Joining the Treasure Hunt

What a self-indulgent weekend. I went treasure hunting both days, but a different way for each day.

Saturday saw the headlong dive back into the world of garage sale goodness. I used to indulge in this delicacy almost every Saturday, back when I lived in the one-suburb Farmerdale. Since moving to Planet Newy I've only done it once. It's either been too daunting to take on a particularly unfamiliar city armed with a newspaper and a map from the phone book, or I've been working or tired or hung over or something similarly destructive to early Saturday morning motivation.

Oh, but the treasures! Troves of seventies goodness laid out on plastic tables. Exercise equipment with layers of dust, rust and cobwebs. And the old guy with the bum bag. There's always got to be one! I'm back in the game. Addicted. Because somewhere in between those Women's Weekly cookbooks, the knitting patterns and the old rusty tools, there will be the hidden goldmine of music resources for fifty cents each. There will be the perfect knock-around kids guitar in the corner at five dollars because it's only got two strings. Oh yes, there be treasure!

After a slightly hung over start to Sunday morning we embarked on a treasure hunt of a different kind. Since I got an android phone with GPS, the world treasure hunting game of Geocaching has captured my interest. All over the place, unbeknownst to the "muggles" -that is, the nongeocaching folk - there are hidden containers. You search for them following the coordinates given, find the hidden cache and leave a note that you've been there. Sometimes the caches have things to swap in them - treasures, of a sort. You take an item, you leave an item in exchange. And it's all supposed to be done in secret, so that the muggles don't find out.

So yesterday my caching tour took me to an old part of Planet Newy. Originally built in 1856, it was a light tower for navigational purposes for the harbour. It was rebuilt in 1877 because the Wesleyans built a bigger building in front of it (nobody thought about that one, did they?). The bearings of the entrance channel to the harbour were altered in 1918, so it was no longer necessary. For once, this is a historic part of town that hasn't been left to crumble and become forgotten - or too messed up to bother fixing! A real treasure indeed.