The Puzzle Continues

Sorry for the long break in updating, changes at work have meant less time for hobbies.

So you want to know how it went? Did we find the final location for the puzzle cache?

Ok ok lets get on with the story.

Having captured the final Puzzle Coin we were able to extract the final coordinates we needed from it. We then released it back into the wild.

Once released we have noticed how these pieces have been moving very fast now that they are in more accessible caches.

Ok sorry back to the main story.

Entering the complete coordinates into the navigator we were now ready to hunt down the head quaters and finally log this cache as completed.

Excitedly we set out.

Soon arriving at the location, we parked the car and set off on foot, the navigator leading us to GZ quickly, we started the search.

After what seemed ages, but was in fact a few short minutes the shout went up and the cache had been caught.

We set about logging, only having to dive for cover as some Geo-muggle dog walkers had managed to somehow sneak close to us.

When replacing the cache we decided to leave the ingot at this location, a tempting little prize for the next hunters, and perhaps the start of their next adventure.

An old pier near the cache location

Of course Mr Geo-Cacher had to test it

Happy that we had finally completed this cache we set off on our next hunt.

Lord of the Flies

It was another nice weekend here in Finland so we headed out for another of our cache hunts.

Close to when we first started GeoCaching we had found a Geo-Puzzle coin.
What is a Geo-Puzzle coin?
Well they are four coins that make up the GeoCaching logo, but in this case they also lead to a cache once you have all four, as each coin has part of the coordinates for the final cache location.
So this is a very sneaky cache as all four parts travel separately around the region, something around the area of a 100km radius, and hide in other caches.

Our first piece of the puzzle.

Well we kept an eye on the movements of the remaining coins, and when one would come within range we would go and retrieve it, it took some time but we managed to track down three of the coins and upon interrogation get the coordinates from them.
All that was left was the fourth and final coin, well we had noted that the fourth part was deep in the forest, and had not moved for a long time, maybe because of its location deep in the forest, or maybe because the location was some distance out of town.

So back to the main story, sorry but I had to lay the background to this story.

On this particular weekend we had noticed a new cache had been hidden, and it was fairly near to where the fourth puzzle coin was hiding, (see there was a point to the first part of this story), so we set off in search of a possible First to Find and the last piece of the puzzle.

Things started off well, as it did not take us that long to located and capture our first cache, that being the newly hidden, well sadly we were not the First to Find this cache, but we were able to log as Second to Find, although as a bonus we did find a travel ingot.
As it turns out this travel ingot is also part of a series where you have to track down others from its clan and capture the coordinates for the final hunt, although this time they travel in a much smaller radius, just 55km.

The Travel Ingot.

So we entered the coordinates if the cache that the final puzzle coin was using as it's hideout.
We should have known this was not going to be as easy as first thought, when our navigator first sent us one way, and then another, but finally we found the road it wanted us to take.
I say road using the loosest term possible, at first it was not too bad, but soon the tarmac turned to a dirt road, then that turned into what I can only describe as small rocks compacted to make some kind of trail through the forest, clearly only meant for agricultural vehicles.
Well we found the parking location, a very small clearing next to the rocky road.
We were now about 1km from the cache location.
Leaving the car behind us we started to follow the trail, now of course we expected to find some kind of hiking trail, or a little path through the forest, boy were we ever wrong.
The path we were following soon ran out and we had to make our own path, being careful where we stepped, so as not to disappear into a bog or hidden stream.
Do not get me wrong, the forest was gorgeous, and there were mushrooms everywhere, these we were also careful not to step on.
There were a few bugs around, but nothing seemed to take much interest in us, little did we know that these were just the advance guard.
It took us awhile but we found the location, but we could not find the cache.
Then from out of nowhere came squadrons of Deer-Ked a type of Deer Fly, first attacking Mrs GeoCacher, and then Mr GeoCacher.
We bravely fought them off while trying to search, and just as we were about to give up we found our goal.
Logging as fast as we could, we retrieved the Puzzle coin, and made as fast an exit as we could.
We were surrounded, the cache had unleashed its protectors and they were not about to let us escape that easy.
We must have looked a sight as we stumbled and moved as quickly as we could over the poor terrain, all the while our arms waving frantically trying to beat off the attack, and keep the flies out of each other's hair, necks, and clothing.
Finally making it back to the safety of the car we climbed inside and took off as fast as we dare, still finding these flies in our hair, Mrs GeoCacher must have thrown about 12 out of the car window on our trip home.
Once home we dived for the shower, and even then we were still finding more of these flies, Mrs GeoCacher tried washing them down the sink, but the little buggers just climbed back up and were almost grinning at us in our attempts to get rid of them, although thankfully in the end we did.

