Earthcache

Geoscouts' first Earthcache is now live

If you find yourself in the South of France, maybe on your way down to Spain you can make a bit of a detour and discover our Earthcache. The mountain is well known by some for it's strange dis-ordered strata. Visiting the related webpage will explain all about this mysterious peak and the enigmas attached to it.

Could this be the place to be when the world ends in December?

Our very first Event cache

Geoscouts are hosting a camping event at the Camping Municipal in Huriel, Allier, France. More info HERE

We will be at the campsite from Wednesday 25th April 2012 so please feel free to turn up earlier and make a short holiday of it.

Thursday we will be out finding caches in the area ~ all welcome to join us.

Friday there will be some new caches hidden for the event including, maybe a night-multi.

Saturday we will be onsite ready for the main event by zephyrsailor which kicks off here.

We look forward to meeting some fellow Geocachers from the Allier.

See you there!

Munzee Madness

New on the scene this year is an add-on to Geocaching for smart phone users. Munzees are QR codes that when scanned take you to the official Munzee site: www.munzee.com where you can earn points for scanning and hiding them. The Geoscouts are in the process of adding these to each of our Geocaches since we found our first one in a cache near Brive. Not all are hidden in caches either. You can find them on all sorts of different locations so check out the map on the official website to see if there are any near you. Happy hunting!

The Geoscouts have been taking some time out in the garden recently. We hope to be back on the caching scene very soon but until then we're admiring this summer's Jerusalem Artichokes ...

All the fives

It was an F-ing great weekend. Not only did we reach five hundred finds at the Event Corrèzien but we also found our fifteenth FTF! We like Earthcaches so much that we went for that one first and were later declared first on the scene. In addition our scoutbus was made trackable especially for the event which took our own trackable count to fifteen. As if that wasn't enough 'F's we published our fiftieth hide on Sunday. A big thanks to Team Lamoer for making it all possible.

Milestones

As we approach our 500th cache find a short word on milestones seems appropriate.

I wasn't one to worry about numbers initially, in fact our 100th find would have been at a motorway services had we managed to find the exit sliproad. As it happened there was no available exit on this particular junction and instead we landed at "Demandez la clé" for our 100th find. After this I decided to make each cache find at the one hundred mark an unusual and memorable find. For number 200 we set out on a cold, damp New Year's Day to find a sorrowful multi -cache at Oradure sur Glane. We had visited this village before but this new reason for being here didn't make it any less sombre.

At 300 we made our way down to the South coast to find our first webcam cache at Banyul-sur-mer. It was a little tricky liasing with the team back home in order to get the webshot but we did it in the end. Milestone number 400 was an Earthcache in les Roches Enchantées series by Trapeur24. It led on from a treck into the depths of a cave which remains one of the scout's favourite caches.

As I write this we have 499 finds. Where the next one will be I don't yet know but I'm sure it will be a momentous occasion.

Cache in the City

We love spending time in the woods looking for caches and in more remote locations that can take half the day just to get to. Off the beaten track is probably our preferred destination but there is another side to geocaching which has it's own individual challenges. Caching in the big city.

You've heard all about "Muggles" - the people that don't participate in our hobby. Well, of course the city is full of them and this alone can be a problem. Finding a nano attached to the railings is one thing but retrieving it and signing the log in full view of onlookers is another.

You probably won't be looking for regular boxes as they are hard to conceal and would likely be found unintentionally by passing locals. In towns therefore, the micro reigns supreme and you will no doubt find 35mm film canisters tucked into walls or a sneaky magnetic key-holder at the back of a phone booth. Love them or hate them there are some situations where only a micro will fit.

On the positive side you are likely to find caches closer together so if you're in it for the numbers you could be in for a good day. But for me the best thing about city caching is getting to see the town centre from a new perspective. We recently found a cache in Limoges - one in the new TerraAventura series which took us to parts of our local town we had not yet exlored. We are hoping to visit Clermont-Ferrand in the summer where there are hides a plenty and we've already been to many other towns and cities, large and small. The main thing to remember when hunting in a busy place ... be discreet!