A Simple Life of Luxury

I treated myself to a day out geocaching yesterday. A good excuse to play with some of my Xmas presents and enjoy the winter sunshine. Before I go any further I should of course thank Anna for looking after Morgan all day long and letting me go out to play.

I started off with a relatively easy cache just above the shores of Tal-y-Llyn. Sam’s Cache was found easily and gave me a chance to try out my new toys. Before setting out I had downloaded information about the nearest 100 geocaches to our house and had uploaded them to my iPod as contacts. So, my new iPod as well as providing me with entertainment on my walk also provided me with the necessary coo-ordinates for the caches I was trying to find, along with the various clues and details needed. It has to be said it isn’t the perfect solution as I still had to enter the coordinates into my GPS receiver and the iPod probably isn’t the most robust tool or taking into the hills. It did however save me printing out the cache notes and as the iPod is new it was fun to play with it.

I then headed off to an Earth Cache (These are virtual caches with a geological point of interest and an educational element too.) I was the first to find this one (Sliding with Stile)which is always a bonus.

From here I decided to head off towards another cache higher up the hills in a ‘forgotten valley’ near to the ‘Devils Stone‘ which dates from the 16th Century. It was a lovely walk through a very peaceful valley, made even better by the fact that I knew Cadair Idris just to the east was teaming with walkers. In this valley I saw no one at all. I found the cache without any difficulty and found the Devils Stone .

Folk lore has it that before the days of the Reformation, local parishioners used to gather in the Rhiwogof Valley below Cadair Idris on the Sabbath to dance and play games.
One Sunday, the Devil appeared perched on a rock in the form of an ass, rearing up on its hind legs he let out a frightening howl that shook the surrounding mountains, everyone fled, no one had the courage to visit the spot for months afterwards.
However in time, two local shepherds one from Pencoed and the other from Rhiwogof, went to examine the rock and found the Devil’s hoof print embedded in it.

I then headed back down the hill to the car before driving to Abergynolwyn and then off up the valley to find two ore caches: Tal-y-Llyn adventure was found easily, but Quarryman and the Monkey Puzzle Tree took me a little longer to find the actual container. I was in the right area but there were so many potential hiding places that it took me ages to find the cache.

All in all a lovely day making the most of the local countryside. My new rucksack was comfortable, my iPod worked well, my new boots were OK but did give me some small blisters and my FM transmitter for my iPod worked well too. The engine management light on my new car came on again though so I still need to get that sorted.

Hope you’ve all recovered from the Xmas excesses… Just in time for some New Year excesses!!

Talking of excesses, this post is about the excess amount of information that we have to watch, listen to and read these days… There is just so much good stuff out there that it can become overwhelming.

We had a good Xmas here, my main present was a 30GB Video iPod and very nice it is too, but it has got me thinking…. Just when are we supposed to find time to watch, listen to and read all the information we can store these days? Earlier in the year we got a Hard Drive video recorder with built in dual freeview tuners. It is great, probably one of the most useful gadgets we have bought. It allowed us to watch one freeview channel and record another, the recording process is as simple as it gets (I never used to use the VCR but use this all the time), and watching things you have recorded from the ‘library’ is easy too. So, although we delete things once we have watched them, the 80GB hard drive that we thought was huge is now nearly full… We just haven’t had time to sit down and watch all the things we have recorded.

The video iPod could be the same. OK it holds my music collection which is one thing, but podcasts and video podcast are free and there are loads of them out there to subscribe to. If you have an interest to a niche subject then there is probably a podcast about it. I have already subscribed to a surf video podcast and a windsurf one, along with a couple of podcasts about website design. All of which make interesting viewing / listening. These podcasts have new articles released on a regular basis, but will I get the time to actually listen to them or will they simply gradually fill up my 30GB of space on my iPod?

We’ll have to wait and see, but a few extra hours each day just to keep up with the information overload would be lovely.

Since Anna, Morgan and I accidently started geocaching eariler this year, quite a few of our friends have started doing it too and Brad and Eloise got around to doing their first cache a couple of days ago.

I know it sounds silly looking for plastic containers in the woods or on top of hills, but it is a good excuse to go for a walk together and Brad seemed to enjoy it. Click here for details of their first geocache experience.

Thought I’d share the jokes from our Xmas Crackers with you!

Q. What do you get if you ross a skeleton and a detective?

A. Sherlock Bones

Q. What must you know to be an auctioneer?

A. Lots

Q. Wo is the most famous married woman in America?

A. Mrs Sippi.

Sorry!!!!

Click here for our Xmas 2006 Photo album.

No doubt there will be more soon.

Just a quick photo I took yesterday.

I’ll soon be releasing my first travel bug on the world. It is activated and ready to go.

What’s a Travel Bug? Basically it is a special item that you place in a geocache and send off on a mission. When other geocachers come across them, they move them from cache to cache and the special dog tag with tracking number allows them to log the Travel Bugs movements on the geocaching.com website. The travel bug is carried from cache to cache (or person to person) in the real world and you can follow its progress online. Most are given missions of some description and the Forces-of-Nature Surf Bus Travel Bug has a mission to visit beaches within the UK.

I haven’t quite released it yet as I shall probably do that when I set up my first geocache of my own (in the next week or so), but you can take a look at it and will be able to follow its progress here.

For those of you wondering where your Christmas card from us is, don’t panic we haven’t forgotten you and our thoughts are with you at Christmas. However we have decided this year to put the money we would have spent on Christmas cards (which only end up in the bin contributing to the waste problems) to buy a couple of goats for a family/village in Africa. Hopefully you’ll agree that this is a much more useful use of our money and you won’t miss out too much by not receiving a card from us.

It is hoped that the goats will provide milk for those in need. Any surplus milk can be sold providing the family with income to buy other things and the goats should breed allowing the family to sell the goats, produce more milk or even eat them if they wish! The idea is that it is a sustainable resource that will benefit the recipients for years to come.

We have to admit that we don’t give much to charity as we don’t have a huge amount to give, but doing this allows us to help someone more needy than us at a time of year when we are fortunate enough to be showering those nearest to us with expensive gifts and treating ourselves to luxury foods etc. Not everyone in the world is as fortunate as us and hopefully this small gesture will go someway to helping some people who have very little.

More info on the goats here!!! 

As promised here is a photo of the lights so far at night. I say so far as I also have an illuminated father christmas with a Merry Christmas banner to go up yet. It isn’t quite over the top yet and I’m sure there are houses with more lights elsewhere in Borth, but it is quite a display for Ynyslas!!

Our tree looks nice this year, just the right size for the corner of the room and nicely decorated too. Hopefully it won’t drop its needles as well.

Morgan had fun helping us decorate it last night and we have lights in the window and around the deck too. I’m quite into it this year as Morgan knows something is going on and seems to be enjoying the run up to Christmas so I shall be buying some more decorations today and putting those along with a few other lights up tonight. I shall try to take a photo of the lights once it is dark as well.

Not long to go now!!!