Home of the Cache and the Deer-Ked. (who stole the path?)

So we now had all four Puzzle coins coordinates, and would soon be able to go on the hunt final cache.

Two more of the Geo-Puzzle coins, as you can see they even gave Mrs GeoCacher trouble when she was trying to photograph them.

That's enough for this time, no seriously it is, do not worry I will return and let you know if we were able to hunt down the final cache.

We hide our first cache

We had been thinking about when and where to hide our first GeoCache. Well we decided on the when, that being once we had reached our 100 finds, and would therefore be a kind of celebration Cache.
So as you have read previously we reached that target, so next we had to decide upon where we were going to hide the Cache.
After a lot of head scratching, and rejecting of ideas for one reason or another, we rested on the idea that it should be at a location that had some meaning for the both of us, once that was settled, it became much easier.
We chose a location that was close to where we met for the very first time, this being a small park called Lampipuisto (Pond Park).
We visited the potential location to find a good hiding place, we spent a long time there choosing the location very carefully, this done we then collected all the things together and returned later to hide the Cache.

Lampipuisto (Pond Park)

Small wooden bridge over the pond

View of the pond from the bridge

A couple of ducks enjoying the good life

After all it is hard to be a duck (yeah riiiiight)

So we added the cache to the website and waited eagerly for it to be made public.
Soon enough it was, and the first find log soon followed.
These logs have been, and still remain to be, interesting, it seems a lot of the cachers finding the cache have some kind of story to tell about the park, and others who even though they might pass the area everyday were not aware the park was even there. So we are very happy with our choice of location, and the cache seems to be a bit of a hit and success.

Mr Geocacher has one weeks summer holiday left, so we checked on flight prices to England, and found a pair of really cheap tickets, so we took the bull by the horns and booked them.
So the last week of September/first week of October we will be in England.
We do plan to do some GeoCaching whilst we are there, and intend to compare English ways of caching to the Finnish ways. So more on this subject at a later date, plus Mr Geocacher has to start adding the caches to the navigator.

After all this excitement we took a trip to hunt down another of those caches that has been eluding us.
Last time we had visited this location we had spent a long time searching and had to admit that at that time the cache had managed to avoid detection.
But on this occasion it was not so lucky, with no berries around to distract Mrs Geocacher, she demonstrated just how good her Geo-eye has developed and soon hunted down the poor unfortunate micro-cache, despite its cunning camouflage.

Although well camouflaged it could not escape Mrs Geocacher (it should have tried hiding in the berries)

Don't forget to join us again to find out what we have been up to.

Church Boats

Ok I know this is not what I promised you, but I have to clear up a mistake I made in the last post.

What was my mistake? Well I stated that the church boats were owned by the church, this in fact was not true, although I have now corrected it in the original post, I wanted to make a full correction for readers who have already read that post.
Also because I have become quiet interested in this subject.

The church boats were owned and built by the local villagers, and used mainly to go to and from the church. In those days most of the churches were located on islands.
Members of the village would own an oar or pair of oars, although the members were all equal partners there would have been a chairman in charge of the boat, and he got to be in charge of steering or "the Cox" calling out the tempo of the rowing, while other non rowing members would sway in time to encourage the rowers.
The largest of these boats could carry up to 40 rowers.

