Geocaching

For his birthday, Nimmy bought Ian a GPS and a cryptic card which just said Geocaching.com on it. So this weekend, we went out to find out what the point was! Its basically a treasure hunt for grownups. You use your GPS to locate a “cache”, normally a tupperware contatiner hidden somewhere interesting, and inside it find a log book and some treasures. You sign the logbook to say that you found the cache and exchange one of the treasures for something you have brought with you. Some caches are quite easy to find, some very hard.

We thought that we’d start with an easy one, up on the moors on Rudland Rigg. We drove up to the suggested parking spot, walked about a mile up the track (ian will be able to say exactly because the GPS told him (along with our speed and favourite colours!)!), and then left the path following the GPS to find the cache. It was hidden between two large rocks, and was pretty easy to identify once we knew what we were looking for.

Ian and Nimmy find their first cache
As the hail loomed closer we carried on up the track to the next cache, and fortunately only got hailed on a little. In this cache we found a Kansas Geocoin. Its basically a metal coin (this one from Kansas), that can be tracked. So you update the website to say where you found it and where you moved it on to, and the owners can watch its travels. We pocketed this to add to the travel bug (same idea, just a bug rather than a coin) that we picked up at the first cache, and wandered back towards the car in the sun.

Another cache
After lunch we found two more caches, and then decided to head back to York via a cache that wasn’t on the map. Bit more difficult, because you can’t work out what public footpaths are going to lead you from the road to the cache, but we thought it would be a bit of adventure. We drove for a while with Nimmy shouting out the distance to the cache, and when it started going up again we abandoned the car and set off in the right-ish direction along the nearest path. After about half an hour we reached a lake behind Gilling Castle which we had never seen before, and then set off up the clay-iest, muddiest steep hill into plantations that we had ever trudged. We spent quite a while in the woods trying to find the cache, but in the end gave up as we weren’t entirely sure whether we were on public land or not, and we were looking for a cache in a wood “under a log”! It was probably just as well, as when we reached the main path again, the GPS was off by 200 yards – it must have got confused under the trees. Never bodes well for finding caches with that sort of accuracy!

And another

It had suddenly got really late, so we drove sleepily back to York and had a roast dinner with Mikey and Roo before sleeping very soundly!