Looking for Treasure on the Treasure Coast

Growing up on the beach, we’d sometimes hear stories of people finding treasure in the sand, especially after a storm would stir things up, so you can imagine my thrill when Santa brought our family a metal detector this year for Christmas.

I always wanted one of these cool tools for finding treasure, so you can bet I brought the new gift along when I went home the week after Christmas this year.

My youngest daughter and I put it to the test our first day in town.

And the only treasure we found was the stuff we buried ourselves, to prove that it worked.

Kind of a downer, you know?  We had all these visions of old coins from the Spanish shipwrecks off shore (they don’t call this area the Treasure Coast for nothing…to this day, I wear a coin around my neck from the 1715 wreck discovered by Mel Fisher…the coin in the shot above is my cousin’s from the Atocha shipwreck).  Shoot…we would have been happy with some chunk of jewelry lost just a year or two ago.  Or, even finding a quarter could have been cool.

Can I tell you what we did discover?

These metal detectors require patience.  That’s something no one in our family has much of.

We tried it again the next day, slowly pacing back and forth, sweeping the gadget over the sand.  This time, we couldn’t even find the stuff we intentionally buried.

It really took the wind out of our sails, so to speak.

But after sitting on the beach for a bit, watching my kiddo and soaking up the beauty of everything around me, it hit me. The real treasure was always there, right in front of my eyes, not buried beneath the sand.

The real treasure is the priceless time spent playing with the people I love…spending time in the place I love.

I never needed a metal detector to discover all that.