Ghosties and Geocachers

Hannah's parents Julie and Martin (Geocaching name Fat Bloke) came down for the weekend to do a spot of local Geocaching and also to attend a Halloween Geocaching event with us.

After catching up on our geo-gossip we set off to Barnburgh, near Doncaster, about 11am on Saturday, arriving a little early for the Noon meet but not early enough to do any nearby series although we did pop off to do a single find just up the road.

There are quite a few series around this area almost all placed by Mr Truffles. He has a local Barnburgh 1-12 series, plus two small series (each with 4) placed specifically for last year's Halloween event and another series of 8 placed for this year's event. He also has two random single ones locally too.

It was really nice to meet so many Geocachers and to have a proper chat with Ea51ron and Mr Truffles, both of whom I have a lot of respect for. Ron has done several well planned series with nice hides and always manages to make really interesting walks. Mr Truffles has found over 9000 caches and has about 200 of his own hides; he almost single-handedly keeps Rotherham Geocachers busy. He kindly complemented me on my recent puzzle cache and container and pointed me towards two other infamous puzzles that I've since started work on solving.

I must thank Angellica for organising this event, the travel bug swap box and for scattering lots of horrid creatures around the tables, but I must also make a mental note to myself so that next time I do not do as many or even any caches and to invest the time in meeting and greeting and exchanging stories and tips with fellow Geocachers.

Anyway I had planned two routes to take in most of the local caches but by the time everyone had arrived and we'd met many familiar names (and put faces to them) and then eaten, time was pushing on so we decided to just do one of the circuits.

We set off with Patrick and family and planned to meet up with Yorkypudding & AgeingHippy later.

A few easy caches later we came across one of Mr Truffles epic hides. This was an off-set cache where the coordinates point to a location that has the coordinates to the actual cache. Nine of us spent 40 minutes hunting high and low for these coordinates all to no avail. It was one of those occasions where you've invested so much time it makes you less likely to quit but eventually we had to tear ourselves away and get on with the day.

We completed the part circuit and arrived back at the carpark far too late to meet YorkyPudding and AgeingHippy who I correctly presumed had gone on without us. We left Patrick at this stage and Hannah, myself and her parents decided to quickly do another nearby series of 4 before retiring for the day.

In total we did 5.4 miles and picked up another 11 caches - I ended the day (without realising at the time) on 399 finds.