Our first geocaching adventure

Today we went geocaching for the first time. We’ve talked about it for a while but haven’t ever managed to get round to it. Today was a beautiful day so Ted downloaded a geocaching app and off we went.

We were hopeful.

We got to the location of the first cache only to find … well actually, only to not find. The geocache was supposed to be hanging from the bridge we were on, but we looked all over, searched the wider area, even searched the internet for clues or tip offs and we still couldn’t find it. I guess sometimes you have to just accept defeat and move on! Off we went to the location of the second geocache on our trail, while trying to keep the boys from being too disappointed. One of our group is never disappointed though.

As we arrived at the site of the second cache, I was desperately hoping it would be an easy find. I reckon the kids were starting to suspect that Ted and I were playing some cruel trick on them!

As we walked around Outwood Nature Trail in Radcliffe, we also found part of the Irwell Sculpture trail. Do you remember a few weeks ago when I wrote about our visit to Clifton Country Park? Well these sculptures are part of that same trail, apparently.

We didn’t need to worry too much though because after a little search around the GPS point and we found our first cache! It was a small tub, which I recognised as one that originally held homeopathic hayfever tablets. I was a bit confused actually because I had imagined them to be in some kind of official box.

Apparently not, as I did actually question whether this was ‘it’ or if the tub full of small plastic bags was the secret stash of some dodgy drug dealer, but that really didn’t matter to us because we were so excited to have found it! There was no log in this one, but I do think that sometimes they get too soggy and perhaps end up disappearing. Next time we’ll take some paper in case we need to replace any logs.

Carefully replacing our first precious find, we moved on to the next one. If I’m honest, I was a bit disappointed when I saw just how basic the first cache was so when we looked for the next one – and found it – I was really pleased to find that it was an official geocaching.com cache and it had treasure inside!

We signed our names in the book and left a coin in exchange for the octonaught figure Rowan kept. He was thrilled with his Pirate Treasure! It’s been ‘Pirate Weekend’ at our house this weekend so geocaching was the perfect activity for us. I’m lucky it worked out!

Motivated, we quickly moved on to look for our fourth and last cache of the day. Before that though, I had to conquer these harder-than-they-look-if-you’re-unfit steps so the boys had left me way behind by the time I got to the top!

I caught up to them just in time to be greeted with the sight of the boys climbing up a huge rock. They had found it already!

I didn’t even get a photo of this one because Louis had taken his camera and was gleefully snapping away, documenting his first ever geocache find. It was a very small container, with just a piece of paper inside. We logged our find and set off home.

 

I had a lovely time geocaching today and I’m pretty sure the boys did too. We’ll certainly be doing this again soon. These four sites are the closest to where we live and there are thousand across the world. I can see this becoming something of a family hobby!