Into the second (and final) week of the school holidays and the chances of me actually getting a lie-in at some point are rapidly dwindling. (I started this blogpost at the start of the week - I'm back to work tomorrow and I managed a grand total of zero lie-ins !) I had the kids in the bedroom at 7.30 one morning asking if we could go out geocaching again ! What have I started ?! I didn't need much (or in fact any) convincing though so I jotted down the coordinates, programmed the GPS and we were off. On the way to one of our favourite parks, we stopped by an old church to find a cache.
It took a bit of hunting (we've discovered that the caches relating to monuments and historic buildings are usually not right on them but opposite) but we found it eventually. There was no treasure in there but we decided to leave one anyway and managed to squeeze in a toy crocodile !
On to the park. We followed the GPS to the first cache location and started hunting. I found a lid but that was all. The kids went slightly further and Juliette called out that she'd found the log on the floor. A bit more hunting and we found the rest of the container so someone had obviously found it and ransacked it. Shame really. This is why you need to be discreet when finding and logging caches.
I logged our find, put it all back together and popped it back in a likely cache, although it's probably not in the right place at all. I've logged it as "needs maintenance" on the geocaching.com site so that the owner can come and put it back in the right place.
Our next hint was for "a giant lying down" and following the GPS took us to this huge tree, which has fallen over but is still growing.
We've been in this park zillions of times but have never found this tree before - it has a series of wooden steps nailed on so you can climb up to the top. How cool is that ?!
We had a good hunt for the cache but didn't find it - although we did find this strange metal pole hidden in the middle of some branches. Maybe Little Bo Peep has taken up geocaching?!
We wandered around looking for another cache to no avail - I think the trees were messing up my GPS signal because I couldn't find the exact spot, it kept sending me 100m further on in a constantly changing direction ! - then my GPS battery died (oops, that means I've done 9 hours of geocaching already in just a few days !) so we gave up and headed to the swings instead.
Time for a well earned rest while they played !
Then I remembered seeing that one of the caches was opposite the play area and the hint was "right into your eyes" so I wondered if these benches, with lovers staring into each other's eyes, were what it was referring to. I spotted this mysterious arrow on the back of one - could that be anything to do with it? Not sure really, so we'll come back another day with the coordinates and new batteries in the GPS.
Just time for an ice cream then we set off for the long walk home. My pedometer tells me we did 19,422 steps, walked 9.71km and burnt off 507 calories which is about the same as yesterday - phew, I'll be glad to go back to work for a rest !
Head over to the new geocaching linky and share your adventures !
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shame when people wreck them, if we cant find one we go and look at the log and see if others cant find it as well in case it has gone missing. Nice of you to put it back and log it as needing maintenance, the website makes that nice and easy for us.
ReplyDeleteIt does get easier to have an idea where to look when you get into the way of thinking.
You will need to learn to carry spare batteries, but looks like you all had a great day out regardless.......I can see 7 weeks of summer holidays stretching in front of you getting moaned at to go caching.
Enjoy your break back at work. lol