Muncie — N 40 degrees 10.149 W 085 degrees 21.269 degrees.

"Beep."

Bill Curtis's GPS unit signals that they are getting close. "It should be right over there," he says, pointing to a clearing among the trees.

"This is going to be fun!" his daughter Lena, 6, declares before jumping off the trail, her Crocs cracking the twigs underfoot.

Her mom, Pam, and her sister, Tasney, 8, are right behind her, pushing the low branches out of the way and scanning the area for any sign of "treasure."

But this is unlike any other treasure hunt. Their map is a GPS unit, their treasure a "cache." They are not pirates, but geocachers, a growing number of people who enjoy their outdoor adventures mixed with a little technology.

On this geocache, Lena and Tasney bring along some Pokemon cards.

"When you take something, you have to leave something," Tasney explains.

"I wonder if (the cache) is big enough for a card?" Lena wonders aloud.

It doesn't take long before Lena is down on her hands and knees. "I'm gonna find it," she says, confidently.

"She's good at checking the small spots," Dad says, staying upright to check the high ones -- hollow areas in the trees or in the "v" of two merging branches.

There are a couple of false alarms and it looks as if the family might have to call this one a "non-finder" before Mom discovers it, skillfully placed under ... OK, we're not going to tell you exactly where she finds it. That would spoil the fun for others, wouldn't it?

We can say that it was a large camouflaged canister filled with all sorts of goodies. Bill opens the cache -- indeed big enough for Pokemon cards -- and signs the logbook. The girls walk away with a cool geocoin and one of those neat capsule sponges.

The family, victorious, heads back to the car to plot the next adventure.

Snacks, water and long pants

The Curtises have Minnetrista to thank for their new hobby.

Bill works on the computers there, and heard about a "new GPS exhibit coming there for the summer." Once it opened, he took the family.

"I think they were hooked right away," says Tanya Brock, Minnetrista's lead interpreter. "They were checking out the GPS units every weekend, sometimes during the week."

On Father's Day, the girls surprised Dad with a fancy Magellan GPS of his own.

Since then, they have been geocaching just about every weekend -- and sometimes during the week, if they can find a few hours here and there.

It's a hobby that is fairly cheap, Bill says, and it gets the whole family out of the house.

You don't need much, Pam adds. "Snacks and water are a must," she says.

"Don't forget long pants," Lena chimes in. That requirement came after a run-in with some sawgrass, Mom says.

And it wasn't difficult to get started, Bill says. "There are 17 within five miles of our house," he says with a laugh. Turns out there are a few thousand in East Central Indiana alone.

The family logs under the name "Crwdwg." It's an old skydiving term, Bill explains, from "back in the day."

Star Date 0842-1

Bill, who has already done some pre-trip research, picks a "Sci-Fi" cache as the next stop. Dad usually handles the GPS unit in the passenger seat while Mom drives. He checks the GPS and his laptop and offers directions -- "left here," "go straight," "uh, you missed the turn" -- while Mom keeps her eyes on the road. The girls occupy themselves with a DVD in the back (on this day it was Open Season).

The "Sci-Fi" cache, placed in what amounts to a semi-trailer graveyard, has them tromping through thigh-high grass (this is where the long pants come in) and looking in old pop machines and under dilapidated tractors.

Lena tells her dad repeatedly to "check the coordinates," which sounds oddly like "corn nuts."

The sun is starting to drop and Lena is getting impatient. "This is the hardest one of all," she says. "I'm gonna faint!"

Bill isn't quite ready to cash it in. He calls a friend for some Sci-Fi trivia help (clues are given for this cache in the form of a Star Trek scenario) and then checks a few more locations. Still nothing.

After a few more minutes, the family heads back to the car, disappointed, to plot yet another adventure. But they do not leave empty-handed. Mom carries a big bag of trash, bottles, paper and whatnot she finds while searching for the cache.

"Cache in, trash out," Lena says. It's a phrase often used by geocachers who take bags with them on an adventure, picking up trash as they go.

The Doobies

The next cache gets the Curtis family back on track. They quickly find a film canister in a cinderblock and Dad unrolls the logbook. It appears the "Doobies" make it to every cache before "Crwdwg," prompting Bill to announce each time in that "Newman!" Seinfeld voice: "The Doobies."

Bill points out that the right cache container takes some thought. They have to be waterproof, because the last thing you want is a waterlogged log. A log is a list of folks who have visited the cache before you.

Together they have found small caches (micro caches, they are called) no bigger than a AA battery and big ones the size of, well, bread boxes. They have been hidden in some pretty wild places -- under wild mushrooms, in bird nests, on well-known local landmarks. So far, the "Crwdwg" record is eight geocaches in a single day.

"That's nothing though," Bill says. "Some people do 50."

People do get creative with their geocaches. One series was created around area churches. Another focuses on cemeteries. Another claims to hit every park in the county.

"We have been to many places we didn't even know existed," Bill says, recalling a local park they discovered on a recent trip.

And then there's the contents. On this day, we spied a BW-3 wet wipe, a mini-New Testament, a tiny yellow arrow, a pen cap, a hair band, a plastic soldier and what could only be described as a ball of lint.

But Bill and his family have yet to place a cache of their own. "We have been collecting coffee cans and we are working on some ideas," Bill says.

"And we have plenty of stuff to put in it," Lena says before the family quickly piles into the car, hoping to hit one more cache before it's too dark.

This fourth and final cache takes them to a park, following a vague baseball hint.

Bill notices a group of people watching them from a house nearby, no doubt wondering why this family is searching feverishly in and around a large pine tree.

The search, unfortunately, isn't paying off.

"Two for four. Not bad," Bill says as the family, hungry and worn out, heads back to the car to plot, not another adventure, but a course to the nearest restaurant.

"When can we go again?" Lena asks.

Dad smiles and looks down at his GPS. "Maybe tomorrow," he says with a big grin.

Contact feature writer Michelle Kinsey at 213-5822.

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