Geocaching diaries : Setting some travelbugs free

During this year's summer holiday to Lanzarote, I managed to squeeze in a couple of geocaching adventures with Sophie and we were delighted to discover a trio of travel bugs.

They were all in a cache ironically called "Playa Blanca's Worst Geocache (Probably)", presumably because of its less than glamorous location on a bit of scrubland next to a main road. It did have the huge advantage of being just a couple of minutes walk away from the the drop-off point for the free bus from our hotel to Playa Blanca beach though. If you want to find out more about the prettier side of Playa Blanca, along with its yellow submarine, glass-bottomed boats, rocks pools and love locks, head over to this blogpost. If you've never been to Lanzarote, make sure you pop over to discover Timanfaya Volcanic National Park too, and our surprising submarine safari excursion.

A couple of weeks ago, I headed out to a nearby lake and managed to release two of them - the third is rather large and wouldn't fit in any of the caches I found so I'll have to hunt out a big enough cache for it in the near future.

Before setting travelbugs free so that they can carry on their journeys, I always like to go through the logs and see where they've been. I find it quite exciting and it invariably ends up as a bit of a geography lesson for the kids too ! This cheeky little fella was the first one, called Urlaub for Allen. It started off its journey in the Lake District when its Dutch owners were on holiday from Utrecht, which is in central Netherlands. Since 2013, he has already travelled over 6000km, going from Northwest England to the Midlands, North Wales and Italy, before being dropped off in Lanzarote where I found it.

His new hiding place was this rather ingenious bird cache, secreted at the bottom of a tree in amongst all the autumn leaves.

Bye bye Allen, I hope you like your new home !

He didn't have long to enjoy the view of the lake because two days after I dropped him off, he had already been discovered and finished his jaunt around Northern France, heading back to the UK.

Slightly further around the lake, I managed to rehome another travelbug, Léna 01, which started off in Croatia, dropped off by a geocacher from Liège in Belgium, in July 2015. Since then, it's been travelling around the UK (Midlands) tbefore being dropped off in Lanzarote, where I picked it up and brought it back to Northern France.

This one also only had two days to take advantage of its lakeside views in Dunkirk before heading back to the UK !

Bye Bye little travel bug !

Off to new horizons.

I really must buy myself some trackables so that I can make my own travelbugs and follow their  adventures - now that sounds like a good idea for a Christmas gift to myself, if ever there was one !