Family Geocaching and a Record Breaking 2013

I hope you’ve all had a good Christmas and New Year? The weather here hasn’t been great but as we are all off school and work there has been plenty of opportunity for quality family time together. Other than going away in the summer as we sometimes do it’s really the only time we get together without too many distractions.

The weather has kept us indoors much of the time with the fire on, watching family films, playing with Lego, cooking, eating and playing trivial pursuit that we got for Christmas – Morgan is winning on the trivial pursuit front at the moment! We have managed to get out a few times though for walks in the woods, geocaching, and strolls on the beach. Luckily each time we have planned an outdoor activity we have been fortunate with the weather as it has coincided with a brief break in the rain. In fact, the weather has been lovely each time we’ve been out with clear blue skies and plenty of sunshine.

New Years Eve was no exception. It was the last day of the year so I took a look at our geocaching stats for the year. I noticed that we had found more geocaches in 2013 than in any other year. I therefore posted a forum entry on aber-cachers.co.uk saying:

“We did what will probably be our final caches of the year the other day whilst out on a lovely walk with the Devil’s Bridge Walkers in the Myherin Forest

I didn’t think we had really done much in the way of geocaching this year, but a quick look at our stats on GC.com shows that it was actually a record breaking year for us with a total of 85 finds. Not many really, but still not bad for us.

It’s probably thanks to the fact that our longest gecoaching streak was also accomplished at the beginning of the year with 12 consecutive days with finds from 04/01/2013 to 04/12/2013.

How was your geocaching year?
Al.”

and posted the following table showing our annual geocaching finds since 2006.

Yearly Cache Stats

Yearly Cache Stats

However, posting this got the geocaching juices flowing so we decided to try for a few more caches before the end of the year. We’d already found 85, so the pressure was on to make that to 100.. It was never going to happen but it encouraged us out of the door and up into the woods and hills behind Tre Ddol. There was a whole series of geocaches here that had been hidden fairly recently that we hadn’t yet searched for. They are all named after chocolates, and probably chocolates from a ‘Hotel Chocolat’ box. They all sounded fairly straight forward, family friendly and not too difficult. Perfect for a New Years Eve stroll.

We started out from Tre-Ddol along a footpath that we are all familiar with. I’ve walked, run and ridden it loads of times, whilst Anna and Morgan have walked it too, along with the Scouts. We couldn’t find the first geocache though despite searching for quite a while. We then looked back through the logs only to find that no one else had been able to find it either. Not a great start to our geocaching day but we can only assume that the cache has gone missing.

Searching for a Geocache

Searching for a Geocache

We managed to find the next few without any difficulties and were now on the small road that takes you up through a couple of farmyards and out across the brow of a hill overlooking Borth Bog and out to the sea at Ynyslas. Anna wasn’t too happy about walking through the farmyards thanks to the dogs so after the first one we decided to take a shortcut through the fields, following a footpath rather than continue along the road. There were a few geocaches to our North but we decided to leave those for another day and head off towards some to the south.  This meant that there was a little gap in the caches on our walk, but that gave us time to admire the views and eat a few snacks.

We were soon back onto the trail of the caches though, walking along some oak-tree covered ridges. I don’t think we were actually on a footpath as we had to climb a couple of fences at one point, but we did find a couple more geocaches and came close to some multi-caches that we left for another day. I was suffering by now due to having run a half marathon before heading out geocaching and the fact that I had some severe chaffing going on thanks to a long ride on the turbo trainer the day before… It was certainly a little sore I can tell you.

The weather also seemed to be closing in again as clouds rolled in from the sea so we decided not to look for the caches on the steep muddy footpath down through Cwm Tre-Ddol that emerges behind the church, but instead to follow the steep road back to the car and head home. We’d only found 5 geocaches taking our annual total up to 90. Not quite as many as we had hoped for, but they’ll be there for another day and we had a pleasant couple of hours out together walking in the welsh hills. We did see two other people waling a dog at one point, but other than that the hills, trails and woodlands were our own.

Click here for our full geocaching stats to date.

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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