n.e.a.r.ly done

Having finally accepted that the dark nights are here to stay we kitted up last night, right from work, and set off to do a nearby series called "n.e.a.r." by a family who use that as their username (it's an acronym of their real names). This is a simple walk set in a 'motorway triangle' created by the roads leading to and from the M1 and M18 and the M1 itself. The entire walk only took us 35 minutes so we thought we'd also clear up another couple placed by the same family a mile or so away in Thurcroft. The first was a simple 'cache and dash' where we parked practically next to it, and the second was a short 0.5 mile round trip to the first cache of the night that wasn't an insta-find.

On the way back to the car I saw the largest toadstools I think I've ever seen. Here's a photo and given that my GPS is just over 10cm (4") long you can see how large they are.

Back at the car by 19:25 we thought it would be almost rude not to go off and get the only n.e.a.r. cache that we've never found so we drove up to Wickersley and did another 1.1 mile round-trip down a lane, around a field and into a wood. It was very dark and we resorted to using the hint to find this one - possibly because my stomach had started rumbling.

We were home for 20:10 and while making tea I loaded up the bread maker and the slow cooker so tonight I guess we'll be eating before we go out and then won't have to rush home.

(Total 7 caches, 3 miles walking.)

Great Scots

(I make no apologies for the blog spam today - this is my diary!)

We had a day off work on Monday to unpack, wash and generally relax from the excesses of Ireland before returning to work on Tuesday. However by 5pm I was fed up of being in a stuffy house so, encouraged by an email from Patrick, we spoke and arranged a quick night caching trip out to pick up a new series near North Anston - Great Scots.

Each cache in the series was related to a Great Scot, for example Sean Connery and William Wallace, and we thought it an amazing coincidence that as we sat in the car waiting for Patrick that Radio Two were interviewing an author who had just published a book on Robert The Bruce - or cache #5 as we'd later call him!!

Patrick arrived at 6:15pm, in the bitterly cold darkness, and we set off on a 3 mile stroll through woodland and open fields. This is a pretty simple, yet very good series on flat terrain, which was made more difficult by the cold and the dark. (I've found a fault with my super-high-powered police-issue torch - it's metal and it's flipping freezing!!)

Time for the gloves to come out methinks.

It was great to catch up with Patrick and tell him all the Irish gossip and to see what he'd been up to without us this weekend. A very good geocaching friend indeed.

We got home about 8:10pm having logged 3.1 miles and 6 more caches, cold and fresh I knew I'd sleep well later that night.

Geocaching in Dublin - Day 3

Today we went out primarily to visit the shops and mop up a couple of caches. We found a great one called 'The loneliest bin in the World' (GC20VM8) which was hidden in a hedge behind a railing fence and I must say I felt quite sorry for it! We found one that was hidden so well I even paid for international Internet access just so I could download a spoiler picture to help us. (It's called Firefly series #1 if you're interested - GC263R0.)

We did a virtual cache (GCC2DE) down on the River Liffey which involved reading about the Great Famine and this then led us, having piqued our interest, to the famine museum based onboard a replica 18th century sailing ship moored on the Liffey. It was a very good guided tour led by an enthusaistic Canadian which had little to do with the actual famine but was primarily about the voyages taken from Ireland to Canada and back during the famine.


Today we also had our first DNF - Did Not Find - hugely frustrating but we had to let go because we couldn't search as well as we'd like given the huge Muggle factor - something we'd been amazingly lucky about all holiday.

Day three in Ireland complete. 5 caches found. One boat museum and dozens of shops visited. 7 miles walked. One pair of ladies boots purchased (not for me I hasten to add!) and still no Guinness consumed although not from illness but from guilt about my health!

We left the hotel at 5pm and were back in our own bed by midnight. A fantastic break to an amazing city with so many sights, sounds and drinks savoured and as a bonus to it all it was our first international geocaching trip.

A huge hugs must go to Hannah for arranging it. Thanks babes xx

Geocaching in Dublin - Day 2

After another hearty breakfast we set off for Phoenix park. This park is about 3 miles to the west of Dublin and I had previously planned to go here because it had one of the largest caches around and would be ideal to leave a couple of travel bugs inside and perhaps bring a couple back with us.

I also wanted to do this walk today as penance and also to make us, theoretically, feel better after the previous nights excess.

We took a convoluted route to the park, passing through Temple Bar (the tourist part of Dublin with overpriced bars and shops) and heading out west. Once at the park we popped into the zoo (we had free tickets) and spent a couple of hours looking at various tigers, sealions and penguins and generally feeling pretty ill. We then did the extra 3 mile walk into the centre of the park to get the Phoenix cache and back out. Disappointingly all the logged travel bugs were missing but I hoped these were simply a loggers oversight as all the remaining contents seemed to be in order.

By the time we were leaving the park (Europe's largest city park) around 4pm we were both struggling. We'd walked a good 10 miles, had slept badly and were both aching. Fortunately the heaven's opened and it started to belt it down. This was the final encouragement I needed to give up and flag down a taxi back to the hotel!

In the evening we went to a fabulous restaurant and logged in another 3 miles walking although no caches.


