Delta68's Caching Year in Review - 2013

2013

WWFM X - Jó estét - May

Wheesh, this brings us to the end of yet another action packed year of caching.  I don't know where the time has gone but we've got some brilliant memories and have fitted a lot in this year.

Here's a very quick summary of achievements for this year and a few pics:

New furthest cache found: Nyúzó Gáspár Fazekas Tájház

New most northerly: Cachopol #23/24 - Kungsträdgårdsgatan/Hamngatan

New most easterly: M30 12km West

Readymoney Cove, Cornwall - May

'Rare' caches found in 2013:  134 Wherigos, 12 Webcams, 36 Virtuals

Webcam cache with other nutters in Stockholm

New cache type: Maze exhibit

4 new countries (Hungary, Sweden, Denmark and Czech Republic)

Kippers in the Jungle - From September 2000- GC6A

 
3 new 'Jasmer' squares: March 2001, August 2000, September 2000

Our 'city' hire bikes at Match Stash - GC4D

New Maximum distance in a day: 968 Miles

New cache types in one day: 12


So there it is, can't wait for our next adventure.........

ROAD TRIP!

A couple of months ago, whilst planning what to do over the Christmas break, we decided it would be fun to go on a short trip and find as many Virtuals and Wherigos as we could, we spotted a nice cluster in the Lincolnshire/South Yorkshire area .  We have always enjoyed finding Virtuals as it's something a bit different, they're quite rare and you just never know what you might find when you get there.  Also as they are no longer allowed to be published then the plan is to find them all - well at least in the UK anyway

Is this door for Tom Thumb?

FRIDAY

We set off quite early from home on Friday morning and headed towards our first stop of the day which was Tom Thumb a virtual with a couple of stages in Tattershall, Lincolnshire.  We had fun looking around for Tom Thumb related items and exploring the church before heading off to our next stop.

Dambusters Memorial

The Dambusters Memorial virtual in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire.

A memorial wall depicting the breaching of the German dams in Operation Chastise, otherwise known as the 'Dam Busters' raid.  It is dedicated to the memory of those from 617 Squadron.

A very moving and poignant memorial.

We enjoyed a walk up and down the high street, what a lovely place, would like to spend a bit more time having a look around here in the future.

Ramblers Church

Next stop was Only The Good, a virtual in Walesby, Lincolnshire.  It's set at All Saints church at the top of a hill, it's a Ramblers Church which is on the Viking way, a long distance footpath running 147 miles between the Humber Bridge in North Lincolnshire and Oakham in Rutland.  

 
What an interesting place, spent ages looking around the church - rather amusingly someone had written in the visitor book that it was a shame the church was no longer used and that it should be 'brought back to life!' there was a reply beneath this setting them straight, commenting that the church is very much in use!

Next stop Wheriwalk around Caistor - a really fun wherigo set in the small town of Caistor, Lincolnshire.  All the stages worked perfectly and took us to places of interest around the town.  We stopped to have a look around the church of St Peter and St Paul before continuing with the Wherigo.  Rather interestingly it mentioned that this small town of population 2600 used to have 29 public houses - now only 1 remains!

Inside St Peter and Paul's Church

Next on the list was Crash Landing - a Wherigo around Cleethorpes Country Park in NE Lincolnshire.  This took us around a lake where we had to find parts of spaceship.  It was quite exposed here and very windy, we had a job staying upright.  All stages were found easily and cache found after a short search in between many muggle dog walkers.  Before heading back to the car we did Cleethorpes Country Park Earthcache and then it was off to do a few challenge caches, we'd planned to do quite a few more in this series but we completely ran out of time.

Cleethorpes Country Park

SATURDAY

A nice early start after a good breakfast at our hotel, then it was over the Humber Toll Bridge to the first virtual of the day Going in Deep.

The second visit was to another virtual Prime Medidian Again - just a quick stop by the side of the road then on our way again.

