Gackt's Geocaching Journal

Geocaching never ceases to surprise me. More specifically this time I mean Geocachers, the people that make Geocaching what it is.

The other day I was little disappointed to receive a notification log with some sad news for one of my trackables that I had set out on a mission at the beginning of the year. The TB comprised of a Slushy the Snowman Travel Tag which I had received in a Geocaching Secret Santa parcel the Christmas just gone. Soon after receiving I attached a small black bison container to it and wrote a short note to a dear friend and popped it inside. The mission given to it was to travel to a particular cache in Brussels that we had shared the finding experience of, and also was the home city she lived in. Once the trackable had made it’s way to that cache I intended to let her know and she could go retrieve and read the message.


The TB had a rocky start to it’s mission. I carried it with me to a few caches with no problem, but then I placed it into a cache I had hidden myself in an underground cavern. Unfortunately I had to archive my cache shortly afterwards. The TB then was stuck there for a couple of weeks until Yorkshire Yellow managed to retrieve the cache for me, and the TB. It continued it’s travels but never left the general area of the UK that it had been set loose.

At some point during the summer I stopped to get notifications for a number of geocaching.com activities, maybe it was because my premium membership had lapsed? Anyway, I heard nothing more of this TB until the other day when I did receive a notification that redsex_mark had posted a retrieve log for it but noted “Found Slushy, but he was not attached to anything. Not sure what happened to the message.” 

After contacting him to check that it was definitely missing, and yes the bison container with the message was no longer attached, I updated the page to state that. Whilst looking at the TB page though I had a look through the newest logs which showed me that, even though I had not had notifications, little Slushy had in fact travelled out of the country to Germany and back, and had even been over Belgium (if that was the route the plane had travelled of course). That made me quite happy. But what made me more so was when redsox_mark contacted me again and offered to fix up Slushy with another little black bison container and re-write my original message and pop it in there. I let him know the message, sending him a photo of the original before I set it loose, and he did so  How wonderful is that?  From time to time certain aspects of caching grind me, but then something like this happens and I remember that outside my close group of caching friends there are still a lot of other good people out there playing the game.

-

I have only been averaging finding about one cache a week of late. Although I am not numbers mad, I would still very much like to be getting out to find a little more than that, but other life things keep getting in the way.

Early this morning, spurred on by the good news of my TB, I loaded up my phone with nearly 2000 of my closest unfound caches. I was never going to find 2000 caches today of course, that would be ludicrous to think that would ever happen, but at least I had many cache details to hand so that if the rest of the family decided to go somewhere semi-local then I could easily check if there would be one close by.

We did go out, at least a few of us did. Midday we were at Lacock Garden Centre. A small circus was pitched there and we watch one of their shows. There were a few good acts, but the clown was hilarious  On leaving the place I checked my phone and found there was a cache to be found right outside the front entrance, yippee! But could I find it? Nope. Feeling a little low again I checked for any more fairly close by caches and there were a few, but not on our intended route home. I asked Tracy if we could take a slightly different route to see if I could go for a quick drive-by cache, and she said yes.

I had to pass on the first one we approached in the car. As I got towards GZ there was a car parked on the verge where I was going to park, plus a few people standing around right by where the hint suggested the cache would be. Maybe they were cachers? I didn’t find out but just drove on to the next one. All clear there and fairly quick find.

I finished up the day with three finds. We stopped at a garage at Chippenham to get fuel and there was fairly new cache there which I found quickly. The last was on a lay-by along a main road, of which I had passed the cache many times previously as I had always been passed there in the dark and had missed the pull off. That final cache was also a quick find, and I had the bonus of picking up a TB to move on too.

I didn’t find 100 caches this weekend like some manage to achieve. Nor 50, nor even 10, just 3. But that’s 2 more than my weekly average of late, and with cacher kindness and a funny clown too it is a good end to the weekend.