Today I went to Seaham for lunch with mam and Lin. After we were fuelled, we set off to find some nearby geocaches. The first was THE PIRATES GRAVE! (GC4NDGV), near St Mary’s Church. Lin got her hands on the cache very quickly, and I logged the find.
We had a bit more trouble with the other one, Church Micro 6853…Old Seaham (GC5HCJX). The clues were quickly found, and the final coordinates were calculated. After a thorough search in the wrong place, I rechecked the coordinates and found the cache in no time – slightly futher away from where we had been looking. Oops.
Mam and Lin fancied a walk on the beach, and seeing it was a pebble beach I wondered whether it would be any good for seaglass. It turned out to be a brilliant spot! We found lots of lovely pieces as we walked along, and the walk quickly turned into a stand as we combed the beach.
There were plenty of people walking along the beach, bag in hand. One man walking his dog said hello and gave us a bagful of glass he’d collected. Apparently he collects it every day while walking his dog, and always hands it to someone else. Today I was his lucky “customer”.
Seaham certainly has a much greater variation of glass than any other beach I’ve collected on, and there are plenty of very nicely-rounded pieces too. Because of the way that waste glass was dumped into the sea in big lumps, I have found plenty of multicoloured glass here, which is really beautiful. I’m looking forward to spending lots more time on this beach.
After a gloriously lazy morning finishing off my book, it was time to geocache!
The weather was absolutely horrible! So why cache today? 15 years ago to the day, Geocaching was born! As such, there was a new souvenir to collect on Geocaching.com, and who can resist a new .jpg for their profile?
Terri and I headed out to pick up some local caches that have sprung up over the winter. We started off with Attention Defici… oooooh shiny (GC5PJNQ), which is nearby the National Glass Centre. When we got to the parking place we were surprised to see this:
HMS Ocean is staying in Sunderland this weekend. It’s a really huge boat. We walked up onto the glass roof of the centre to get a better look. This is the weird view you get up on the roof – the gift shop many floors below.
Terri hoped that these designs weren’t covering up the cracks!
Back to the geocaching though. We found the cache near the Red House, a sculpture nearby the National Glass Centre.
Quite a view from the living room.
After a short drive up in the hideous weather, we ended up on top of the cliffs at Roker. The picture below doesn’t do justice to the wind and rain we were enduring by this point! Traditional Bank Holiday weather.
Next up, Top Bombing (GC5NM3R). Continuing the military theme we headed for a multicache set near an old Sea Mine.
We solved the clues from the nearby information board, and ran along the clifftops to the final location to keep warm. The elements didn’t want us outside today. Once we got to the final location, we quickly hunted out the cache and signed the log.
On the way back to the car, I picked up Church Micro 6343…Roker (GC5CCZ7) – which Terri had already found. Still freezing, we ran back to the car.
From one church micro to another, the next one on the list today was Church Micro 7369…Whitburn (GC5NA9Y). In our own traditional style we headed straight for the church in Whitburn. Except it was the wrong church. Whoops. Still a nice church though.
Nearby Whitburn Parish Church is this other red house The Red Cottage, which has cricket-themed decorations.
Anyway, we were in exactly the wrong place for the church micro. We walked back through the village towards W.M.#62 We Shall remember them ~ Whitburn (GC5NEB8). The War Memorials series is a relatively new one, and you complete them by reading information on the monuments which reveals the final location of the caches. The church micro series has really taken off, with at least 7000 in the UK. I wonder if the W.M. Series will do the same.
Before going to the final location for this cache, we went to the Methodist Church in Whitburn (the correct location this time) but were unable to unearth the cache. We had similar luck with the final location of the war memorial cache. We should have quit while we were ahead!
At the end of the adventure, we were left with a couple of new DNFs in the area as well as our finds – it’s been a while since we’ve had some local DNFs to grab! The souvenir unlocked itself and presented us with a new mission of finding various types of cache on various days throughout the summer. I wonder if we’ll manage it!