Next stop, Oi! Can anyone hear a Zeppelin? Which is a virtual set near Spurn Head - It's an acoustic mirror which was a forerunner to radar, they were built on the south and north east coasts of England between about 1916 and the 1930s. The ‘listening ears’ were intended to provide early warning of incoming enemy aeroplanes and airships about to attack coastal towns. With the development of faster aircraft the sound mirrors became less useful, as an aircraft would be within sight by the time it had been located, and radar finally rendered the mirrors obsolete.

Acoustic Mirror

Wheesh!  Next stop Trans Pennine Trail - Eastern End - We were at the Western End in Southport last weekend!  Cycling the Trans Pennine Trail between these two points is definitely on our to-do list!

Then a quick stop in Seaton to find a virtual - Sign of Old times before heading off 87 miles towards Bradford to another Wherigo - A Neolithic Geocaching Adventure - We were just hoping we'd left enough time before it got too dark.  Just as we reached the first stage a friendly face appeared - it was UK Reviewer Castagnari - it was really good to meet him and put a face to a name, enjoyed a chat before continuing on our way.  The Wherigo was really great fun, all stages worked perfectly and one of the stages was timed and involved racing up to the top of the hill - Great fun!  We were rewarded wtih a YOSM/trigpoint at the top.

After this we headed to the nearest Toby Carvery for a slap up meal before going into Leeds city centre to do the Leeds web-cam cache.  This was fun as we had to hang around by the Town Hall waiting for the page to refresh, this only happened every 5 mins, the first time the picture was just too dark so we had to reposition until we could be seen in the picture, must've looked very odd to anyone watching but hey-ho we're used to it now

Waiting for webcam to refresh

I noticed there was a church micro nearby so we decided to see if we could find that one, it was a straightforward multi so no problem.  I really like finding Church Micros - must make time to find more in 2014!

SUNDAY

We couldn't make a very early start this morning as breakfast wasn't served until 8am!  So the first visit of the day was to When???, a quick virtual in a layby - we noted down the necessary details then we were on our way again.  Next stop - a wherigo in Kippax just outside Leeds called Lost Cachers in Billy Woods - This was an enjoyable stroll around Townclose Nature Reserve, the weather was sunny and dry and all worked perfectly on the smartphones - once again we found the Oregons did not want to play.

The next virtual Tiles in the Wood was a real gem.  This is what I love about virtuals, you just never know what you are going to find.  This was a complete surprise, on our way along the track we were trying to imagine what we'd find and we certainly weren't prepared for this - sorry no spoilers here - just go and find it!

Last but not least on our list was the virtual A Moravian Walk - This virtual takes you on a walk through Fulneck Moravian Settlement, which is a village in Pudsey just outside Leeds West Yorkshire. It was established in 1744 and is named after Fulneck (Fulnek), the German name of a town in Northern Moravia, Czech Republic.  A really interesting walk and once again somewhere we'd never heard of before geocaching brought us here.

Fulneck School

Well that brings me to the end of the blog for this trip, a very brief account of what we crammed into the 3 days.

Altogether we covered 600 miles over 3 days
Found:
11 Virtuals (+ 2 YSM)
6 Traditionals
4 Wherigos
4 Unknowns
1 Earthcache
1 Webcam Cache
1 Multi

.................  Already getting itchy feet for the next trip...........

Wherigoing in Warrington and a few virtuals

A day out oop North

We decided to spend a day finding our two favourite cache types - Wherigos and Virtuals in the Warrington area.

Golden  Gates at Warrington Town Hall

The weather was looking mixed but undeterred we headed up the M6 at 6am.  We were a bit concerned that Warrington might be heaving with Christmas shoppers but when we parked up at 8am all was quiet. 

Warrington is a town in Cheshire, England. It stands on the banks of the River Mersey and is 18.5 miles  miles east of Liverpool, 16 miles west of Manchester and 8 miles south of St Helens.