Day two tally:
13 miles walked.
5 caches found.
2 aching legs.
1 zoo visited.
1 sore head.
0 Guinness consumed.

Drinking in Dublin - Day 1

Spandannah and I took an evening flight from Leeds/Bradford to Dublin for a long weekend on Thursday night. We didn't arrive at our city centre hotel until it was too late to do anything, apart from a quick Guinness in the bar, so we simply unpacked and looked forward to our three days in Ireland - a place I'd never been to.

After a hearty (too hearty!) breakfast on Friday morning we decided to wander randomly around the sites of the city centre and drift off in the direction of any caches that popped up within a reasonable range.

Within 30 seconds of leaving the hotel we got two firsts: our first Irish cache which was also our first webcam cache. I'd seen this cache before we left England but hadn't realised how close to the hotel it would be. I texted two work friends who both watched us appear on the webcam and then saved a copy of the picture for us.

This break was our first big urban caching session (apart from York which had been carefully pre-routed) and a lesson has been learnt for the next time - I think we'll remove all the puzzles & multi-caches from our listings and leave the simple traditional caches, virtual caches and webcam caches. This is because these are generally easier to pick-up on random wanderings and don't require any pre-planned routing. Quite a high proportion of Dublin's city centre caches are puzzle caches, some admittedly very simple, but when you are on a short timescale and in unknown territory I think it is easier to sightsee and wander randomly without letting geocaching interfere too much. (Perhaps on a return trip you could pre-plan these routes more capably?)

So on Friday we wandered randomly, we met three fellow Geocachers inside the castle and ultimately headed off towards the Guinness Storehouse - which is an exhibition/museum and also the brewery where they make most of the Guinness for the whole World (there are 3 breweries in Africa for that continent, everything else is brewed in Dublin - 3 million pints per day, 5 million for St Patrick's day and Christmas!)

Having been a Guinness drinker for about 22 years I was quite looking forward to the visit and after picking up a cache at the gate we went in and spent a fabulous 3 hours wandering around seeing how the 'Black Magic' is made, marketed, served and drunk. We had a pint each at the top of Storehouse in the 360 degree viewing room looking over the whole of Dublin, and then made plans for the evening.


(I tried to take an 'Arty' photo of the two free samples we got at the Storehouse.)

Plans plus drink.

They don't work do they.

We planned to have tea about 8pm after sampling a few local beers & bars whilst wandering roughly back towards the hotel. We had two rounds at the first bar, wandered further and then found another friendly bar and got chatting to a talkative local and the landlord - the most perfect landlord I have ever met because he gave away rounds every now and then.

At 8pm they convinced us that restaurants are open all night, besides who needs to eat anyway?

At about 11pm we were in an American restaurant, goodness knows where, eating a burger meal. Well Hannah was eating, I was sleeping. The next thing either of us remember is waking up at the hotel, 8:30am, with next to no idea how we got there.

So day one in Ireland was over. 8 caches found. Two museums visited. 7 miles walked (excluding distance inside the museums). 11 pints of Guinness consumed. Ouch.

A Snapper's Stroll

After a quiet two weeks of caching we finally got our teeth into a meaty series on Sunday. As part of Team PADS again (Patrick, Aggrajag, Donna, Spandannah, kids & doggie) we met up at 10am in Barnsley to do the reasonably new "The Snappers" series "A Snappers Stroll".

This starts a couple of minutes drive from J37 of the M1 at the Locke Park car park but heads off south and then west over the M1 then a long W/SW loop before heading back, over the M1 again on a different footbridge and looping back up to the start.

It's a very good series of 18 caches during which we also picked up 3 unrelated ones. Total walk was 8.3 miles over 4.5 hours including searching, signing, swaps and a lunch break.

I took a couple of travel bugs on the way around which I'm hoping to drop in Dublin at the weekend - assuming we find caches big enough to place them in.

We were out of practice and aching a bit last night but a big thanks must go to the UKSNAPPERS for taking the time to lay down a nice long series.

Also a big thanks to Patrick, Donna and family for entertaining us on the way around.

Lose 6lbs in two weeks

After someone at work showed us some pictures they'd had taken & professionally edited (a la magazine cover style) I thought I'd save the quoted £4000 and do one myself for a laugh.

I did this at work and it took me under 90 seconds, it's not meant to be realistic and is meant to be a bit of a joke along the lines of those adverts you continually see online.


I lost 90lbs in 6 months Geocaching!

Jeremy Creak

Well my long-awaited new puzzle cache went live last night Jeremy Creak and the lost cache (GC2GC32) which took much longer to make than I had anticipated. I had written the puzzle a couple of months ago and I believed it to be 'nicely' difficult but blow me down if the cache wasn't found within 10 hours by 'snoopyisboss' aka Sarah.

I hid it at 8:30 last night in the pitch black, it went live on the servers around 10pm and Sarah solved it during her work shift, ahem hope no-one is reading from her workplace!, and she found it at 8am.

Well done Sarah!

The cache is currently for premium members only but I'll likely open it up for all to see after a couple of months, just like I did with my previous puzzle Not a Bit Sticky (GC2C5QM) last night.

