How it all began...

I heard about Geocaching about four years ago from my girlfriend's father. I don't know when he started but I do know he's racked up a decent find count.

Being an I.T. geek it appealed to me but I didn't act upon the urge until a co-worker mentioned it again earlier this year. I had been getting a bit bored of my main "hobby" which I have to confess was World of Warcraft and had been for over 5 years. The game was in a down-turn waiting for the next expansion and I was burnt out. I was also painfully aware I was very overweight and unfit. This comes of sitting down at work all day and being a lazy sod at night.

I registered on the site and did a bit of searching around. The timing coincided with a long weekend we had planned up at Kielder Water. We bought the iPhone application and headed off with half a mind to try some whilst there.

It looked as though it would be a disaster. We got there and there was no phone signal and therefore no Internet connection. We couldn't do searches or download any cache information. Disappointed we forgot the idea and started to enjoy our short break.

However! Whilst at the top of a big hill in the middle of nowhere Spandannah notices we have a faint signal. We both load up the app (we both had an iPhone 3G at the time) and quickly looked for a nearby cache.

Wonders will never cease and we were 40 feet away from our first ever cache. My iPhone was terrible and over the coming month we realised my GPS was useless but Span's was much better. So after 15 minutes of hunting, not knowing what we were looking for, we stumbled upon a HUGE cache containing all sorts of goodies, even a DVD!

We were hooked.

(For reference this cache was Kielder Sky Space [Nothumberland] http://coord.info/GC2C92 and currently stands as 1) My first cache 2) My furthest from home cache 3) My furthest North cache 4) My furthest East cache and 5) the biggest physical cache I have seen.)

We discovered that when added to favourites the cache was saved on the iPhone and no longer required an Internet connection. We 'favourited' several local caches and spent the next couple of days finding about 4 more.

More news in the next post and I promise the long posts will stop once I've caught up with myself!