 12-stop geocaching tour using the King Tut exhibit as a theme, his wife also become hooked on it. Their two young children are also burgeoning cachers.

Bell is also a fan of Earthcaching, in which pictures are taken and lessons are learned about geography. It’s a slight twist on geocaching that doesn’t leave a cache in place. The place is the cache.

Travel Bug 'hotels'
There also are Travel Bug “hotels,” Bell said, at hotels or airports, where cachers leave their Travel Bugs to be picked up by other cachers to move them along to their destinations faster.

Geocaching.com’s Travel Bug Gallery includes many characters. Among them: A Darth Vader head that’s beginning its journey in Pennsylvania and hoping to hitchhike its way to Marin County, Calif.

Its first home was a Tupperware container called “The Cache Strikes Back,” with other “Star Wars”-themed items.

There are also Cabbage Patch look-alikes “Beth and Dan” from Minnesota, who “have been traveling for 30 years,” but have never been to Germany, the home of their “ancestors.”

In other words, you create the treasure. As long as it’s meaningful to you, the object will have some measure of value unique to it.

Its journeys only add to the intrigue factor, and for the owner there’s a sense of satisfaction when the cache makes it to its destination.

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For others, the satisfaction comes in the journey.

“It gives me a reason to get out of the house and enjoy nature, to use my brain a little, and the satisfaction of finding something hidden where you would least expect it,” said Gaudreau.

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