250 Finds

We knew that we were close to the 250 finds milestone so we set ourselves the goal of reaching this target.

 Looking at the geocache map we could see a lot of caches from one of our favourite cachers, Haksu10.

He is not only a cache hunter but a breeder of caches, and has bred some of the best caches in the area, if not the best, upon closer investigation we found that Haksu10 also had a pet cache on his ranch (Haksulandia), so armed with this knowledge we thought we should make this cache our 250th find, and at the same time try and meet with the Lord of the manor.

We got his phone number and sent him a text message laying out our plan, he replied by saying that he would be pleased to meet with us and would be in residence.

We have a function on our gps that alerts us when we are close to a cache or waypoint such as a parking place, it sets off a loud "ping" sound, it did not take us that long to find the needed caches to take us to 249 finds, just 1 away from our target.

Now we headed towards Haksulandia, nearing our target location our trusty gps let out the alert, but it did not just "ping" the once, in fact it would not stop going "ping", there were so many waypoints around that in the end we had to mute the gps.

There in the grounds of Haksulandia was the Lord of the manor, waiting to welcome us.

This is where the pressure was really on us, trying to find his pet cache, whilst the owner was following our every footstep.

He informed us that this cache has never had a single "did not find" logged on it, great just what we needed more pressure.

Then grazing in the shade we found his pet cache, and what a magnificent specimen it was. Mrs Geocacher logged the cache, and noted down all the travel bugs that were in residence, replenished our stock of silica gel bags from a large tub that is provided so that cachers are able to replace damp bags in other caches.

Then we went inside for refreshing coffee, biscuits and a chat with the Lord of the manor.

He showed us his collection of Geocoins and gave us a list of the tracking numbers so that we could log them, we also chatted about how new cachers are not being so accurate with terrain difficulty levels or coordinates (sometimes being up to 100 meters or 300ft away from the actual location), and how some are using unclean ice cream containers or margarine tubs.

We left feeling very pleased that we had made this our 250 finds milestone, and headed off to find a couple more to start us on our way to the next milestone.

Mr and Mrs Geocachers 250 Finds Geocoins

Mid-Summer (Juhannus)

Last weekend saw the mid-summer (juhannus) celebrations here in Finland, so like many people here in Finland we headed for the countryside, for us this means going to visit Geocaching mummy.

Well we had a really good time, going to sauna, grilling (indoors due to a bit of rain), and just relaxing.

Mrs Geocacher spent time with her mummy, while Mr Geocacher did some fishing (and fed the local mosquito's).

We did not stay the whole weekend because of getting home to the pets. So on the Saturday evening we headed off home. It was a nice evening so we thought we would hunt out a few caches on the way.

As it was the evening after mid-summer there was lots of dances going on, so we still had to be careful of muggles, well avoiding muggles and short showers of rain we managed to bag ourselves a nice batch of caches.

Below are just a few pictures from that evening, taken from or near cache locations.

 Taken near a cache location
 

 Yes we found a cache hiding near here
 

 This is one of the barn dances that was going on that evening, there is a cache close to this location. It is the oldest barn still hosting these dances in Finland, and has been hosting dances since 1949.
 

This was taken just after one of the short showers of rain, and yes it is at a cache location, plus I like this picture very much.
 

Well that is it for this post, but there will be more as we are both now on our summer holiday.

I also have some plans to write some kind of explanation about Geo-caching as a lot of people have been asking me about it, so if there is anything you wish to know or would like to read, now is the time to mention it in the comments below, and I will see if I can accommodate you or even answer your questions.