Senior Olivia and her family were searching everywhere around the shops in old town Lewisville. No bench was passed without looking under it. No stone was left unturned. Every outside umbrella, every store sign, all of the landscaping was thoroughly examined for a hidden treasure. Her feet were beginning to ache and her legs were tired. But she could not stop searching for - she wasn’t exactly sure what it was.
All she knew was that the geocache was somewhere. She had no idea what it looked like. She only knew its coordinates.

And she knew she had to find it.

* * *
Geocaching is like a world-wide game of hide-and-seek. People hide containers, or geocaches, anywhere around the world. Then other people seek them out, take the treasure, and leave their own for the next geocacher. The containers can be anything from a small camera film bottle to a military ammo box. All kinds of things are hidden inside ranging from bracelets to action figures.

Geocaches come in all shapes and sizes, and there are several different types. According to the geocaching website, www.geocaching.com, there are 16 types - the most common one being traditional, or a simple object found using only the coordinates. There are also multi-caches, which involve one geocache providing a clue linked to another cache.

The family plays this real-world scavenger hunt game. To locate their treasure, the geocachers use the latitude and longitude of its general hiding spot. Using the geocaching website they load the coordinates onto a GPS. Then the search began.

“We wandered around the shops for hours looking for it,” Olivia said. “You wouldn’t believe the looks we got huddled around our faulty GPS that kept screaming ‘turn left now!’ It wasn't until we decided to abandon it that we found a small tuna tin with a magnet [inside] on the underside of a patio table.”

Olivia and her brother, sophomore Clay, started geocaching with their dad five years ago. But they are not the only geocachers at the school. Senior Bonnie stumbled upon her first geocache by accident.

Floating along the Brazos River in a canoe, Bonnie was talking and laughing with a co-ed group from the YMCA. As her dad pulled the canoe to shore, the group started to set up camp for the night.

“We were cooking dinner and exploring… when I saw something up in a tree that looked like a bat box, but it was too low,” Bonnie said. “I pointed it out to my dad, and [he said] ‘that's a geocache.’”

When Bonnie opened the geocache, she found a keychain with a small globe on it, a clear bouncy ball filled with liquid glitter and a pair of toy chattering teeth.

“We all had a laugh at [the teeth],” she said. “We turned them on and set them on top of one of the coolers we had and watched them run around.”

Since this was Bonnie’s first geocache, she had to learn the rules of geocaching, including what to leave behind. She decided to exchange an elastic lanyard she made for the globe keychain. She also learned from her dad that she had to take out the journal inside.
“You’re supposed to write your names in a small notebook kept inside,” Olivia said. “But people like to leave little things behind. We've found army men, sunglasses, sticker sheets, magnets, earrings, small farm animal figurines.”
The most memorable geocache Olivia has ever found was also the weirdest.

* * *
It was noon in the middle of a hot Texas summer. The family were fighting though the heat and the low-hanging smog. The brush and branches in the little forest behind their neighborhood left scratches on their arms. Sweat was running down their backs. After 15 minutes, all they wanted was to go home and take an icy shower.

The only thing that kept the family of four going was their GPS’s promises of “30 feet and the destination will be on the right.”
“It wasn’t 30 feet. It wasn’t 60 feet. It was a good quarter mile,” Olivia said. “Had it been cooler, it might not have been so bad, but it was hot and we were miserable.”

After much complaining and bad attitudes, Olivia found the camo box hooked on a tree. They opened it up, expecting a reward for their long, sweaty hunt. There was one thing sitting at the bottom of the box.
“A toothbrush,” Olivia said. “Our treasure that we so valiantly - well, maybe not that valiantly - fought for was a toothbrush.”

They ended up leaving the toothbrush inside the geocache and adding their own treasure as well.

“My mom never came on another geocache [hunt],” she said.

* * *

Though the toothbrush treasure was not her most favorite find, she’s found other geocaches that make up for it. One of these was a trackable, or travel bug, called Windowla. "Travel bugs" are just what they seem - they’re geocaches that travel from place to place. Olivia’s travel bug is a silver dog tag with a depiction of a beetle on the front.

“I actually took one with me to Scotland and left it there,” Olivia said. “Windowla has been in Europe, China, Mexico. It's traveled.”

Not all geocaches are in remote or far-away places. A few can be located in Flower Mound and its surrounding areas. In fact, there are geocaches in several popular areas.

“My favorite geocache is the one at Kid’s Kastle,” Olivia said. “It’s really small and really tricky to find, but I still visit it every time I go to the park.”
Despite the difficulty in discovering some finds, there is a reason why geocachers like Olivia and Bonnie love the search.

“It’s something you do with friends, it’s active and it’s basically got the same appeal as treasure hunts,” Olivia said. “I do it for the adventure.”