Thursday, July 31, 2008

Sad news about our first cache placement

The first cache that we placed, Sshhh! had a few DNFs recently, and those cachers that had found it had commented on the amount of litter that had been building up in the area. Mr S went for a look on Saturday, and confirmed that it had been muggled. We decided to archive it, as the area seemed to be becoming unsuitable as a cache hiding spot. We've got a cache container ready to go. All we need to do is find a suitable location for it.

Our second first to find

We recently managed to snare our second FTF. It was The Sacred Order of the Stonecutters, and there was a bit of confusion whether or not we were actually there first. We think we were lucky to try this one during school holidays when some of the regular FTF-hounds were out of town.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Back in Oz

With Mr S back in the country, we've managed to make a few more finds. During his week off after arriving home from the US, Mr S tried to find a couple of caches that have been bothering us for a while.

The first of these was No Trolls Here. We'd had two previous attempts at finding this one, so armed with some fresh ideas of where to look, courtesy of the logs of some of the successful finders, he hoped that our third search would prove lucky. We'd figured out that the cache was a magnetic key container, and that it was hidden near one corner of the bridge. Mr S spent some time walking slowly backwards and forwards across the bridge to try and figure out which corner was the correct one. The GPSr managed to keep pointing pretty much to one corner (with occasional variation), so the hunt began. There weren't many places to search, so it wasn't long until the cache was in hand. It felt good to finally cross that one off our list.

Inspired by his success with No Trolls Here, Mr S set off the following day to search for another of our nemesis caches, Stumped .... We'd had no luck with this one in its original location, so hoped that the new location would be easier. After searching GZ fro half an hour, though, Mr S came up empty. He thought that muggles might have discovered this one, as there was a newly-constructed BMX track next to GZ. It was a bit disappointing to log a DNF for this cache again. Turns out that the muggles hadn't been there, as the cache has been found after his unsuccessful attempt. I guess we'll have to go back!

California cachin'

During late June and early July, Mr S travelled to the US to attend a conference in Anaheim. Of course there was no way he was going to let work get in the way of some geocaching. He had a few days in San Francisco before flying down to Anaheim, and was able to do some a couple of caches.

He managed to find our first virtual cache, WPArt: Lillie's Cache, as well as I met him in a swamp down in Dagobah.... Being a Star Wars fan, there was no way he was going to leave that one alone. He was able to set our Gingerbread Man geocoin free, and it didn't take for him to be moved on.

There were a couple of other caches on his list that he would have liked to have found, but the muggle factor was too high, and he doesn't like doing urban caches in Australia, let alone overseas. Ms S got into the caching spirit too, and dropped off a couple of travel bugs and coins that we'd held onto for quite a while.

It was nice to come home after adding a couple of overseas finds to our tally. If only he'd known about geocaching two years ago during his seven week holiday in the US!

Baby geocacher on board

As mentioned in our previous post, we may need to reconsider our goal of reaching 250 finds by 20th May next year.

Just before we left for our trip to Port Macquarie, we found out that we're pregnant with our first child. This will probably mean no more long weekends away where we can devote ourselves to going geocaching. Now that we're over the initial shock, we're both very excited about becoming parents. Apparently prams and kids make good cover while caching, so we can't wait to take our child with us to distract the muggles.

The baby's due on 2nd January, so it will be a quiet Christmas and New Year in the Sensible household. So far everything's going well with our mini-cacher. It (we find out in a couple of weeks whether it's a boy or girl) will have a geocaching.com profile, so will be able to log the finds that it accompanies us on.

Another caching milestone

Since our last post, we've reached another caching milestone. While on a trip to Port Macquarie in May, we made our 100th find. It ended up being Light-A-Tack (GCR6QN) on 5th May. We'd set ourselves the goal of getting to 100 finds before our one year cache-a-versary (May 20th), so we were happy to be able to do that. We've bought a 100 finds geocoin and will drop it in a cache once we get it engraved with "Sensible Shoes".

We managed to find nine caches on our trip (along with one DNF which was the first of many for that cache so the owner has disabled it). There were some nice spots along the way that our caching led us to. The caches that we found were:
Our goal now is to reach 250 finds by our second cache-a-versary. However, this might not be as easy as we first thought ...