A pair of Church Boats in the boat house waiting for the next outing.

The Church Boats name and year it was made. This one is Ahti and was made in 1896

Church boats were normally named after a person, the "company" that was set up to build and maintain the boat, or after local fauna.

Ahti is an old male Finnish name, but also has its roots in mythology, being the Finnish god of the sea and fishing.

Although a lot of the church boats are around 100 years old they are still used today for rowing competitions.

More information about Finnish church boats can be found here. (link is in English, Finnish, Swedish, and German)

More information about Ahti can be found here.

Normal service will now be returned to.

Nice Weather for Caching

Sorry it has been a little while since I last posted, but the weather has been so nice, and we have both been so busy at work, that there has not been much time left for me to update you all.

So as I said the weather has been really good, so we decided to take a trip to Pori, in the west of Finland. We had a lovely day out, although the town was far too busy for us to get any caching done there, we did go out of the town to Yyteri (pronounced oo-ter-ee). Yyteri has a proper sandy beach, and we soon found out that there is a cache located on the beach, so of course we could not resist this challenge, and was rewarded with a beach hunt success. Sorry to say that we do not have any pictures that we could post of us at the beach, so enjoy the ones of us in Pori.

Mrs GeoCacher with a balloon mouse (yes it is suppose to be a mouse not a poodle).

There is a saying that goes something like "visit Pori and be dragged through the square in a basket". Well we found the square and the basket, but could not find anyone to drag Mrs Geocacher around.

We have also been to visit GeoCaching Mummy, although this time she did not come caching with us as there was not enough time.
We set out a cache route on the way there, and then another for the journey home.
This turned out very successful and bagged us many caches.

Yes this is a Wellington boot hanging upside down hiding a cache.

The building on the right of the picture houses a church boat (and somewhere hidden is a cache), there are many of these boats around Finland. No the boat is not a church, it was owned and used by the villagers to go to the church, and is rowed by a team of locals.

Do I need to comment?

(Ok if I have to comment) Just some lovely shots of the stream next to the church boat.

This is not near the church boat, but was still on the journey home. This rather erm safe? pier is still in use.

Then one evening we thought we would try our hand at finding a cache we had tried finding three times before.
So setting out on our fourth attempt we really did not know if we would indeed find it this time.

Well we still do not know how it happened, but this time we struck lucky and found the cache in a location we could swear we had searched several times already, but this time we found it within ten minutes of arriving at the cache site.

The cache that managed to hide from us so well. This was the second Nano-Cache we have found.

Well that is it for this instalment, there is more to come.
What? you want an example?
Ok then how about this?
Coming in the next action packed episode we hide our first cache, we find another sneaky cache trying to use camouflage, and we book a trip to England (English caches be afraid, be very afraid)

Ok, can I go now? Well tough because I am, so until next time, stay lucky.

Our First, First to Find :)

First of all Mr Geocacher had to go into town to leave some forms at an office.
After this was done we decided to go and take a look at a cache we had searched twice before with no success, even though we did not have any of our caching equipment with us.
We knew where the cache should be and thought a quick search late in the evening might be in order.
We arrived and parked our car and walked to the location, the hunt was on.
searching through the undergrowth, Mr Geocacher caught sight of something from the corner of his eye, so circling carefully around he moved in on the cache, and this time we had complete success, the cache was in the bag.

After that we went home to relax for the rest of the evening, or so we thought.

