Find And Seek

Last weekend we went geocaching. "What is geocaching?" I here you cry! Well basically it's a worldwide treasure hunt. A cache is generally a sandwich box, ammo box or something similar, containing a logbook and a few small gifts, although they can be as small as a film case. People hide them (often in bushes, trees or rocks), taking a note of the GPS co-ordinates, then file them on www.geocaching.com where other people (like us!) log the co-ordinates and try to find them. The idea is that you take one gift and leave another, and write a message in the logbook. We thought we'd do a bit of promotion of our favourite band Marillion, and leave sampler CDs.

Darren's son Jordan came up to the North East for the long weekend, so we located a few near us to try to track down. We started with a relatively easy one (all caches are graded on Difficulty and Terrain) called Air Power, then found Hardwick Hall Park and Rodridge Lane. Hardwick Hall was particularly nice - a wooded park with lots of ponds and ducks. 3 out of 3!!! Just when it started to look really easy we seemed to hit a wall...

Next on our list was Rule Of Thumb. We knew it was a multi-cache, where the co-ordinates don't lead directly to the cache but to a clue. We could see a bird-box among the trees, and sent Jordan in to have a look but he couldn't see anything. It started to rain so we gave up. Dalden Tower seemed even more fruitless - lots of overgrown nettles and the tree cover made it hard to get a good GPS signal. Again the heavy rain drove us back to the car. Alienation was quite good fun - a VERY steep path down the cliff onto a raised beach. But we searched and searched among the rocks and could find nothing (we weren't quite brave enough to stick our hands in blind holes!

So after 3 successes and 3 failures we had two more on our list. It was getting late and we only had time for one more so we decided on another multi-cache, Dead Man's Bank. We had to find out the co-ordinates by answering some questions, and we were on our way. It was quite a long walk along the cliff, and when the heaven's opened we were really too far away to get back to the car. So we plodded on in the rain (which soon subsided) to a bunch of gorse bushes. Hmm. It was obviously in there, but they're prickly things and as they were covered in spiders there wasn't a chance I was sticking my hand in! Darren wasn't going to be beaten though, and eventually he found it. 4 out of 7, we won!!! Also in this cache were a travelbug and a Geocoin, both of which wanted to move from cache to cache.

On Saturday evening we e-mailed the owner of Rule Of Thumb (who very quickly replied with a hint) and studied the pictures of Alienation. Dalden Tower looks a bit of a lost cause as no-one's found it for a while, but we thought we'd have another go at the others. Firstly Rule Of Thumb. I decided I was going to investigate the birdbox this time. I found a small metal stick around the back of the telegraph pole, and when attached to a metal disc on the bottom of the birdbox a tape measure came out with the co-ordinates on it! Clever! Alienation we found by taking a picture with Darren's mobile phone - his arm was just about long enough! We left the Geocoin (which wants to travel around the North East) here. Finally we found Go Down In The Woods Today, the one we didn't bother with yesterday. It was a long, long walk in the Dene Forest - and a long walk uphill walk back!

We had a lot of fun Geocaching. It's a great way to explore places you wouldn't have otherwise known about, and get some exercise. We'll take the travelbug with us next time we decide to hunt some treasure...