Have you ever dreamed of following a map to a buried treasure? Or did you read Treasure Island and wish that you could be Jim Hawkins and trek through a jungle to find pirate doubloons while evading bloodthirsty cutthroats? Well, you are SOL because guess what? You’re in the 21st freakin’ century and pirates are gone, wenching is gone, the rum is gone, and there never was any pirate treasure in the first place because those bloody bloodthirsty pirate bastards spent it on the wenching and rum… which is why those are both gone too!What the 21st century does have is iPhones, GPS, and satellites.  The 21st century also has dorks like you and me who want the wenching, the treasure hunts, and the rum. The wenching is called prostitution now and is illegal in Massachusetts, and get your own damn rum, this bottle is mine!The treasure hunt experience though, I am more than willing to share with you.Using such magical devices such as iPhones, GPS, and satellites, you can go on a treasure hunting adventure. In fact, there is a treasure you can even find on campus!The name of the game is Geocaching! In 1992, some nerdy guys (probably while at a Star Trek convention or while in their mother’s basement smoking reefer) decided that it would be pretty bodacious to use GPS coordinates to find treasures. So that’s what they did- planted some booty, gave their friends the way-points, and voila! A treasure hunt using the latest gadgets rather than old sheepskin paper and a compass.Eighteen years have passed and doing this is even easier since GPS units have been made cheaper and cell phones now have more capability than the KGB did. If you have an iPhone, there is actually a geocaching app for purchase ($10). If you have any other kind of smart phone with GPS capability, there are other (but less user-friendly) applications as well.And so our adventure begins:12:00pm: Before setting sail , it is important to go on the geocaching website www.geocaching.com to first see which caches are available and to read the official rules. It is important to note that if you are hiding a cache, you must abide by the rules, which have changed significantly since 9/11. After all, we do not want Muggles (non geocaching folk) discovering a cache by accident and mistaking it for a bomb or some other malicious device. For those of you that remember the ATHF Lite-Brite incident in Boston, you know what I mean.12:05pm:  I decided upon geocaching in the Lynn Woods, just north of Boston, but there are several “urban caches” in Boston as well as those hidden in a more natural environment. I’m sure that places like the Arboretum in Jamaica Plain or other wooded areas hold a countless number of caches.12:10pm: Because I do not have an iphone, I decided to go geocaching with my mother who is a geocaching fanatic who also happens to be Professor Hansen in the Sociology department should you care to go on a geocaching adventure for extra credit (whether she’ll give it to you though is up to her). She and I uploaded the coordinates to her phone, and then we were off in a pirate ship worthy for two- A Hyundai.12:30pm: Lunch at Uno’s.  After all, pirates need full bellies to go treasure hunting.  But the scurvy barkeep would not serve me grogg because it was too early in the day. Yarr!1:20pm: We drove through the gated entrance of the Lynn Woods. The stone walls were likely made from ship’s ballast. We parked and found plenty of Muggles with their dogs. We had to be careful not to let any of the caches be discovered by those outside the geocache circle.1:22pm: We start up the geocache application and find that the closest cache is less than 500 ft away, probably hiding at some crevice of the stone wall.  We step up off the pavement on to snow-covered ground that crunched beneath our feet. I see some footprints leading to the approximate location of the cache. I decided to look around the area of wall where those footsteps stopped thinking that another someone had been searching for that cache recently.1:25pm: I looked down to find that on the other side of the wall, the ground dropped far lower than on the side I was on. I saw a set of stairs nearby leading down to the other side of the wall. My mother and I agreed that we had been searching on the wrong side.1:28pm: A vicious-looking dog barked at us through a fence while we passed a baseball field on the way to the stairs. It was all a front though, as we soon found her to be tame and begging to be pet.1:30pm: The path to the stairs proved difficult with the thick layer of ice beneath our feet. Why ever did I wear tennis shoes when I knew I’d be trekking in the woods?1:31pm: We approached the other side of the wall and found plenty of places where the cache might be hiding. We left no crevice unsearched, no rock unturned.1:35pm:  I see a crevice in the wall down at ground level. I hunch over and moved a rock that looked like it had been placed deliberately. I saw a black cap to what I recognized as a 35mm film canister.1:35pm (and 30 seconds): “Found it!”, I shouted to my mom.  I popped the lid open as she walked over. Because of the size of this cache, it only held a log to sign, but many are large enough to hold little treasures: anything from little plastic army men to DVDs.1:36pm: We signed the log with our “geocaching names” since you are not supposed to leave a real name. Onward to another cache!1:40pm: We saw ice fishermen! I thought they were just in legends and fairy tales… I guess they do exist!1:45pm: After a small hike through a more wooded area, we came across Ground Zero for another cache.  I had to climb up a rather steep hill to be in the right spot and found myself among numerous boulders. After quite a bit of searching for this cache which appeared to be missing, I abandoned the search and turned to throwing snowballs near where my mom was searching, then ducking behind a boulder and slowly peek over to see her looking around, trying to find out what the noise was.1:50pm: We had determined that this cache, one large enough to hold countless treasures would have to wait for another day.So now that you have an idea of what geocaching is, I encourage you to hop on a computer and visit www.geocaching.com, and start geocaching, you scurvy pirate dog!