Treasure hunt
A couple of months ago I was inspired by something I read on Geek Dad. I ordered a wooden chest from eBay and a load of chocolate coins. Much application of tea bags to stain the chest, coffee grinds to create spots, and similarly for a sheet of paper – scrunched, mashed, stained, burnt etc. ensued until we were ready to plant the map + chest for discovery. Today we didn’t have anything much planned, so we stuck the map in a bottle at the bottom of the garden, and the treasure chest about a mile away, at the top of a local hill (20 paces north of a landmark!).
I got the kids searching the bottom of the garden for blackberries, and sure enough they discovered the bottle and map. Serious excitement. Even more when they spotted the big X on the map, and they were ready to march off and find treasure. In fact, they even dug out a compass and shovels (I restrained them on the shovels front). They had to walk about a mile and trudge around the landmark before finding the loot, but all had loads of fun doing it.
Unfortunately my overly analytical 8 year old quickly sussed out that it was a plant/stitch-up: “it rained last night but this is dry”. Ho hum. Still worth it for the look on their faces, especially when they discovered the treasure and got some chocolate for their trouble.
Excuse the washed out photo – it’s an iPhone original.
