What a hectic few weeks! Clive's been away loads, so masses of curries, but he's doing brilliantly with his new job. Laura's had fun at rehearsals and has just been told she's going on pointe after Christmas, so great excitement there. I've had a stressy time at work, a 2 week observation window requiring a few trees being used for printouts that aren't necessary normally, staff not pulling their weight and then getting flak for doing what you haven't done, not praise for all the extra you have done. Not good. Now got a stinking cold. grrrrr
The highlight from the last month is "we've found geocaching", a new modern day form of treasure hunting.
As of yesterday, we have now found 7 caches ranging from micro caches to tupperware containers with treasure.
Here are the stats so far.
I thoroughly recommend it, you do need a GPS that's designed for outdoor pursuits, we have a Garmin Etrex (it's old and Clive is now thinking of upgrading).
When we normally go out for walks, we stick to the routes we know, geocaching has introduced us to some wonderful new walks with the fun of finding treasure at the end. I wonder how many times in the past we have walked past a hidden cache without realising it is there.
Part of the fun has been finding travel bugs and geocoins in with the treasure, these are trackables and you can watch them travel around the world. We found a geocoin the other week that started in Texas and has now travelled 4000 miles, it's amazing. So last week I ordered our own coins and bugs, so yesterday I released the first micro geocoin into the wild, we are now so excited about watching it travel.
We have also got our own cache boxes, we're working out where to place them now, a chance to revisit some areas we haven't been to for years. Clive took me on a walk when we were first courting and we haven't been back since, we are now going to go back and see if we can use it for a cache. It's really soppy and romantic.
It is brilliant finding new places, the Wishing Wimborne cache was brilliant, I had never realised there were the most brilliant carvings there or that walk existed, shame we didn't see the kingfisher, but a couple were just coming back along the path who had just seen it hovering over the river.
I've bought an A5 file for the clues and have printed them off (I use the special option for my printer to shrink 2 pages to an A4 page) then fold and punch. Clive then downloads the waypoints to the gps and they then get filed. When we are out, we can then use the GPS to find the nearest cache and I've got the file to get the clue.
We're going to keep the caching bag in the car, so that when we get a moment, we can cache.
I've managed to find a sneaky stats program that lists our achievements to date.
A good excuse to get fit and have loads of fun in the fresh air.
