Spies and pirates are about equally cool. Spies have steely jaws and elaborate high-tech gadgets, pirates have cutlasses and buried treasure. I suppose there’s also cowboys, ninjas, astronauts, etc. but, frankly, who cares. For my money, spies and pirates are tied for first place as the coolest childhood aspirational occupation, with all others a long way second.

So it was with some excitement, last week, that I used my brand new handheld, waterproof Garmin eTrex Legend 12-Satellite Global Positioning System Navigation unit to locate a lonely rock wall in the middle of the Delaware woods, then found a loose stone hiding a hidden recess. And, wedged into the cavity behind, a steel ammunition box full of swag.

Arr, Langley, that’s a good time.

The GPS unit had been purchased the day before, at the Eastern Mountain Sports store in Haverford, PA. I’d wanted a GPS for a long time, since I’ve always been abjectly clueless about directions. And this GPS is a doozy. It fits in your hand, it’s shiny and blue, it’s waterproof, it knows every major road and town in North America, it runs for 12 hours on two AA batteries. It has a handlebar bracket and a grey-green backlight. It’s droppable. I clamped it to my motorcycle and turned it on: “TRACKING SATELLITES” it said.

Coooool.

GPS units kick ass if you get easily lost, like me, and they’ve swept the construction and transportation industries. Operators of large earthmovers usually have GPS antennas mounted on their vehicles’ blades, and can see on a screen the dirt they need to move (in blue), and where they need to move it to (in red.) Hikers, mountain bikers, canoeists and fisherman have them, and it’s de rigeur, I’m told, to bolt an expensive Garmin V to the cockpit of your BMW motorcycle.

The rise of GPS is also giving birth to new activities, none more popular than a game called Geocaching. Geocaching is a gadgeteer’s cross between a treasure hunt and a distributed capture-the-flag game. The idea is simple: somebody, anybody, hides a waterproof box. They can hide it wherever they like, usually someplace out of the way -- in the middle of the woods, built into a stone wall, or strapped at the top of a tree. Using their GPS unit, the cacher takes the precise latitude and longitude of the box. To get the precise coordinates, the cacher may take the average of a dozen readings, arriving at a figure that is precise to a dozen feet. Finally, the cacher uploads the coordinates of their Geocache on the Web, to the Geocaching Website.

Geocaching has been popular for five or six years, ever since handheld GPS units became (relatively) affordable, and by now there's a lot of caches hidden all around the country. A lot of caches. You can look them up on the website by state, by Zip code, or by proximity to your home coordinates. Read the descriptions, pick a cache, enter the coordinates as a waypoint into your GPS, and off you go!

Which is what Kate an