We have caught the geocaching bug. Big time.
We had our first go at this fab pastime whilst we were on holiday at Longleat Forest Center Parcs at the end of November. Even though we ended up walking miles, and I mean miles, we absolutely loved it. So Father Christmas treated us to our very own GPS unit, the superb Garmin GPS 60.
It appeals to me in particular because I love all that treasure hunting sort of stuff. It includes the use of a gadget (always a plus), the buying of said gadget (and I am a gadget girl!) but also I'm not really one for just going out walking. I like to walk with a purpose. And geocaching gives me that purpose. It doesn't hurt that it's a hobby that all the family can participate in and gets the children out in the fresh air and excercising to boot.
We are now proud members of the global geocaching world. I've also logged on to the website, Geocaching.com, and I was surprised, nay shocked to say the least, to find that there are no fewer than 2340 cache sites within a 50 miles radius of our home! And that in fact there was one within a 5 minute walk from the house.
We went out on our first trip on Boxing Day, to see if we could find the cache that was within walking distance. This was a multi-cache site, meaning it involves two or more locations, the final
location being a physical container. There are many variations, but most
multi-caches have a hint to find the second cache, and the second cache has
hints to the third, and so on. An offset cache (where you go to a location and
get hints to the actual cache) is also considered a multi-cache. In this case we got to the first location and had to note down the 2 numbers on the nearest lampost. The top figure = T and the bottom figure = B. We then had to note down the number of dragons on
top of the roof of the local chinese restaurant, this figure = D. From this we were then given little mathematical problems to solve and could then work out the co-ordinates for the next cache. And so on. The children had a blast. We got to the last set of co-ordinates (called waypoints) but alas couldn't find the physical cache, even after rooting around in the undergrowth and were just on the point of giving up and walking away when Richard stepped in and became the hero of the hour. He found it!
We were very excited... and then very disappointed. The cache had been moved because of mugglers (non-geocachers who can potentially find/see the cache and take it!!!) and we were then given another waypoint to find the actual cache. This time we failed. It was getting late and getting dark so we decided to make our way home, have a lovely hot drink (a warm winters Pimms for me) and try again another day.
We haven't yet been back there but today we did go on another outing. We took my mum and step-dad too and think we've got them hooked! Today we were highly successful, if a little muddy. What I'm really loving about it is that we are getting out and seeing parts of our local area that we have never seen before. Today we were to be found alongside the Wiltshire and Berkshire canal - we never even knew this part of it was there! And we found the cache... yay! And not only that but we found 2 traceable items, a TravelBug and a GeoCoin. These are items that
people buy (at a very small cost) and that they put out in the world to travel, sometimes with some sort of set goal/agenda (to see the castles of England for example), and the owners can follow their progress. They work sort of like hitchhikers. You pick them up and carry them with you to some other cache. Each has its own unique tracking ID that gets entered online and can then be tracked. Cool. Also today in the cache the children each got to choose a small toy and the owners of the cache had left a Christmas card for the next people to find it (us!). We left a pc adventure game. Oh, and we saw some very sleepy ducks!
We have been bitten by the bug (a TravelBug perhaps?).
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