Geocaching … I’m addicted.

It’s true. “Capital C” took my son and I out on our first GeoCache a couple weeks ago, and now I find myself addicted to it.

I never really took to outdoors in-the-woods type activities, they never really made much sense. Hiking, for instance, always seemed like such a pointless thing. Traipsing around the woods, ticks and mosquitos all over the place, dirt … And for what? Just to do it?

So, now — introduce a little technology and a purpose — I can’t get enough. Hiked at least a couple of miles through some pretty thick brush to discover 6 caches yesterday.

For those of you that aren’t in the know, Geocaching is basically a treasure hunt. You get yourself a GPS, head over to a site like (duh!) www.geocaching.com and look up a cache, get coordinates, program your GPS and head out on the hunt.

The goal is to find the cache, usually an ammo box or some sort of waterproof container hidden somewhere out in the woods, sign the log book and trade trinkets. There’s also GeoCoins and Travel bugs — these are trackable via website — that you try to keep moving from cache to cache.

So dorky … But somehow I can’t get enough. If the weather was a bit better today, I’d be out doing it again. Perhaps I’ll try an urban cache — being that I’m a die-hard city kid. I’ve heard some pretty weird caches exist in parking garages and various other areas of downtown Chicago. Might have to pickup a handgun or some mace first though.