Ever wanted to go on a treasure hunt but had no idea where to start? Thanks to the increasing trend of a treasure hunting game called geocaching, websites now host treasure hunts, called caches, all over the world. You don’t have to be a worldly explorer to go on these treasure hunts. OU is home to several geocaching adventures of its own. This means your next adventure could be right outside your door.

Geocaching.com is a website where people can set up a cache hunt. These hunts consist of finding a hidden container, filled with little trinkets from geocachers who have come before you. The etiquette is to leave a trinket of your own in the box before taking a trinket of past geocachers. For example, when I went geocaching, we took a sticker and a patch from the tin and left a book of matches and some coins. This is to ensure people are not taking advantage of the little treasures.

OU’s campus is home to four caches that are a part of the OU Cache Series on geocaching.com. This series is located around various buildings and sites on campus, which is one of the harder ones in Norman because the website does not provide you with any hints other than the general locations. The series includes a hunt in the Oklahoma Memorial Union, Gaylord Hall, the Sarkeys Energy Center and one at the stadium.

In my family, treasure hunting was a normal weekend past time. My grandfather took my mom and my aunt out looking for arrow heads and other findings their entire lives to fill the old west museum we own, which in turn made me the only kindergartener in my class who knew what a metal detector was and how to use it. So, it may come as no surprise that geocaching is now my new hobby.

Now, how does one go about getting to the little treasures hidden all around the world? Well, as a now-seasoned geocacher, let me offer a little advice:

• Sign up.

Make an account with one of the free versions on geocaching and get the app on a smart phone — if you have one.

• Choose your locale.

Once you have signed up, you can type in a zip code, coordinates or a name of a place that you want to go exploring, and the website will pull up all of the geocaches located in that area. There are well over a hundred just in the Norman area.

• Know the lingo.

There are some key phrases you need to know as you embark on your first hunt. A muggle, not to be confused with “Harry Potter,” means a person who is not geocaching and could interrupt your hunt. If a geocache says there could be a lot of muggles, that means it is in a highly populated public area and could make the search more difficult.

Another term that is good to know is skirt-lifter. This means the cache is hidden somewhere on the ground, and if you are geocaching in a skirt, which is not the best idea in my opinion, you will need to lift it in order to search the area thoroughly.

• Interpret the symbols.

There are symbols provided to help narrow down when, where and what conditions the caches are hidden in.

Once you are ready to go out on your adventure, you will either want to enter the provided coordinates into a GPS or into a smart phone or look at the driving directions if they are provided. This will get you within about a 10-20 radius of the geocache.

When hunting for caches, it is best to recall the adage, “it’s not where you end up, but the how you got there.” On one of my more challenging geocaching experiences, I only found one out of three caches, and I made a bit of a fool of myself while the “muggles” stared and thought that perhaps I had lost something in the drainage pipe under a bridge or was scavenging a dog park with no dog for fun.

The point is, you can have a really great time doing something a little out of the ordinary. Geocaching is a great date idea for those who have a little Indiana Jones in them. Granted, there are not, to my knowledge, any booby traps involved in these treasure hunts.