Our main reason for visiting Warrington today was to do Warrigo which we'd been looking forward to doing since it was published.

Mad Hatter's Tea Party

A thoroughly enjoyable Wherigo, all the stages were interesting and triggered easily. I played on my iPhone and Oregon 300 and Mark on his Samsung Galaxy S4 and Oregon 550.  Unfortunately my Oregon didn't want to play today and kept on crashing at the Old Post Office so I continued just with my Iphone which all worked beautifully.

A K4 telephone kiosk in cast iron. There is an integrated stamp selling machine and posting box

We were able to do a bit of last minute Christmas shopping too which was very handy.

We'd only put a 2 hour ticket in the car park, hoping that this would be long enough but as we'd stopped for coffee and a bit of shopping half way round we realised at GZ that our 2 hours were up - doh!  A quick check on google maps and it was a 15 min walk back to the car - soon halved that as we ran all the way.

Then it was back in the car and off to Southport for a couple of virtuals - Trans Pennine Trail- Western End and Virtually on the beach.

Looks like we might get our feet a bit wet

I last visited Southport in the 80s on a high school trip to Pleasureland amusement park - the highlight of the trip being a visit to the Fun House and the low point was throwing up on one of the 'rides' to the sound of Kim Wilde's Kids in America, I've never been able to listen to that song since , yeah very nice, I used to suffer horribly from motion sickness as a child (in fact I still do), I couldn't go anywhere in the back of a car or on a coach without being sick and fairground rides were a no-go but to keep up with my friends I went on them.

Virtually on the Beach

Anyway, I digress .....Southport was hardly recognisable from my memory of the 80s trip, Pleasureland had had a bit of a revamp and there was a large retail park on the sea front including a large hotel.  The town was also extremely cycle friendly with cycle lanes and a cycle hire centre.  We had our trusty geo-bikes with us so it was great fun whizzing along the promenade.

Then to round off the day it was back in the car and down to Formby to do the virtual Guiding Beacon.

No footprints but we did find a starfish

We had great fun on the beach trying to find Intertidal Footprints, we searched until the sun went down and then got talking to a group of locals, one of them just happened to be a member of a local archeological group, she explained to us that the footprints weren't visible this time of year but she did explain where we should be looking if we were to come back in the future.  So this is definitely on our to-do list when next in the area.

Now where are those footprints?

So that was the end of a fantastic day of fun caching rounded off by a lovely meal at The Red Squirrel Harvester in Ince Blundell before heading home on our 130 mile journey.

Fun on the dunes

Another sunny autumn weekend ...... hope it lasts!

Hairy humbug

SATURDAY

As the forecast was for dry, sunny weather today we decided to head out to the Stamford area, we'd spotted a couple of IzaacWilson series that would be perfect to combine and do part by bike and part on foot.  We parked up near O.M.V.7. just outside Barnack to start the day.  We were much later starting this morning at 10.30 than our usual unearthly hour starts but hoped we'd still have time to complete the caches we had planned berfore heading home.

Enjoyed a really pleasant ride on our bikes.  The route was fairly flat and took us through the very pretty village of Barnack.  After 5.2 miles we left our bikes and continued on foot for 4.5 miles until we arrived back at the car. The route on foot was really easy going, no cows or ploughed fields and it was very well marked.

Interesting bus collection

The route took us 4 hours to complete and has to be one of the most enjoyable ones we've done for quite some time.

 
SUNDAY

 
We have been looking forward to doing the CBA series just outside Worcester since it was published last month, today was the perfect day.

We hadn't read any of the previous logs so we didn't realise that the hides were mostly tricky ones.  If we'd done our homework properly we'd have realised this and would've set off much earlier in the day, as it happens we set off at midday and started at quite a leisurely pace, estimating that we'd be finished within 3 hours.  Hmm ..... best laid plans and all that

The first few finds were straightforward enough and we even stopped at the Church Micro and ate our lunch in the churchyard before continuing on.  At #11 we realised we should've allowed a lot more time as the hides were getting trickier. 

