"I don't think I can explain this in any way that would make my parents believe me..."

Maybe you've never heard of the worldwide treasure hunting phenomenon that is Geocaching. If so, that's okay; I hadn't heard of it either until I began my 101 in 1001 project. In looking for random, fun things to put on my list of 101 goals, I came across geocaching.com and, without any real understanding of how the treasure hunt worked, slapped it on my list as Goal #86.

Last night, my friends and I finally decided to find out what geocaching is really about. We headed to the website and, after reading up on the details, decided to finally try it out for ourselves: at ten o'clock at night, on one of the coldest winter days on record. Four girls and a boyfriend.

So here's the gist: we each brought an object to place into the "cache" that we would make. I brought a ring and a bouncy ball; my friends put in eyeliner, and an oversized stuffed fish that probably shouldn't have been able to fit in such a small container, among other random objects we had found lying around. We closed our cache, which was, by decree of geocaching.com, an airtight, waterproof container. We were then ready to hide our geocache, but that wasn't all we would do: we were also going to find some hidden treasure of our own.

Now, geocaching is set up to work by GPS. The coordinates of each cache is recorded online, and it's cachers jobs to find the containers hidden at each location. When you find it, you can take something out, but you have to put something else in to replace it. Then you put it back in its hiding spot and let some other cacher find it. The key to finding the cache is the GPS coordinates, because while the geocache may be hidden, the GPS lets you know that you're looking in the right spot. Our only problem was that last night, we didn't have a GPS with us.

We ran around for hours in the dark, trekking across busy highways and deserted parks in search of the "sketchy door" where the cache we were finding was supposedly located. We nearly got arrested not once, not twice, but three times as we waved our flashlights into gaping holes in the ground shouting, "Is that the box?" We stopped at green lights and ran from strangers and dashed into oncoming traffic and jammed out to music and made illegal u-turns and waved to hobos and finally, finally found the box. Or rather, film canister.

And it was empty.

All right, fine. Not empty. But all it had was a list of the people's names who had found the box before us. Somehow, we weren't disappointed. We were just happy that we had found our box.

And so as we replaced the canister and hid the geocache of our creation, there was a spirit of triumph in the air. And then my friend Frenchie turned to me and said with a laugh, "I'm sorry my fish was too big."