I have never... been geocaching

Geocaching is yet another thing that I've never done. And yet again it's one that doesn't take me miles out of my comfort zone. I quite like walking. We used to do quite a lot of walking before we got married. Although to be fair we were usually looking for a pub, or at the very least where we parked the car, rather than a small plastic tub.

I didn't set out to try geocaching this weekend. I was on a 40th birthday weekend away in the peaks and was settled on painting my toenails different colours on each foot, walking the length of the room with a penny between my knees and wearing a blue wig. But the opportunity presented itself and it seemed rude to ignore it.

As such it was a really badly thought out bit of geocaching. Between us we had a map with some caches marked on it by a thoughtful holiday home owner, an IPhone app with very little signal, a terrible weather forecast and only fairly suitable outdoor clothing.

Before I go any further I would like to point out that we always knew where we were. Frankly I impressed myself with my map reading skills. It was just a shame that farmers don't believe public footpaths should be all that public. And that we chose to go out in torrential rain. I haven't been that wet in quite some time. We did a bit of stone wall vaulting (well slow climbing), some bog squelching, some farm dog avoiding. And very little of anything to do with coordinates.

The caches were marked on the map we had which made life a bit easier and Jodie actually knew what a Rowan tree looks like which was a  bonus and meant the clue left us by the cache setters had some worth. Imagine our sodden glee when we found the exact tree we were looking for. We sent Valda round the back of the tree to find the cache. Well it was her birthday. It wasn't there. We wrestled with bits of the undergrowth. We gave up and looked at the clues on the app. Finally we admitted defeat. It wasn't the best geocaching start.

The route we took should have included four caches but after all the retracing our steps and bog hopping it took us quite a bit longer than expected. After the first failure we ignored two others and headed for the last one which we knew was in a pub car park. It didn't have quite the same feeling of magic and adventure. It did however contain a pot full of small toys and was within spitting distance of a pint of Peroni.


All in all the experience was great fun but most of that was down to the wonderful girls I was away with rather larking about in the rain than any kind of geocache success. But it has got me planning on trying again. If we are going to take the kids though we need a route that definitely does not involve negotiations with farmers and one where the caches are, well, at the very least actually there. It's one thing disappointing a bunch of ladies on the long way round to the pub and quite another disappointing smallish children.

I'm off to do a bit more research. But this new thing has legs. Hopefully they won't be so soggy next time...