Sunday 31 December 2017

Year in Review – 2017



Year in Review – 2017

Well, yet another year draws to a close.  We've been on some amazing adventures, it's been fun looking back on all the exciting trips to write our Year in Review.

Our quest to climb all the Wainwrights continued this year with a further 36 summits achieved bringing the total up to 90 out of 214.




This was fewer than we had hoped to do but we generally only head up to The Lakes when the weather is good and this sometimes clashes with other activities such as three Mega Events in the UK (The Kent Mega, Piratemania and Devon UK Mega), Caledonian CacheFest  and a trip across The Channel to GeoNord 2017 - Oxygen  took up a couple more weekends.
Venice

At Easter we enjoyed a week in  Italy - this was our first trip of the  year out of the country.  We logged nine cache types for the country including Italy's only remaining webcam.
Our event in San Marino

Part of our Italy trip included San Marino where we managed to find the maximum of six cache types which included the only Puzzle, Multi and Earthcache. A few more have been published since then though.

In September we attended our 5th Giga event.  We flew to Slovakia to attend the Giga over the border in the Czech Republic. Once again, we 'only' managed nine cache types! :D


Our little event in  Trvana



The highlight of the year was our three week road trip to the South Western states of USA in the Autumn. A totally surreal experience.  We saw so many amazing places and met some lovely people.  During our trip we visited San Francisco, we hiked to Half Dome summit in Yosemite, visited the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, flew to Seattle to do the Ape Cache (amazing) and visit Geocaching HQ to name but a few things, would love to go back, so much more to see that we didn't have time for. 



Big Sur

Half Dome Hike
Joshua Tree National Park
Mission 9: Tunnel of Light
At Geocaching HQ with Sven

As the nights were rapidly drawing in we also managed to fit in a long weekend in Spain  



We have made a few videos of our trips and put them on our YouTube Channel, we hope to add more when we have time to edit and upload them so hit subscribe if you'd like to see updates.
This years' new geocaching milestones etc:

New furthest West: The Great Lobos GC21EA - California
New furthest South: You Shall Not Pass! GC4F7ZM - California
New most finds in a day: 235 – on the epic E.T. Highway in Nevada
New cache types: Project A.P.E Cache

New Countries:

Italy
San Marino 
Slovakia

New cache types in previously visited countries

France: Mega Event, Event and Lab Caches
Czech Republic: : Giga Event  an Lab Caches
USA: Project A.P.E. Cache

'Rare' cache types logged in 2017:

303 Wherigos
6 Webcams
113 Virtuals
90 Lab Caches
4 Mega Events
1 Giga Event
1 ‘Maze’ Exhibit
1 A.P.E. Cache

Next year we'll try harder with the Wainwrights... although there are three Megas in the UK in 2018, a Mega in Austria, some more interesting Geoart in Spain to be done and a Giga near Cincinnati which will take up a number of weekends...... plus a few other ideas in the pipeline so watch this space...


A Happy New Year Everyone!