I made my first attempt at Geocaching back in… 2005 or thereabouts? At a time when a separate GPS unit was required, before the birth of smart phones. With the use of my father’s Garmin unit the husband and I made an attempt at finding a cache that was supposedly located at the bottom of Lillegårdsbakken here in Trondheim. We never found it, and the cache is no longer there.
Since then I have occasionally made vague attempts at getting started, which has resulted, amongst other things, in me apparently having two usernames on Geocaching.com, and another failed attempt some time in the early autumn of 2016 to find a cache near our house, with some children in tow. Then the husband went to Riga with a friend of ours who happens to be a geocacher and was persuaded to join since there was an event on, and voilla, he was hooked. Shortly after we found a few caches along Ladestien on one of our Sunday outings, and I discovered the neccessity of paying for a premium membership if I wanted to be able to log (or even see) the caches myself, rather than just tailgating him. So I did. During the autumn break we used caching as an excuse to take breaks on our drive to Oslo and back, and the kids got quite enthusiastic. And then winter hit and outdoorsy stuff was much less tempting. Just before Easter, however, while we were out to catch some Pokemons and spin a stop (to maintain a streak) we found a cache near our house and I was reminded to bring our “swag-box” when we went away for Easter. So during the Easter break I found a cache at Fetsund station while waiting for the train, the kids and I looked unsuccessfully for one in Arvika and found one in Charlottenberg. Once the husband joined us we found one by Grue kirke and searched fruitlessly again for a DNF from last year nearby. And we resumed the habit of using cache locations as convenient stops when driving north again at the end of the week.
So when we needed an excuse to get out of the house on Monday (which is a bank holiday here), a combined Pokemon and cache hunt seemed ideal. Which led to three caches found, three caches not found, one new Pokemon in the Pokedex and more than 10,000 steps walked (according to the Fitbit), more, probably, by the 4-year-old. And I guess that was sufficient to hook me. Now I’ve set myself a goal to bag one cache a day, either on my way to work or at lunch, until I run out of caches in the relevant area. Though I am going to have to change that to “at least one”, because once you get going it’s too tempting to find just one more.
I’ve set up a separate Instagram-account for geocaching, sooner rather than later this time: @lattermild_geocache, but since this blog is lying here quite unused I will see if I can’t manage to blog my way through town as well, cache by cache. Don’t expect daily blog entries, though. That would be asking rather too much…
Day one went well, though I had to search for a bit the cache was reasonably easy to locate.
On day two however, I first attempted one where the cache and the log are not in the same place, and it was way too cold to hang around and search. I passed one nearby which I think I located pretty easily, but where there were too many people passing for me to fish it out without attracting attention, so I’m leaving that for another day. Finally, I decided to have a last shot before hurrying in to the office and it was third time lucky as this one was just where it was supposed to be, and not a muggle in sight.
And now I am scratching my head over some of these multi- and mystery caches. Ah, well. No doubt practice will help.
While browsing the available caches I came across this multicache one that is actually a pub crawl. So that’s an obvious candidate for a night on the town, but perhaps not so family-friendly.