Sunday, July 12, 2009

Where to start?...I know Geocaching

So I have decided to start off with Geocaching.
But where to start with this?....How about at the beginning!
Well it was the dawn of time....What? this is too far back for you? *sigh* OK OK I will bring it more up to date, quick fast forward to the 21st Century (there is that better for you?)
At the beginning of the year we decided to purchase a navigator for the car (my girlfriend is not the worlds best at navigating, a good example of this is she still goes wrong even with the navigator), we looked around at the surprising amount of car navigators, from low budget to the really expensive ones (you know the ones, all whistles and bells just to tell you how to go from A to B), we settled on a low priced (but not bottom of the range) model from Garmin, the NÜVI 205 W.
Around three or four months later my girlfriend asked me if I had heard of Geocaching, I had to reply that I had not, she then proceeded to enlighten me, at this point I realised that I had heard of something similar when I was younger, this was and still is called Letterboxing, it appeared that they had brought this idea into the 21st Century.
We thought about this and talked it over and decided that this could be a new hobby for us to try, it being something we could do together, and with our new toy, the Navigator.
So my holiday was booked for June and we decided that we would take this time to "give it a go".
The day arrived and my girlfriend had a notebook with a few cache locations jotted down, these were not in our area but in Pori Finland (did I mention that I live in Finland? just don't expect me to write in Finnish as well as English, I don't want to make your eyes bleed with all the mistakes).
So she would tell me the coordinates and I would type them into the navigator, this worked well but was time consuming, but we had a good day out and found our first caches.


First days caching in Pori
(no she is not wearing a planter on her head)

So about one month on and we are getting more adept at this, I have sourced and installed new software on my computer so that I can now load cache information into the navigator faster and with descriptions and hints, these programs being GSAK with macro's, GPX_by_Cache_Type, garmin-nuvi-exportgpx, and SpoilerSyncTxfr, with these in place it has made our lower range navigator into a powerfull Geocaching tool.
So back to the caching, we are really enjoying it, we have been warned that it is addictive, this is true it is, but it has taken us out of the apartment and into the beautiful finnish countryside.
Even though my girlfriend is finnish, we have still found places that she had never thought excisted in the area.
Below you will find some examples:

Cache by the ruins of an Old Church

Coming back from a cache we found this lovely old tree

Upon closer inspection we find a hidden world. (smurfs or muumi?)

So thats the start, there will be more to follow. (Got a whole days caching today, and boy is there a story in that).

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