This has took a few nights of my time so hopefully I can now get back to some 'proper' caching and continuing on from that hopefully back to more interesting blog posts.

Scoffing Scones in Swaffham

We've were down at my mother's house in Norfolk this weekend - she's got quite a large amount of woodland that would be great to hide caches on!

On Saturday (unfortunately we couldn't plan it for the 10/10/10 global event) we popped into Swaffham and had tea and scones at the second-hand bookshop, which has a small cafe in the back, and then wandered off to do the Swaffham Saunter series. This is about a three mile series with six 35mm film canister caches each with a coordinate leading to the final seventh. We forgot to take the clue from the first but it was pretty obvious what the missing coordinates was. The hides were all simple and there's actually little really to write about. Total walking distance was 3.9 miles including the walk from & to the car-park.

I spent a fair amount of Sunday working on my next cache. I researched the coordinates and wrote the puzzle about 6 weeks ago and then last week I uploaded the webpage which is now sat ready to be activated but still I needed to make the actual hide. I haven't really had the time or the materials but I set to work with a vengeance on Sunday whilst the kids were all hatching 'get rich quick' schemes and making magic wands which they hoped to sell at school.

I can't write too much in my blog for fear of leaving a spoiler as I'm hoping both the puzzle and the hide are difficult and therefore will be highly rewarding to successful finders.

My plan is to have it finished and published by next weekend.

**********

Muggled!

I received a DNF (did-not-find) notification and a detailed email last night from a well-experienced Geocacher who could not find my "Queen 2" cache, even after she had resorted to PAF (phone-a-friend - ring somebody for help who has already found it).

I've not had chance to check yet but from her email it really does sound like it has been stolen and it's very frustrating. I know this sort of thing happens all the time with this hobby, and I quite accept that, but as it's my first one to go missing I'm a little bit more disappointed than I probably will be in the future.

I have a replacement tub and contents ready, and it's not the money that bothers me, it's just the time it will take and also the frustration at the pointlessness of the destruction or theft.

Wildlife

On Sunday, once the rain had abated, we popped out to plant Hannah's new series. We'd done an exploratory walk a couple of weeks previously and had made approximate location plans for each cache so that they wouldn't fall foul of each other regarding the 0.1 mile apart rule and also wouldn't infringe on my 'reserved' spot for another mystery cache. (It's not really reserved but Hannah was kind enough to let me keep it as I'd planned it a month before. More news on this cache in a couple of weeks hopefully.)

We wandered around a very sodden landscape looking carefully for the best locations and taking multiple averaged GPS readings which we then manually averaged in order to be able to publish the best coordinates possible.

The fifth cache is a clever, yet easy little puzzle using wildlife carvings on posts alongside the River Rother between Catcliffe and Treeton and adds some interest to a part of the walk where you have to backtrack on yourself.

We published them at 8pm last night, they were live by 9pm, and there's already been two finds of each cache today by midday!

I'm very proud of her and in one fell swoop she's equalled my total number of cache ownerships!

(Series Final cache is here: Geocaching - Wildlife Final)

Not-So Wet Weekend

After picking up another couple of loose-ends on Tuesday we didn't have the time or the weather to get out again until Saturday. We met up again as Team PADS (minus Adam and Jade who were in London for the day) to complete the KB series near Doncaster which we'd started the weekend before and which Patrick had expanded a little with four more caches in a nice additional loop to the south.

After the torrential rain of Friday we were a little apprehensive, and packed accordingly, but the day turned out to be a total joy.

We arrived at 11am to find Patrick and Donna mopping up the remains of the third 'final' cache which had been Muggled and scattered around the parking area.

(This series has a final cache which you calculate the coordinates for on the route around. This final cache has coordinates inside for a bonus cache which itself has coordinates inside for an extra bonus - it was this one that had been damaged.)

We did almost 6 miles walking over three hours in lovely autumn sun and picked up 14 caches. The ground was extremely wet in places and involved some walking around or paddling but it was all good fun.

At one stage we passed (what I thought was) an amazing wooden bridge structure that appeared to be carrying a gas pipe across a ravine. We walked under it and I've never seen something so old-fashioned, large and bizarre. It was very Hollywood-esque if you imagine the old westerns or suspense movies where a steam train crosses a rickety bridge.






En-route we replaced one of the missing caches which had been alerted to us by the series owner. Patrick took the tub, pen and pad and we took some goodies to drop in it. We had a little fun watching the kids searching for it for 5 minutes before Patrick 'found' it in his rucksack. Needless to say the children didn't share our sense of humour.

On the way home we stopped off for a drive-by that Patrick had seen en-route. This was at a lifting bridge in Barnby Dun and was a magnetic nano attached to the fencing on the bridge. We had just arrived when three barges and boats queued up so we had the bonus of watching the bridge in action. (I doubt it's much of a bonus for the 100 cars that were sat waiting within 5 minutes!)


Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the bridge raised, or being passed under, as I was videoing it.

We'd all given up on this cache and were just turning around to leave when Hannah found it. She was very pleased with herself and for good reason, it had been a tricky one and rather than ending the day in frustration it turned out to be a good final find of the day.