Once home we thought we would review some of the mystery and multi-caches in the area, and see if we could work any of them out, well time moved on and it was approaching bedtime, Mr Geocacher decided that he would just have a last look at the recently published caches.
There on the list was a new cache, only published 15 min's before and about 8km's (5miles) away.
At first Mrs Geocacher did not believe Mr Geocacher, and came to view his screen, realising it was real, the race was on.
Mr Geocacher has never seen Mrs Geocacher get ready and leave so fast, we collected up the navigator and a couple of torches and left, running to the car (again Mr Geocacher was surprised because Mrs Geocacher was running to the car, yet another first).
We arrived at the location and was in luck, it seemed that no other cache hunters were around.
Soon locating the coordinate location it was just a case of finding the actual cache, at the same time hoping that no others arrived in search of the rare FTF (First To Find) honour, after all this does only happen once in any caches lifetime.
After a few minutes of searching and head scratching we found our prize, and was very pleased to log our very first FTF, the time was exactly 00:00, what better way to end the night and start the next day.

Did we get to 100?

WARNING PICTURES MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS!!!

Sunday morning dawned and we was up and about early, and preparing for a good days caching.
We had loaded up the navigator with lots of caches in Nokia in the days leading up to Sunday.

Mrs Geocacher preparing for an early start

Well we did manage to get out early, and made our way to a small village near Nokia, we had tried this cache once before but it had turned out NATSBOG. This time with it being early on a Sunday morning we struck gold and hunted down the cache, we had been in the right area before but because of the Geo-muggles, we had not been as observant as we might have otherwise been.
That done we moved on to one we had not done before, but was close by. Here we got a pleasant surprise when we opened the micro-cache container, the makers of the cache had made it from a 35mm film container, but then they had taken the time to use an old 35mm film roll and instead of the film inside they had rolled up the log book.

Mrs Geocacher with the 35mm film roll log book

We continued on, in high spirits, we was 2 for 2 and feeling good.
Our next hunt was to be another surprise and bag us the biggest cache we have ever seen, some how we went from the micro to the huge in leap.

Mrs Geocacher looking really happy and surprised at the size of this cache

We had to drive through this gate to gain access to the cache site, we assume it is to stop the cache from escaping. As you can see Mrs Geocacher seemed to enjoy playing with the levers on our exit.

Whilst we were driving to the next location the navigator alerted us that there was a roadside cache ahead, so we stopped by the side of the road and bagged ourselves this, then continued on our way a lovely cache location of an old stone railway bridge that is no longer in use.

Mr Geocacher "bravely" coaxing a spider away from the cache

Mrs Geocacher walking on the rocks in the stream while she examines the old stone railway bridge

So our day continued as it had started (no not in bed, please do try and keep up), but with us finding all the caches we visited, our navigator kept us informed of more roadside caches whilst we drove from location to location, and we decided if we would stop and do these hunts or if they were just a little far off the side of the road.
The finds just kept on coming, until we was just one short of our 100th find.

Could we do it?

Well with excitement we chose the next location and was feeling good, as we had not failed all day.

We arrived at the location and parked the car, and off we wandered following the navigator, well we came towards the cache location, and very close to it there was a Geo-muggle, so we crept up very carefully towards where the navigator was leading us, keeping a close eye on the muggle, who seemed more interested in his bottle of beer than us thankfully.
After a few minutes we were at the exact coordinates and had our 100th cache in our hands, we excitedly logged and made our way back to the car, being careful not to disturb the Geo-muggle and his beer drinking.

Mrs Geocacher back at the car at the location of our 100th find (woop woop)

So did we have any failures during the day?
To be honest not really, we did go to one cache that turned out to be NATSBOG, we dont count that as a DNF as we were totally unable to search. The cache is located by the side of a lake on the edge of a mooring dock, and of course there was a very big expensive yacht moored there with lots of children swimming in the lake.
We also went to find cache number 101 but when we got towards the cache location the rain started to come down, so we headed for home, to log our finds, write our blogs, and plan our first hide in honour of our 100th find.

All in all it was a great day for us, hope yours was for you.

Velodrome

So what have we been doing?
Well we went to a Geocache event, this entailed finding the location, as it happened it was on an island, so Mrs Geocacher had to row us about 200 meters, as Mr Geocacher has never rowed a boat.
We met up with fellow cachers, grilled sausages, and swapped stories. A few of us took one of the boats to a near by island where there was a cache hidden. All in all it was a good time. Mrs Geocacher had the good fortune when it came time for us to leave that she did not have to row us back, as some others were leaving at the same time, so we let them do the honours.

