[ 30.10.24 ] LOG #3
i had the day off today and decided to take my camera down to the bay to take some photos of the boats coming in and out of the harbour, and snag some caches along the way! i did a little bit of geocaching when i was in Japan this month - mostly just taking a quick peek while in gardens and stuff like that, but i did bring a few trackables home! one in particular had a specific goal to get to australia, so I snagged that one and took it back with me.

the first two caches I found today were super easy - the first one was at a dog park, which is where i left the little shiba trackable that wanted to come to australia. the second one was another park a short walk away that had the most bizarre cache container i've ever seen in my life - just a computer mouse? tied to a branch, hidden in a hollow log. absolutely fascinated by it. regardless, both easy finds and i got to offload my trackers and some fun little swaps and trades since the containers were mostly empty.

last stop was revisiting a cemetary that i had to mark DNF twice now. i missed it the first time around, the cache itself had disappeared the second time around, but i did manage to grab it this time! nice to mark off a frowny face on my map for a change. the cemetary has this lovely florist and cafe open through the day as well, so i capped off the day with a walk through the memorial gardens and some ice cream. super nice day! wish i'd stayed out for longer and grabbed some more caches by the bay, but it was getting real hot by mid afternoon and the aircon of my car called to me





[ 11.09.24 ] LOG #2
today was a beautiful overcast day and i woke up with the intention to find as many of my old DNF logs as possible today! i've been holding ontp a trackable i bought for a few weeks now because i wanted to make a silly little hopscotch keyring to attach to it, because i thought that would be a cute little thing to have and watch how far he can travel! the keyrings arrived on monday and they came out absolutely perfectly, so i attached one to my tracker and decided to send it on it's way today. there is a specific cache i had in mind to drop him off in, but it's a bit out of my way and i wanted to get a bunch of caching done around that area if i was going to be there - so i figured today would be perfect.


so! with the tag activated and set up, i made my way to a letterbox hybrid cache i had always wanted to check out! it's not in my usual circle of cache adventures, and it always sort of freaked me out because it's right on someone's front lawn (presumably, the cache owners) AND it has puzzles involved, so i was always a little worried about how it'd look to loiter around while i tried to solve the puzzles. no need to stress, though - it was quite straightforward in the end. the cache itself was a very cute little mailbox, locked with a code that you had to figure out, and then inside of that was another puzzle box to get to the log itself. it was such a neat little puzzle - the cache said to bring a tool with some kind of attraction, which i figured was a magnet. the puzzle box had numbers and letters on all four sides of it, and after hovering a magnet over each of these numbers, i found one would stick the magnet to it and that would be one of the numbers for the lock. successfully did this for the whole box, unlocked the code and got my little stamp in about 10min! in and out super fast, dropped off my tracker, and went off to my next one.


next one i headed to was a nearby cemetary that i completely forgot existed! what should have been a relatively easy find was a dnf for me once again - i visited that cemetary a very long time ago with my brother when we first got into geocaching, but were unsuccessful then and unfortunately, unsuccessful today. no matter, it was a very lovely walk through the memorial gardens all the same, and i ran into some local wildlife - two bush stone curlews who were very unhappy to see me. next one I headed off to was a very old DNF, another first attempt at geocaching that i never found. fortunately i am older and wiser this time, and with more experience with what exactly a 'devious cache' could mean, i managed to find it from it's sneaky hiding place, way up a tree and disguised in bark. very satisfying to knock that one off my map finally.

and my final one today was in a very hidden away dog park, deep in some bushes. i've tried this one before, but i was going on weekends when the park was full of people and dogs that i just could not avoid. this time, however, it was mostly empty and i managed to sneak over the fence (and slice open my finger in the process, but that's just a given for me really) and start rummaging around in the bushes undetected. managed to snag this one pretty quickly, log it, and get out without anyone even noticing. successful day all up, i would say!



[ 16.08.24 ] LOG #1
Geocaching is something I tend to only do in the cooler months, because trampling through bushland in summer while kids are also out and about on their school holidays is a nightmare. That being said, I've been incredibly slack this month and it's been a hot minute since I went! so! today I had a rare weekday off work, so I'd decided to swing by some caches on my way to my errands for the day. I have some trinkets and trackables I've been meaning to drop off for a while now, so I was specifically looking for a larger cache to drop them off into. it has been raining real hard this week and flood warnings are in effect, so i had to find something that wasn't too close to a river or somewhere that would be coated in mud. the mosquitoes were horrendous, also.

the first one I found was a new cache, quite literally only a 5min drive from my house! it was in a little patch of bushland where an old farm used to be, hidden under an old trough. The cache was big enough to leave some items and trackables, so I dropped off some stuff I'd collected over time and left one of my trackabkes behind for the next person. it was a bit of a tricky one, since it was right next to a house with a very open and see-through fence, and the owners were home and in the garden with their dog. sneaking around was a little difficult, but i managed to get the cache and return it unnoticed. very pretty little area with a lovely creek! and spotted some very cool mushrooms, and a sweet little bearded dragon friend basking on the gravel path back to my car!


second stop for the day gave me a little more trouble. it was an easier find, just by a playground. i knew i'd have a good chance of getting it through the week here, as that place is swarming with families on weekends, so i went to give it a go today. it was hidden underneath a metal electrical box on the side of a relatively quiet road. first roadblock: council workers riiiight on the side of the road that i had to wait for. after about 15min of loitering, they packed up and left, so i went to start looking around the area. second roadblock: dog walkers immediately came round the corner and i had to stop until they also passed by the area. and third roadblock: couldn't find it! it was so wet and muddy under there that i just could not feel anything but mud and damp leaves, and i wasn't super keen on shoving my hand into unknown dark spaces here in australia. dangerous activity. ended up having to mark as DNF - but planning on going back next week for it!