Geocaching in Aberdyfi
Our geocaching streak continues. Morgan and I quite often do some geocaching whilst he is on school holidays and this Christmas break has been no exception. First our target was to get to a total of 300 caches which we did a couple of days ago. Morgan now has the idea of breaking our best caching streak with the most number of consecutive days caching. This currently stands at 5 days from 2nd May 2008 until the 6th May 2008. Here’s the proof from my recent Geocaching Stats page.
Not a huge target to aim for but unfortunately despite doing some geocaching on New Years Eve we didn’t do any on Jan 1st so our current streak started on Jan 2nd and is now 3 days long. I wonder if we’ll manage to beat 5 days!
On Jan 2nd we did at least make it to 300 finds with a few caches that were fairly close to home. It was a miserable day, wet and very grey so we just did a few local caches in the car.
Yesterday was just a single geocache day in Aberystwyth, nothing too exciting, just logging one to keep the consecutive days thing going.
Today we headed off to Aberdyfi as one of the things I wanted to do was tick off all of the caches within a certain radius of our house, or at least those that pop up on the first page of search results based on our home location. The trouble with this is that there are a couple of geocaches that are only a few miles away as the crow flies, one in particular was only just over a mile away, but they were the other side of the estuary so involved either a swim or a kayak across the waters or a 50 mile round trip in the car. The weather today was pretty cold, grey and miserable again and seeing as I was accompanied by both Morgan and my iPad I thought the drive would be more sensible than a sea crossing so we spent the morning driving to and from Aberdyfi.
First stop was the closest as yet un-found cache to our house, Aberdyfi Bandstand. The cache details said it was 20 minute walk up to the bandstand and another 20 minute walk back down so I was expecting quite a climb up the hill. We set off from the seafront on foot and were at the bandstand within a couple of minutes. Quite how it would take 20 minutes I have no idea? We found the cache, signed the log book, retrieved a Travel Bug, logged the cache and Travel Bug on the iPad, snapped some photos, admired the views, and took a different route back down, but even with all of that and a little stroll through the streets of Aberdyfi we were back at the car no longer than 10 minutes after we’d set off. Cache number one of the day done, 3 consecutive days ticked off and all was looking good.
Aberdyfi Bandstand
I’d never been up to the bandstand before and didn’t even know it existed, but it certainly has some nice views over Aberdyfi and the Dyfi Estuary. If it weren’t for the mist and murk you’d be able to see our house from here.
The Dyfi Estuary
The next geocache on the list was Mouse’s Buried Treasure – just up the road at the bit of beach between Aberdyfi and Tywyn that I call ‘Graveyards’. We parked in the car park opposite the graveyard, crossed the railway line and then tried to cross the golf course. We followed the path but then ended up in a flooded bog. Thankfully I hadn’t worn my new Crocs that arrived yesterday as I would have ruined them, but I’d also left my wellies in my car and I was in Anna’s car today. This meant that I had an old pair of Crocs on that were very worn and desperately lacking in traction. I’ve had issues with them before slipping and sliding and unable to get up even slight inclines, but today I lost traction completely and fell into a bog covering myself in mud and muck! Morgan did take a photo of me covered in mud but it was out of focus so you can’t see it.
We tried to continue through the bog but ended up getting very wet so eventually gave up and took a slightly different route around some drainage ditches and then over a couple of little bridges. We eventually made it to the boardwalk over the dunes, found the cache, signed the log book, retrieved another Travel Bug and headed back across the golf course with muddy legs and soggy feet. This time we took the drier route – I wish we’d done that in the first place as it was so much easier.
Geocaching at Graveyards
We may have continued on towards Tywyn to do a cache there and maybe one at Dolgoch but as we were both pretty wet by now and I was covered in mud we decided instead to avoid any populated areas and head off into Happy Valley instead. We had done a cache here years ago but it has been disabled and replaced with a new cache a little further along the valley. We drove there with the heating on full blast, our shoes off trying to dry them out and the windows open. It didn’t help as our shoes were still soaking wet once we got there so on they went and we sloshed our way along the grassy path to the cache. Again we found it easily, signed the log book and dropped the Travel Bug we’d picked up in the last cache off. We decided then it was time to head home so back down the grassy and very slippery (in my shoes) path to the car we went for an uneventful drive back home.
Not a bad morning’s geocaching, 3 nice easy finds and a few of our closest to home caches ticked off. We’re now up to 306 finds in total and if we can find some on Saturday, Sunday and Monday before Morgan goes back to school we’ll beat our longest ever caching streak… Time to stay focussed!