On one of our latest cache hunts we were led to a Velodrome, had it not been for Geocaching we would never have known this place was even near to Tampere.

The Velodrome (No I said Velodrome Not Thunderdome, you wont find Tina Turner or Mel Gibson here)

Quiet high and steep banking

The things Mr Geocacher goes through in pursuit of the hunt (nope no Tina Turner or Mel Gibson under here either)

Not the kind of sign you expect to find in the woods

There has been much more going on, but nothing much to really report here.
We have a weekend of caching planned soon, so with any luck there should be plenty more to write about after that.
Of course you can always come back and see what else we have been doing in the meantime.

Saturday and Sunday

We did not get away to an early start, this was due to Mrs Geocacher attending a bloggers meeting.
When she was finished at the meet we decided to drive and visit her Mummy, and of course do a couple of caches on the way.
Well we went to the first location and quickly found the cache, just as we were about to leave a car stopped in front of us, I turned to Mrs Geocacher and said "I know what they are here for, the same thing as us", her reply was "how can you be so sure?", the answer was easy "the two very large navigators on the dashboard of the car are a bit of a give away don't you think?". well sure enough they were there for the same thing, so we had a short chat with them and continued on our way.
Next stop was to a cache we had tried to find on our last visit to this area, back at mid-summer, well once again we failed to find this cache, not because we are looking in the wrong location, but because it was NATSBOG (Not Able To Search Because Of Geomuggles), the cache is right by a big lake, and being a nice afternoon someone had docked their boat right by the location of the cache and were sunning themselves, so once again we will have to return to this cache to search it another day.
By the time we arrived at Geocaching Mummy's, Geocaching Mummy had already been to sauna, and it had almost gone out (this being a wood burning sauna) so there was Mr geocacher in front of the sauna stove blowing on a tiny little ember like crazy to get it hot enough to catch the logs alight and warm the sauna again for us, the ember grew in size and then flames started to lick the logs, yes success the sauna was alive once more, leaving it to warm we went and had some food and followed that by visiting the now re-warmed sauna.
After sauna we set up our mobile command center and Mrs Geocacher logged the finds for that day, the cache had also given up it's treasure of a TB (Travel Bug), we had exchanged one TB we had with us for this new TB.
The rest of the evening was spent with Geocaching Mummy, who was eager to show us her new hobby, collecting pin badges, before retiring for the night.

The following day we continued our hunt, taking Geocaching Mummy, who likes to join us when we visit with her (thus becoming a part-time member of our team).
All three of us set out in the car, we had chosen to return to yet another failed find in the area, this time better equipped for the terrain, this was a multi-cache, we had worked out all the previous parts and only had the final cache left to find, well this time we struck gold, and after some hunting and a lot of tripping and falling we found the cache.

The view from the parking area (I missed the picture of Mrs Geocacher and Geocaching Mummy picking and eating wild berries as soon as they emerged from the car)

Upon opening the cache we was greeted with the treasure, a geocoin and other exchangable's, among these was (believe it or not) a pin badge, so Geocaching Mummy got her own piece of treasure from this cache.

Geocaching Mummy with her own treasure from the cache

So we exchanged some other treasure for the pin badge and also exchanged a TB for the Geocoin.

Mrs Geocacher with the TB we exchanged for the Geocoin

This being done it was off to the next location. A really beautiful spot way out in the countryside.

Old mill (well it is, what do you want? long titles on everything?)

Even the birds have apartment buildings around here

Well we found the cache here, and yes another surprise the was a TB here as well.

I never knew the Simpson's were such football fans

So we exchanged TB's and later found that this new TB is trying to get to Plymouth in England, well we are hoping to go there ourselves soon, so we are really pleased with this find.
We stayed here a short time, looking around the museum and drinking coffee, before leaving back to Geocaching Mummy's.
After we dropped her off and had something to eat we left for our own home, and more caching on route.