Although we are pleased to say that sheer determination paid off at some of them and we found all the caches without resorting to PAFing for any of them (although came very close to it at #15).  A lot of the hides were quite novel and very well crafted, one in particular was the first we'd seen in all of our 15,000+ finds. 

We made the walk to be 5.3 miles  and it took us 4 hours to complete.

A lot of hard work has gone into setting up this series which we really appreciate.  We throroughly enjoyed the challenge of finding them all.

Arrived home just in time to see this a beautiful sunset

Nights are drawing in rapidly

Since we got back from Prague life has gone back to being its usual hectic self but I'm trying to find time to update the blog a little more often, might get a little easier now the darker/colder/wetter days are here.

We took our son off to uni in Wales last month so decided to make a weekend of it and finally got round to visiting Mumbles Lighthouse Island, this has been on our to-do list since we spotted it when we went to the mega event in Swansea but we weren't able to fit it in.  In May 2012 it was Geocache of the week on the Geocaching blog so we made a mental note to visit last year but couldn't fit it in. 

Then back in early September we planned to go but the tide times would've meant leaving the house at 3am or some other such stupid time so we looked again for the weekend we were taking our son to uni and the tide times looked perfect so we knew we had to go.  So glad we did, it was brilliant fun and the weather was lovely and dry and sunny.

Without Whitemoor Wander

Wherigos

Mark managed a short break in Cornwall last week, we'd been planning our return trip since our last visit in May but unfortunately I wasn't able to go this time due to work commitments but he had a great time finding all the Wherigos in the area. That brings us up to 127 in total.

I remember when we found our first one back in April 2008, the Whitchurch Wherigo, Mark really enjoyed it but I found it was a very solitary caching experience only having one Wherigo compatible device between us.  Over the last few years we've found them as an when we came across them but were concentrating on other targets such as old caches and D/T grid etc.  Now we've virtually completed all these challenges we tend to look out for more unusual rarer cache types such as virtuals, webcams and Wherigos.  Back in February Mark upgraded to an Oregon 550 so it meant we could both partcipate when completing the Wherigo, hence having found 113 this year!  Not that we're addicted or anything

Having an iPhone and Android smartphone has been a big help too as the players on these devices are excellent.  For some reason Wherigos haven't really caught on in the UK but in Europe they are becoming increasingly popular and increasingly inventive in gameplay.  Such as Domecek jednim tahem which is a 'play anywhere' Wherigo.  As the name suggests this type of Wherigo can be played anywhere and you end up with the final location.  Mark did this one over several evenings in our local park and it was all the more challenging as it's totally in Czech!  Then we were able to find the final whilst on holiday in the Czech Republic.

Shrewsbury

We'd been  monitoring the weather all week and rain was pretty much forecast for all areas but as luck would have it we were planning to do the new Wherigo in Shrewsbury and that seemed to be the only place in the country that didn't have rain forecast.

The starting point for the Wherigo is a pay and display car park but we decided to park a short distance away in a side street and do the Wherigo by bike, we keep our bikes in the cachemobile at all times so we can use them whenever the occasion arises.

This was our first visit to the medieval town of Shrewsbury and we loved it.  The old buildings, quaint alleyways and individual little shops were amazing.  

The Wherigo was an interesting tour around the town and we loved the ghostly theme and humour - 'Is that bacon I can smell?'

We picked up a few other caches around the town before heading out along the River Severn to do the Tinkerbell series which was really enjoyable on our bikes.

Then it was time to leave Shrewsbury and head over to Middleton Scriven, just south west of Bridgnorth to do Pen and Ceri go walking, which was a 4½ mile series which we did on our bikes as it was all on quiet country lanes.  The rain held off until about the last half mile or so then the heavens opened which then scuppered our plans to do the night cache near Kidderminster on our way home.  Oh well, never mind, at least we've still got that one to look forward to on a dry night.