Exploring parts of Woodley

Flickr CC-BY vizzual-dot-com

Earlier this week I’d spoken to a friend about geocaching and was surprised that he’d never heard of it, and was delighted when, after a short explanation, he was keen to give it a go. He’s a fellow IT guy and has a 6 year old son, so the whole “treasure hunt” thing had instant appeal.

I got to his place early this afternoon, we did the usual natter and catch up, and then we were off – husband and wife, their son, their son’s friend from school, and me. I’d checked the website before arriving to find the nearest couple of caches to his home, as I thought it might be nice to be able to stroll around their neighbourhood and discover a few. They particularly liked the use of the term muggle to describe non-geocachers, agreeing that it really does have a parallel: a world around them of which the general public is completely unaware.

The closest cache was GC2B00J, barely a quarter of a mile from their front door. We reached ground zero, along a tarmac footpath that cut through a park and allotment area, and I told the boys that it was somewhere within a 10 pace radius. I found it in under a minute, but let them hunt around for a bit. It turned out to be an ideal cache, as it was larger than the all-too-common micro/nano caches and so contained a number of trinkets and toys that the boys could choose from. They picked one each they wanted, I dropped a couple I’d brought along to make the swap fair, dropped in a travel bug that I’d been carrying for far too long, and we headed off to find some more.

We ended up doing a 3 mile loop and found 4 caches in all. Aside from the first, they were all micro-caches — either 35mm film canisters or magnetic key safes. It was a bit disappointing for the boys, but it was a great excuse to walk around a neighbourhood I’d only knew via main roads, and we discovered a couple of parks that even my friends didn’t know about. It confirmed that discovery is one of the joys of geocaching.

And of course, they enjoyed entering their finds into the website, starting them on the journey to what it seems will become a long-term hobby, or at least something they can do when they find themselves in a new area and some time to explore.

A round and a cache

This evening was my (cautious) return to golf, after having time off due to an actual pain in the neck. This means I’ve had a brand new, shiny driver sitting and a pencil bag sitting around collecting dust for almost a month. Maddening.

Mark, Neil and I met up outside the pro shop around 17:30 and headed straight out. The place was surprisingly busy — plenty of cars in the carpark, the pro shop and clubhouse had people milling around, and approaching the first tee there were people ahead of us and some following us to the tee. I thought we’d stumbled into a competition or society day for a while… until the calls of Fore! rang out all around us (some by us). It was a happy hacker’s playground!

Aside from being quite rusty and slicing it far too often (the two-ball ahead of us kept thinking I was aiming at them), there wasn’t a jot of pain anywhere nor numbness. Clean bill of health as far as golf goes.

Relieved? You bet.

After the usual post-round visit to the 19th for a sherbet, I recalled there was a geocache alongside the golf course grounds. I had my geocaching kit in the car, so I could see it was less than 50 yards from where my car was parked, though required a lengthy walk to get around fences, bushes and trees onto a bridleway. It wasn’t until I was armpit deep in stinging nettles that I discovered my (magazine subscription freebie) torch had finally died, but in summer the sun never fully sets this far north so there was some light to see by.

A few minutes later I discovered the “travel bug hotel”, as this cache is called, containing just one TB and the log book. This TB’s mission is to get to Somerset and the caches near home are closer to that than Buckinghamshire, so I signed the log, took the TB and dropped in a trinket (so there would be something for the next visitor).

Now to get this travel bug into a regularly visited geocache!

That’s a funny rock…

This afternoon I went to visit a friend in Southampton who I hadn’t seen in some time. Due to some changes in his circumstances he now lives in the centre of town, and this was my first trip actually into Southampton proper. It was an interesting drive down the M3 and a beautifully sunny day, and the town at all wasn’t what I expected. What I saw was leafy lanes, parks, and generally rather nice.

A quick check of the Geocaching website showed that there was a geocache literally outside is front door. When people say that, they normally mean over the road or down the street a bit. In this case, if he were to open his front door, trip over and fall flat onto his face, he’d be able to reach out his arm to touch the geocache. Seriously.

Located by a 14th century well-house, a quick look was all it took to find the likely hiding place. It was my first ‘fake rock’ cache, of the kind typically used to hide a spare house key in the garden. And it was my friend’s first geocache, so I’m hoping it will encourage him to find more. His second was my car, as the mobile Travel Bug. There are 6 or so within half a mile of his house, so he doesn’t have far to go.

The bear is in the wild…

Flickr CC-BY vizzual-dot-com

Well, I did it again. Another day, another cache. But first…

The coin/bear Travel Bug that I mentioned previously has now been released. Today I stopped by the geocache I discovered on Monday, dropped in the trinket I said I would when I logged the find, added a sticker to the jar (the same as shown in the picture to the left) as the marker pen had all rubbed off and, as it seems to be quite a popular cache, I put my new creation in there: TB36WY4. So now we get to see how far it makes it across the world!

Today’s cache find was a puzzle cache. The starting point was in a secluded cemetery with the puzzle requiring dates and ages off a number of gravestones near the chapel, then the coordinates calculated from that. Fortunately they were all very close, so I had GZ (ground zero, the real cache coordinates) within minutes and my eTrex told me it was a half mile stroll outside the cemetery gates and down an unpaved country lane.

Not far from where the GPS was telling me I needed to be was a large agricultural hopper-style trailer, that was clearly well beyond its use-by date, being used to block vehicle access. I’m beginning to understand how geocachers think, so I had a quick look around and found a plastic clip-lock container about the volume of a lunchbox sitting in the enclosed tow-hitch part of the trailer, full of treasure. Well, I say treasure… it was mostly small LED torches, visitor cards, a couple of smaller items, and a lipstick accompanied by a card that said it was unused when it was placed there (it was almost used up when I looked). I signed the logbook, took out a tiny heart-shaped pencil sharpener, and dropped in a souvenir koala keyring. Another one bites the dust…

Oh, and the nettles. They’re painful. Try to avoid them…