A Sensible Life

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Caching at Coffs, and a milestone

We recently had a very nice holiday on the northern coast of New South Wales at Coffs Harbour. The weather was perfect, and Shoes Junior had a great time in the pool and at the beach. He loved going down the waterslides.

During our time away we managed to find two more caches (Rotary Lookout above Bellinger River and Rest at Repton). We had a bookmark list of about 35 caches that were in Coffs Harbour or on our way, but we'll have to save them for next time.

The milestone that occurred was that Shoes Junior found his 50th cache (Rest at Repton). Not bad for a 16 month old. He still doesn't really understand what this whole geocaching caper is all about, but it will be more fun once he does.

We're hoping to be able to go on a cache-a-thon on Easter Monday. Our current most finds in a day is 11, and that was before Shoes Junior came along. It would be nice to beat this, but it will be tricky.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

We're still around!

It's been quite a while since our last post, but we've been pretty busy and haven't had any spare time to update the blog. We'll try and summarise the last seven months in this post.

We mentioned in our last post that we were off to the South Coast for a holiday, and we had a lovely time down there. Of course we did some caching, which included our first EarthCache. Our find count increased by ten, and these were the ones we found:
We managed to reach a milestone since our last post - our 150th cache. It was one of three that we found during a walk around Bicentennial Park. A very pleasant way to spend a day.

For our wedding anniversary, we returned to the city and went on a little cache-a-thon. We managed to find five out of five for the day. They were:
Another nemesis has been crossed off our list. El Guarda has been found! Mr S took his sister (a recent convert to geocaching) for a bit of local caching. El Guarda was the first stop for the morning. While we were there a fellow cacher by the name of jkcourtz joined the hunt, and made the find. It feels good to have taken another cache off our to-do list.

Meanwhile, Shoes Junior has accompanied us on our caching trips, and is closing in on 50 finds. His pram has served us well by providing cover while we search. We'll hopefully be at a local event in a couple of weeks, so more people can discover his Travel Bug.

We've now got one less active cache, as we had to archive Weekend at McBurney's. It was attached to a slippery-dip in a park near our house. The local council deemed the slippery-dip unsafe, and had it blocked off for several months, so we removed the cache and disabled it. Eventually the slippery-dip was replaced, but it was plastic and didn't have any metal supports, so our magnetic nano was useless. We're on the hunt for another spot to place it.

In March we're heading north to Coffs Harbour for a family holiday. There's a pretty good chance that some caching will be done as part of the trip. Hopefully we'll update the blog before then.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Mother's Day caching

After having a nice breakfast at a local cafe, we headed off to do some Mother's Day caching. We picked four local caches, two of which were in a park which we didn't know much about. With the weather looking a bit threatening, we wanted to be able to get back to the car in a hurry if we needed to, and these caches all had parking close by.

It was a successful trip, with a 100% success rate. Shoes Junior enjoyed the whole trip, but was really happy at Tennis Anyone?. We're lucky that he enjoys being outside in the fresh air.

After getting on a bit of a caching roll recently, we're hoping that we'll get to 200 finds by the end of the year. We've got a four-day trip to the South Coast next month, so hopefully we can grab a few caches while we're away. There's also a chance that we'll be going to New Zealand in October, so we might have the chance to add to our international caches.

WWFM V

Recently we attended the Sydney World Wide Flash Mob V (WWFM V). Ms S wasn't able to attend the fourth WWFM last year, so was quite excited to be able to attend the fifth. We got to Luna Park in plenty of time, and fed Shoes Junior while we were waiting for 10am to arrive. When we saw the blankets being spread out, we headed over and joined in. The event probably didn't have the impact it could have, because Luna Park didn't open till 11am. It was good to see quite a few cachers there being part of this world-wide phenomenon.

There are plans for another WWFM later in the year, and we'll try and be there.

Our Easter caching trip

We spent a couple of days in Canberra over Easter, and managed to fit in some caching around visiting friends. There are a series of caches at some of the rest areas along the road between Sydney and Canberra. We did some of them during our last trip, and managed to find a few more this trip. There are still a couple to do during our next trip south.

One cache we were happy to find was On Target. As we said in our log, third time lucky with this one.

The main aim of the trip was to find some of the puzzle caches that Mr S had spent several weeks solving. We've only found a couple of puzzle caches, and we figured that this was a good opportunity to increase our tally. There were 27 in total that Mr S had solved, but we knew we wouldn't get to all of them. We managed to find two of them - Canberra Karst and Budgie's Science Homework. There were a couple of others that we had a quick look for but couldn't find. Mr S needs to check his solutions to those. Plenty more to keep us bust next time we're in Canberra.

We finished the trip with a total of nine finds, most of which were on the way down and home. We're lucky that Shoes Junior enjoys travelling in the car and we can combine geocaching with travel. It gives us an excuse to break up the drive and grab some caches on the way.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Another one off the to-do list

On Sunday, Mr S took his sister out for her first geocaching experience. The trip didn't get off to a good start, with DNFs on the first two caches we looked for - Shape Confusion and Mr. Cache. Both of them had quite a few places to look in, and we were on a time limit. We'll try for them again.

Luckily we were able to find the third cache on our list - High Adventure. This was a DNF from last year that Ms S was adamant that Mr S wasn't to go back and look for alone. So when there was interest from Sensible Sis in going caching, this cache immediately went on the list. It was a bit of a scramble up the steep slope, and there was a bit of luck involved in the find. Mr S happened to look under a rock and spotted the container. High Adventure has the highest terrain rating of the caches that we've found so far at 3.5.

We're going to Canberra at Easter, and Mr S has been busy solving some of the puzzle caches down there. At last count he's solved 27 of them, but we don't think we'll get to all of them (not with Shoes Junior with us anyway). So far we've found two mystery caches, and we think we'll be able to add to this tally after our Canberra trip.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Canberra caching

We headed down to Canberra on Saturday for a visit with friends and family. Naturally we'd planned to do some caching during our visit. Mr S had spent a few weeks solving some puzzle caches (there are quite a few of these in Canberra). We managed to grab McForest on the way down, which was where we discovered that we'd left the geobag at home. This meant that we didn't have anything to swap, so we had to include "TNLNSL" for all our finds.

We left Canberra on Sunday morning with a list of 18 caches that were along the road home. Most of them were located at the rest areas, so they were fairly easy finds. Our greatest achievement was going unintentionally paperless and finding Remembrance Driveway - Gordon. We had the co-ords loaded into the GPSr, but didn't print out the cache info, so weren't really sure what we were looking for. Luckily Ms S was on the case, and pointed Mr S in the right direction.

Our tally for the day was six, and our total of seven for the weekend brought Shoes Junior's total finds into double figures. Not bad for a fifteen week old baby. Unfortunately we didn't get to look for any of the solved puzzle caches, so they're on the list for the next time we're in Canberra.