During my drive to Conwy on Saturday morning I stopped off to do some geocaches. None of them were too extreme, being quick cache-and dashes by the side of the road, but it broke the journey up a little.
The first was just a little way south of Conwy called ‘This Daughter became a Conwy Valley Tour Guide‘. It was right beside a road so I managed to park pretty much on top of it and make a quick grab.
The next was just on the outskirts of Conwy in a little garden beside a stream. Unfortunately there were quite a few people about so I didn’t feel comfortable nosing around too much. I found the garden but not the cache itself. So, Gyffin Garden was a DNF for me.
I then spent a day do ‘naturalist’ type things and found a geocache called Watch the Birdie just outside the RSPB Conwy reserve. This one was an easy find and despite the fact that there was quite a few people around who had gathered to watch the starling roost I was able to sit down on top of the cache and retrieve it with raising any suspicions.
It has been ages since I’ve been geocaching. I’ve been out to repair or replace a few of my own caches now and then but hadn’t done any finding myself as I thought I’d have to travel to find any new ones.
How wrong I was. I had a look at the Geocaching website yesterday and there are loads of new caches in the area. Someone called ‘nitroglysarine’ has hidden an entire ‘Alphabet Series’ in the local neighbourhood, so that’s at least 26 geocaches that I haven’t found and there are lots of others too.
I had a few meetings in Aberystwyth yesterday so before I left I loaded a few cache locations onto my GPSr and stopped off on my way to my meetings for a few quick finds. All were really easy and accessible by car so they were quick ‘cache and dashes’ that took me no time at all. I even got an FTF (First to Find) on one of them.
I prefer the caches that are out in the middle of nowhere really, but those take quite a bit of time and effort to do and I don’t always have that time. So for now these local, easy caches will have to do and it’s good to see so many new ones in the area and new cachers out there hiding geocaches. It looks as though the number of Aber-cachers has been growing and will be keeping me busy for a while. I shall load up my GPSr with all of the new caches today so that I can find them whenever we are out and about.
I haven’t done much geocaching lately, but need to get out and maintain some of my geocaches that need attention… Hopefully this weekend if time permits.
Meanwhile, one of my geocoins has been continuing on its mission to visit as many UK counties as possible and notched up a new one, West Sussex, yesterday. A geocoin is a little traveling token with a unique identifying number that allows you to keep track of it. Gecoachers move it from geocache to geocache whenever they come across it and I can track it’s movements online.
My ‘Dressel Dragon Geocoin‘ has the mission to visit all of the counties of the UK. It has quite a few to go yet though.
Counties it has visited so far
I couldn’t resist another day out on my bike in the sunny weather, so after tidying up some loose ends as far as work was concerned I headed off on my bike and I hid a new geocache while I was out there. I won’t give too much away about its location but it provides lovely views over the Dyfi Estuary and hopefully the cache itself will prove just a little tricky for some people
It was inspired by the Assume Nothing series of Geocaches that we had fun with on our recent trip to the Isle of Man. It isn’t too tricky but may fix a few people if they don’t pay attention to the description. Lets just say the container is well camouflaged! Click here for the Assume Nothing Wales #1 (Bark) geoacache description.
We have a few more planned to make this into a little series of caches so this new one is just a starter. We’ve now hidden 17 geocaches in total, so hopefully this series will take us up to 20 hides before too long.
We’ve just got back from a trip to the Isle of Man and as we flew over rather than going on the boat I didn’t have any windsurfing kit with me so we did lots of geocaching instead.
The Assume Nothing series by Happy Humphrey kept us busy as did a few other caches. El Presidente involved a lovely walk from the sound to a nice big cache with some gorgeous sea views. The Long Way Round was a nice multi-stage cache with the final hiding place giving me a nice coastal walk in the sunshine.
I spent a few hours walking from one side of the island to the other (Douglas to Peel) along the Heritage Trail and found all 15 caches of the Heritage Trail Series in the process, and despite getting a little wet at one stage had an enjoyable time finding the caches and walking the trail. We did a few other caches as well and as always, geoaching took us to places we’d never been before, gave us some interesting information that we didn’t know and provided us with reasons to go to areas we just wouldn’t have gone to
If you’re planning a geocaching holiday then the Isle of Man would be a good choice of destination.. A high density of caches. We were rarely (if ever) more than 2 miles from a cache and there are caches to suit all tastes, from really easy roadside caches such as the one we found at Derby Haven, multi stage caches with a fair bit of walking involved, plenty of cache series to get stuck into and some devilish puzzle caches if that’s your thing. The fact that it is an island also means that you could, if you have the time, set yourself the goal of finding all the caches on the island… I’m not sure how many there are and it would be a challenge, but what better way to see the island and learn about its history?
Happy Humphrey, a prolific geocache hider on the Isle of Man certainly kept us busy on our recent trip to the Island, especially with a few attempts on his ‘Assume Nothing IOM’ series.
