Geocaching diaries : Free at last, free at last, .. !

To complete the quotation from the great Martin Luther King, "thank God almighty we are free at last" ! One of the things I love about geocaching is picking up travelbugs and helping them on their journeys. You can see where they've been and how many kilometres they've travelled and it's usually quite amazing to see just how far they've gone and how many countries, or even continents, they've covered. I picked these two up at the start of the summer and I think they're cursed ! They've been travelling around with us on our travels to Brittany, the UK and Turkey and I haven't managed to find a single cache big enough to drop them off in ! 

Today was my day off so I was on a mission to set them free. As there aren't many big caches around our local area, I decided to make one of my own and drop them off in that. I had scouted out the perfect location (you may not know but you have to find a location that isn't within 160 odd metres of another cache) and, after dropping Pierre off at school, I headed off on foot to hide it. Some friendly rabbits (or maybe foxes or badgers, as they were quite large) had been digging lots of holes that I could use, but I made sure I didn't use one that looked active.

Now you see it ...

Now you don't !

I used a couple of fallen branches for an "X marks the spot", used my GPS to take a note of the coordinates and headed for home. 

It was a bit of a mad rush getting back in time for Pierre's pick-up at 11.30 because I kept getting sidetracked by interesting things like weird mushrooms and this skull (a rabbit, presumably), but I made it in the nick of time and was rather chuffed when my Fitbit buzzed to tell me I'd hit 10,000 steps before lunchtime.

This is where things started to go pear-shaped ! I came home and made lunch, then sat down to add the cache to the geocaching website. Everything was going fine until I published it and the little map showed a spot just outside our house ! For some reason, the GPS had let me down and transformed the coordinates to those of the armchair in my living room that I was sitting in ! I quickly disabled the cache then headed off to drop Pierre off at a playdate, then take Juliette on the bus to meet her friend at the new swimming pool. Sophie had come along with me so we headed back to the cache and took down the coordinates again.

Back home, I updated the coordinates, the little map changed to the right location and we were all set. I headed straight back out to pick up Pierre and, when I got back home, I could see a couple of people outside our house on their smartphones with a puzzled look on their faces. Then one of them said "are you Madhouse Family?". I did a doubletake and thought how did he know that ?! He laughed and said that he recognised me from the profile pic on geocaching ! So the coordinates had updated for me but not everyone else ! Oops ! I showed him the right coordinates and disenabled the cache (again) while I sorted out the coordinates (again). After my GPS playing silly buggers in the morning, it was time for the geocaching website to let me down - you can't modify coordinates by any more than 161m from the original spot. I emailed the moderator who sorted it out, but I had several messages during the afternoon from geocachers desperate to get the FTF (first to find) log ! After dashing off to pick Juliette again, then heading back home (again !), my Fitbit told me I had done 24,000 steps and covered 17km on foot ! I can laugh about it now but it was a totally manic day and I'll be glad to go back to work for a rest  ! At least the travelbugs are already back on their journeys - they've headed across the border to Belgium, so they didn't have long to admire the view of the lake for long ! :)

#MySundayphoto #SundaySnap 23/7/17

First to find !! (Sorry, you have to be a geocaching fan to understand the excitement of being the first person to fill in the logbook !)

Geocaching diaries : Hiding some urban caches in the town centre

As we'd had lots of adventures searching for geocaches during the Easter holidays, I decided that we'd finish off the week by hiding a few new ones. Lots of the caches in the town centre have been archived lately, so it's opened up some new places for us to hide replacements.

Walking along the footpath by the canal, we looked for a suitable hiding place and found the perfect tree. It's fairly secluded so I decided to try leaving a big cache here - we'll see if any Muggles (non geocachers) stumble across it by accident or if it survives.

Pierre excitedly climbed up the tree to put it in place. (He's only about a foot off the ground but he was very chuffed !)

Heading further into town, we popped into a little known garden next to the art museum.

This has been made into a commemorative garden with a few statues celebrating the release of Jewish prisoners and honouring the Résistance and those who were killed during WWII. We soon found a hidey hole in a nearby tree.

Our final hiding place was in another park - the sculpture garden next to the modern art museum.

It was hard to find a secluded hiding place so we hid a small cache - the capsule from a Kinder egg tucked in behind a pipe - then went exploring the rest of the statues.

We found a cute family of ducks too - these are our first ducklings of the year. We still haven't managed to find any frogspawn or tadpoles though !

 Our new geocaches still haven't been published yet but hopefully they'll inspire some other local geocachers to go out and hide some more for us to find !

Geocaching diaries : The dunes of the maritime hospital

On Easter Sunday, after the kids had done the traditional egg hunt, I wanted to get out on a hunt of my own - geocaching ! It was a beautiful day (again - we've been really lucky with the weather for the whole of the holidays so far) so we jumped on the bus (which are free at the weekends - always a bonus) and headed down to the dunes near the Belgian border. We jumped off at the Hôpital Maritime in Zuydcoote, which was originally a sanatorium, before becoming a military hospital during the two world wars - there's a film, called Weekend à Zuydcoote, which focuses on the Evacuation of Dunkirk and features the hospital. It's still used a hospital now, although few of the original buildings remain.