Our first stop was to a recent addition to the caching pages, and as luck would have it almost right on the doorstep of Geocaching Mummy, and as a bonus it's a nano-cache.

Our first nano-cache

This is the first nano-cache find, although we have found other small caches these have been in the group of micro-caches.
Moving on from there, we journeyed onwards to the next location, arriving there to find what appeared to be a lizard guarding the area.

Beware! Guard Lizard

Although upon closer inspection it was found to be fake.
Continuing our journey we passed some more interesting views and sights,

Abandoned Farmhouse

including this old abandoned farmhouse.
Our last cache of the weekend was a four part multi-cache.
Well we completed the first two parts, but was unable to locate the third part, thankfully for us there were some other clues to the fourth and final location, so armed with this information we were able to complete the hunt and find the cache.

One of the churches we visited during this cache hunt

A close up of the interesting stone work on this church

We had tried to do this cache once before, and had got as far as hunting the first part, when the heavens opened and down came the rain like there was no tomorrow, needless to say we headed straight back to the car and went home.

Updates

Well I had intended to update the blog on Monday, then again today, but it seems life had different plans for me.
First of all we got a notification of a part of a geo-puzzle we are following, so of course we had to go and do that, so there went Monday, then Tuesday (today) my PC decided that it was going to play up and I had to spend the evening fixing and updating that.
So I am only going to post a short update for now.
Lets go back (way back, no further back than that) lets go back to last Friday, as I had said we were getting ready for the weekend, well we found ourselves with some extra time, so we thought we would go and start our caching weekend, and visit a cache we had previously been too and been unlucky.
This time we were certain we knew exactly where the cache was, but alas we were wrong.
Although we was in the correct location and did eventualy find the cache.

No this is not some horrible lake monster, just Mr Geocacher on the hunt

So then we moved two other caches, where at one we was lucky and found a travel bug that we were totally unaware was there, also at this location Mr Geocacher decided to place his very wet and now useless socks in the waste bin, we were however successful at all three caches and started our weekend off well, returning home in time for our Friday evening sauna.

The sign says it all

Now for those of you who might not know about the great Finnish past time of sauna (pronounced sow (as in cow)-nah not saw-nah), this is where you strip off naked, and go to sit in a small room lined with wood.

The entrance to the sauna

Inside there is a stove with warm coals (the stove is heated by wood or like in our building electricity, and these days you can get the really fake infrared, there is also a smoke sauna, but this is a totally different experience, and one Mr Geocacher has yet to try).
You sit in this small room that is heated between 70 and 100 degrees C, and from time to time you throw water onto the warm coals, YES even in the electric sauna (I know, I know these Finns are crazy, but you just have to do it, it is great), although not in the fake infrared ones, now some Finns will slap themselves on the back with birch twigs, this we have both done of course (although not together), and find this is not for us.

The Hot room, notice the wooden benches where you can either sit or lay down and gently boil yourself

Now assuming you are boiled enough you are then supposed to run naked from the sauna and jump into the lake, this we do on occasion when we visit geocaching mummy (more about her in a later post), we just normally shower and go back to the apartment to enjoy our after sauna beer and cider.
This done we then eagerly awaited Saturday.