We should have started at the beginning really as we DNF’d (Did not Find) our first attempts on number 2 and number 6 in the series. However, on the last day of our trip we headed for the first in the series and found it without too many problems. So we then went back to Number 2 with the right frame of mind and also found it within seconds. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to go to any of the others but next time we are on the island we shall be in search of them again.
Inspired by the series we will hopefully be hiding some similar ‘Assume Nothing’ caches in Wales in the near future.
The first stage of the aber-cachers travel bug race ended yesterday. The idea was to see how far the travel bugs could travel by moving from geocache to geocache over the course of a year. Here are the final results:
The Little Welsh Cache 11907.9 Miles
Skateboarding Sarah Miles11744.2
Jennie.m’s AberCachers race TB 11158.5 Miles
Forces-of-Nature Al – Travel Bug Race 6174.6 Miles
~*Tinkerbell*~ 2792.8 Miles
Snowboarding Dave 2340.6 Miles
Samurai Vanya – Travel Bug Race 1759.1 Miles
Samurai Dan – Travel Bug Race 1046.8 Miles
Forces-of-Nature Morgan – Travel Bug Race 570.9 Miles
Tortoiseshell’s Aberystwyth race travelbug 550.1 Miles
Red Kites Abercachers Racer Bug 111.9 Miles
The second stage of the race now begins… A race back to a geocache in Aberystwyth.. May the best bug win!
I had a meeting with some potential web design clients today, so drove all the way to Llandysul. Unfortunately when I got there I discovered they had been trying to phone me as the person I was supposed to have the meeting with was off sick so the meeting was canceled.
Frustrating as traveling to such meetings eats into any profit I make from such a project, but if I want to get the project then I shall have to make the trip again sometime soon.
All was not lost though as I had my GPSr with me and there were geocaches nearby that I had yet to find so I decided to do some geocaching in the time I had spare.. The first was a short walk from the canceled meeting so I set off on a pleasant walk along the banks of the river Teifi. This part of the river is used by canoeists and there were lots of slalom gates hanging over the river. The cache ‘Canoe Find it‘ was found easily before I headed back to my car.
Geocache number two was Tristan’s Cache, a cache overlooking a village in the middle of nowhere! It seemed like a nice place to live though, ‘proper rural Wales’. Geocache 3 was one that has been on my to do list for ages ‘Of Gorse you can see the sea’, located on the coast path just south of Aberaeron. Again the cache was found easily and a travel bug I collected from Tristans cache was dropped off.
The wind was blowing and the sun was shining so after walking along the coast ath for a bit watching the waves and whitecaps, I couldn’t resist a windsurf session so I rushed home and went out for a quick sail from Borth.
Not a very productive day workwise, but at least it wasn’t a complete waste of a journey.
Ever since starting geocaching I have wanted to dispense with the paper cache description and find a streamlined way of paperless geocaching. As yet there isn’t a GPSr that allows you to simply visit the geocaching.com website, do a search for parituclar caches and then upload all of their details to the GPS device. As far as I’m concerned it is about time that Garmin and Groundspeak teamed up to produce such a device as it would make things so much easier. Of course, I’m sure they will, but no doubt it will be too expensive for me and Mac support probably won’t be great.
However, now that I have a new GPSr things have improved a little. My previous experiences were time-consuming to say the least and not ideal. I had a Garmin eTrex, but no cable to connect it to my Mac so a typical geocaching expedition would mean first visiting geocaching.com to find caches in the area I was about to visit, printing out the cache descriptions for each of these and then manuakly entering the co-ordinates into the eTrex. Once out looking for them we would have pieces of paper everywhere and of course only a few of the caches loaded into the eTrex.
Now that I have a Forerunner 305 can at least connect my Mac to it so can upload co-ordinates without having to enter them manually. This is an improvement, and coupled with macCaching and an iPod I can now go paperless geocaching… It isn’t quite ideal. For a start the Forerunner isn’t really designed for use as a geocaching machine and can only store 100 waypoints. Secondly the cache descriptions are on my iPod not the GPSr which means taking both out into the hills with me. It is still btter than it was though and here is the procedure
1. Log onto gecoaching.com and create a pocket query for the area you are about to visit. I tell the query to return 100 results (as this is all the Forerunner will hold) closest to my destination, and select caches that aren’t mine and I haven’t already found. i also limit it to active caches and exclude events etc. Once this has been done I get email a gpx file containing the details of these caches.
2. Open the gpx file using MacCaching (A Cache management database for the Mac.)
3. Export this list of caches from MacCaching to both my Forerunner and my iPod. This gives me all 100 coordinates on the forerunner and all of the descriptions of the caches within the Notes setion of my iPod
Now, when I get to where I’m going I simply switch on my Forerunner, go to the navigate screen and lookfor the nearest caches. This gives me the caches GC number which I can look up on my iPod to find the description.
Much better than using my eTrex, but still fairly limiting by the fact that 100 caches doesn’t actually cover a huge area in some locations. I’ve just done a pocket query for an area of North Wales that I shall be visiting soon, but 100 caches doesn’t come close to covering the area. Still, 100 caches is more than enough to keep me busy!
