Eloise (& Brad) online

As with all good bank holiday weekends we indulged in a bit of DIY, but we did manage to avoid any trips to B&Q (thank god!).  The results of the weekend are new lights in the kitchen (I can see now!) and a neater front garden.  I also managed to find the study under all the junk.

We didn’t just do DIY, we also wore the dog out by taking her geocaching on Saturday.  We really wanted to do a 5 part cache up at Ashton Court, but we knew with the good weather that there would be too many muggles around.  We headed north instead to the Cotswold way.  There were 3 available caches in the aera.  We found the first one quite easily despite the tree cover.  We dropped off a Travel bug and picked up a geocoin, our first one.  We then headed off for a second one.  Despite looking for a good 20 minutes we didn’t mange to find it.  The clue indicated that it was quite a bit off the path, but we couldn’t get a decent GPS signal under the trees.  We had to give up.  We decided to give the third one a miss as Bea had had enough.

We spent the rest of our weekend, seeing Friends & Family, eating chocolates and relaxing.

Comments Off

I thought that I should add a quick explanation of what geocaching is now that we are starting to find a few caches.

First of all you need a handheld GPS and the co-ordinates of where a ‘cache’ has been hidden. One of the best sites for this is Geocaching.com.

Geocaching is like a treasure hunt. Some of the caches are straightforward - the co-ordinates take you straight there, some take you to a clue (or several) from which you have to get the final co-ordinates.

The ones we have done so far (and the ones we are looking at doing) are quiet rural, but there are some in towns and there is even some at motorway service stations.

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Geocaching is an outdoor treasure-hunting game in which the participants use a Global Positioning System receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called “geocaches” or “caches”) anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small waterproof container containing a logbook and “treasure”, usually toys or trinkets of little monetary value.

Comments Off

So on Friday we set off on another geocaching trip.  This time we were off to Leigh Woods.  The weather wasn’t too great, but it stayed dry.  Bea enjoyed herself, running around while we were searching for the cache, walking backwards and forwards trying to get a clear satelite link under the trees.

We found it eventually.  It perhaps would help if we didn’t try and guess where the cache was and followed the instructions.

On the way home we purchased a cable for the GPS, so now we will be able to overlay our tracks onto a map.

Comments Off

Today we tried geocaching.  Brad had received a GPS unit as a birthday present, so we thought we would give it a go.

We started with one along the Frome Valley Walkway as we know the area.  We did make it a little harder as we left from home and not Winterbourne as suggested.

We found the general area of the first clue easily, but had a bit of trouble actually finding it.  It wasn’t helped by the tree cover and that we didn’t know what we were looking for.  20 minutes later and I spotted the clue. It took us another 20 minutes to figure out how to put a new Waypoint into the GPS.  After that we were on our way, and it probably only took us another 10 minutes to find the cache.

2 Comments »