In the meantime

Well not much to post about at the moment.
I thought I would give you an insight into what goes on when we are not outside searching the caches.
At these times you can find us in front of our PCs, we are either chatting with our friends online or updating our blogs, (Mrs Geocacher has a very active blog, that she writes in both Finnish and English), doing another of our hobbies (will talk more about this another time), and of course working out what Geocaches we are going to go and look for on our next safari.
So how do we choose them?
Well we have a few options here, location, distance, maybe part of a series we currently following, or just random.
With location it might be the case that we are already going somewhere for a visit, so we will look at what caches are available in that area, and make our list from that.
Depending how much time we have before normal life kicks in again determines the distance choices, the more time we have the greater the distance we are able to cover, we are trying to keep a few local caches in hand for when the winter arrives (a damn cold time here in Finland, so we don't intend to go very far unless it is to a warmer climate or the place has a sauna).
Some caches have multiple parts (a multi-cache), whilst others maybe a series (railway stations for example), and then some Geocoins may have a series as well, we are currently doing one Geocoin puzzle series, and one Multicache.
Also at these times I am loading more Caches into the navigator, so that we are able to cache on the go, they are setup in alerts, so as we drive along the navigator will alert us if there is a cache near by, just like they do with speed camera's, then we are able to decide if we wish to stop and have a hunt.
Lastly we try and work out some of the clue caches, these caches have no coordinate locations on the web pages, you are given clues and have to work out the coordinates from those. They can be extremely hard.

With that all said it is now time to go and get ready for the weekend, and with luck plenty more to write about and for you to read, come back soon and find out whats been going on.

Navigators

I thought I would talk a little about Navigators.
To go Geocaching you do not need a high range top of the line model, most models will do, of course some are better than others.
But at the end of the day price is an issue for most of us.
You can go with just your mobile phone, Trimble make a really good software for today's mobile phones, you do however need a phone with a built in GPS, or one with bluetooth and a small cheap bluetooth adaptor GPS.
Some handheld Navigators come with cache coordinates already inside (the most I have seen advertised is with 250,000 caches pre-installed).
Whilst other units are able to download direct from the internet, but at the end of the day all will allow you to input them manually, although time consuming, the reward of a fun time is worth the time.
So to sum up, when it comes to the cost of this hobby, it can be as cheap or as expensive as you want, there is a way to do this for every pocket.

Encounters with mother Nature and other scenic things

What have I got for you today?

Well we have not been out for a couple of days, work and real life coming into play, so I thought I would show you some more of the sights we have encountered on our travels so far.

This first set is of some interesting signs...I will of course translate them for those of you that do not understand Finnish.

What? "oh how dull" I hear you cry, "we can see signs anywhere".
Well maybe you can, but some of these signs are quiet old, and others are just unexpected, I will try and explain in the captions.

Sign reads "End of Public Road"

Although this sign may not seem that strange, it comes as a bit of a surprise when you are driving down a country road, and come to a lovely beauty spot with a lake and coffee shop, the road continues on over a lovely bridge, and "bam" on the other side of the bridge you see this sign

(Top) Summer Headlands Road
(Bottom) Jawbones

Now here you drive down Summer Headlands Road (there is another sign further down the road, but sadly we did not get a picture, that read "15 kmh whole island"), and you arrive on the little island of Jawbones, I really do not know how it got this name, and I am not sure I want to.
Interestingly although cars are limited to 15kmh there is a railway going across part of the island, and I do not know if they have to stick to a slow speed limit. Trains used to stop here, as you will see in a later picture.
We found the locals of this island to be very pleasant and friendly, all smiles and waving, comes as another surprise, but very refreshing change.

Old Chalk mine

(although we feel it should have read "mosquito central")

We walked into this area and were greeted like the meals on wheels lady being greeted by the elderly, we were totally mobbed by the mosquito's.
We located the cache as fast as we could, Mrs Geocacher logging the find, as I waved my arms around like a demented windmill, trying to stop us from becoming an all you can eat buffet, and made our escape as quick as possible.

This next set are just a few of nice scenery and pretty places.

The old Railway Halt in Jawbones

Although no longer in use, as you can see the locals still keep it well maintained.

No real title here, just a pretty picture of an old pier with a wonderful view

Again no title, just a quaint cottage in the middle of nowhere

This believe it or not was mentioned in the cache description as a pointer to being on the right path

A rather lovely little shop, again in the middle of nowhere

Well this was the first, but not the last time we had to walk the plank to get to a cache, as you can see on this day we had the perfect weather to go hunting

Just one of the many graveyards we have visited whilst on our hunts for Geocaches