Our first cache was literally a few metres from the bus stop so we were off to a great start ! When you've been geocaching for a while, you can spot the likely hidey-holes from a mile away so we honed straight in on it !

We stomped through the woods and found a second cache in another tree.

The caches have been here for a few years and they're quite damp so the treasures were a bit mouldy !

Juliette filled in the logbook while I admired a lone bluebell.

Our trail headed out of the woods and into the dunes next.

We were on a roll and soon uncovered caches 3 and 4.

I managed to spot some more bluebells - I wouldn't have thought they'd have grown in the dunes as I've only ever seen them in woodlands.

The dunes are covered in very short dry grass that crunches when you walk on it so it sounds like you're walking in snow.

It was a beautiful day and we could see the sea when we were on the higher ground.

Turning around and looking behind us, the water tower on the right is where we were geocaching the week before at the Fort des Dunes.

The gps sent us down a very overgrown path next, with lots of spiky bushes to pull back and squeeze through. The hint was "under bricks behind bricks" so we knew we'd be looking for a wall or a building, which seemed strange as it was in a wild area of the dunes with nothing man-made in sight. Sure enough, we stumbled across a bunker.

It goes quite some way back but has half filled with sand over time.

There was a crawl space into a separate room but I didn't venture in there - it would appear to be a popular place to hang out and drink beer though, judging by the pile of empty cans ! The path had pretty much dwindled away to nothing and, to avoid getting scratched to pieces, we gave up and doubled back to the main path. Looking through the logs afterwards, I think we were on the wrong path and were supposed to be up above the bunker, not down below at the entrance.

Juliette wanted to stop geocaching and head to the beach but I kept the gps on, to help find our way. We just happened to go right past a geocache so we grabbed that on the way past. Funnily enough, this one has been archived but it's still there so we signed the log anyway.

A short walk later, we arrived on the sandy beach and Juliette suddenly found a reserve of energy ! We had an interesting 2km walk back to the bus stop which took us past the world war II bunkers, so I'll blog about those in a separate post.

Geocaching diaries : The Tom Thumb Circuit

The day before, we'd had a fabulous day out at the park and at the Ferme Vernaelde educational farm, but I hadn't managed to squeeze in any geocaching. Luckily, Juliette was up for retracing our steps but this time hunting for caches rather than visiting the play areas and animals. Our first stop was the Jardin d'Eau or Water Garden, a little area that has been created on what was pretty much wasteland.

It's been left quite natural, with insect hotels made out of old tree trunks and wild flower zones to encourage Mother Nature to do her stuff.

Just next to the garden is the old bag factory, which dates from the 19th century. It's been converted into a new community centre with cafes and a creche.

It took us a while rummaging through the ivy but we soon found the cache - yay !

Our next cache took us to a nearby town square ... which was round !

We needed long arms but soon uncovered this cache too.

We headed into the woods. Juliette couldn't decide whether to keep her coat on or take it off so she decided for a one-shoulder option. Nutcase !

Funnily enough, the route to our next cache took us straight through the Ferme Vernaelde. We'd only been there the day before but Juliette couldn't resist going round to see all the animals again !

The donkey yawned, as if to say "you again ?"!

The goats were all snuggled up together.

We were confused about where the pig's tusks had disappeared to ...

... until Juliette rustled a sweet wrapper in her pocket and a load more pigs came out. We've only ever seen one pig at a time so we always thought he was all by himself.

Aahhh there's Mr Tusky !

We headed over to the far end of the farm, dodging an escaped pony with a couple of girls desperately trying to catch him (they did eventually !) and Juliette used the gymkhana equipment for some gymnastics !

Followed by a quick rest !

We had to walk right through the horses' pasture.

Spotting a couple of burrows on the way, presumably belonging to field mice. "Or snakes?" gasped Juliette !

Our GPS made us force a way through a hole in the hedge which Juliette wasn't too pleased about ... especially when we arrived on a big path and realised that we definitely hadn't taken the easiest route, even if it was the most direct !

She soon stopped grumbling when she laid eyes on the cache though - it was enoirmous.

And even better, it was full of Kinder egg capsules. We had to sort through them all to find the log book to sign and were delighted to discover that most of them contained a little treasure to swap.

While Juliette sorted through to see what she wanted to take home, I rummaged through our bag to find suitably sized treasures to replace them with.

The little treasures are always a bonus when we find them, because they are few and far between in France.

A few hundred metres on, we found another cache. This one was sneakily hidden inside a fake brick, especially made as a geocache. It's hollow and has a little sliding door to seal the log book and treasures inside the compartment.

And we found another little treasure to swap - Smurftastic !

As we continued on our walk, we came across what I was always thought was a camouflaged shelter for hunters. That made sense because this series of caches is inaccessible over winter because it is a hunting area.

However, on closer inspection, it's actually a shelter for birds, with water troughs and a grain dispenser. We headed into the trees for the next cache.

Aha, here it is - carefully pushed into a hole in a tree !

We walked along a muddy path that covered Juliette's trainers and jeans in a thick, oily black substance - that will be fun to get off later then !

We didn't manage to find the final cache for the day but we did miraculously discover that we were just next to a road and our bus was waiting for us, ready to leave in five minutes. The next one didn't come for half an hour so we were really lucky !