I was in Leeds for work, and managed to squeeze in a few caches – along with a few DNFs! It was quite busy though, so I didn’t search too long or too conspicuously for the ones I missed.
I started at Roger Stevens’ Nano (GC3KQ9Y) but there were far too many people around to have a good search. I checked the obvious places as discreetly as possible, but came up with nothing.
I moved on down the hill to Leeds Web-Cam Cache (GC24CD) and Jon helped by taking the webcam picture. It was a bit tricky to spot me as it’s not exactly high resolution, but by following instructions on where to stand and by making myself into two dots with my bag, Jon managed to spot me and take the picture. There’s something very fun about these ones! I was happy to see this was the oldest webcam in the world, having been placed in 2001!
Camera is up there somewhere.
Next was a short multi, GGS3 (GC15QCW),which involved reading some information and working out some coordinates.
Useful information excluded from the picture!In the lobby at the teaching hospital.
I managed to solve it fairly quickly thanks to the clear clues, and soon had the final cache in my hand. I was really happy to be able to bag a multi in the short time I had, as well as a webcam.
I had a very quick glance at Park Square Cache (GC11KQE) and That was then this is now 6-7-8 or 3-4-1 (GC2QPX2), but in the end decided I’d better get my train!
To celebrate my last day of freedom before starting my new job, and because we’d been meaning to go on a proper day trip for ages, Terri and I spent a day caching on holy island! We checked the tide tables and reckoned we’d have time to get all of the island’s caches in one day – the challenge was on.
On we go!
Our first stop was the endpoint of the mystery cache Lindisfarne Puzzler (GC51Z7Y), for which we had already solved the puzzle. Our coordinates were correct, and the find itself was very straightforward.
One puzzle down…
One down in short order! There’s a lovely multi cache on Lindisfarne, Lindisfarne Gospels (Holy Island) (GC49XKX), which takes you around the whole island. We decided to use it as our guide and pick up the traditional caches on the way around the island, recording the multi clues as we went.
The beautiful priory
We got the first clue at the prory and moved on swiftly to a traditional cache – Lindisfarne. View of St Cuthbert’s Isle. (GC51Z42). We found the cache quite quickly, and Terri braved the nettles to get it out. When we took the camo bag off, we found a caterpillar inside! Luckily it wasn’t inside the tupperware!
No code on this Travel Bug.
This one also had some really lovely treasure inside for the youngsters.
Marbles, shells, a pine cone – what lovely treasure.
The cache location also offered us a few nice views.
A view of St Cuthbert’s IslandThe priory over the cache.
Next, we went off to the castle for more of the multi, playing tourist as we went. There were SO many people though…
Boat sheds and the castle.
A busy little spot! We couldn’t find the multi clue, so we had to hope we could guess it…
A piper and the castle.
After picking up a few more multi clues, time for the trads. This one was accessible only through Terri’s premium app, but she graciously allowed me to join in looking for Time for thought (GC3QV2D), which was tucked away behind a wall.
Ah, back out to the quiet side of the island.
We continued around the perimeter of the island to pick up a few more multi clues, including one at a bird hide overlooking a lake.
View from the hide.
It was here where we learned about the Pirri-Pirri burr… we would become much more acquainted with it later!
These would turn out to be a theme of the day! They’re very tenacious.
We passed some lovely bays and walked through lots of dune paths on the way to Cuthbert’s Ghost (GC1HAJ2), which was sited in an old quarry, with a ghostly tale…
Just around this bay…Pathways through the dunes.Nando’s Seeds.
We didn’t see any of Cuthbert’s Ghost’s beads, but we did find a solitary soldier climbing the rocks. Terri noticed that the log directly before ours was always by the same cachers, and we realised we must be following them around the island!
One man war.
We went on to the next cache around the next bay and over some more dunes looking for Greenshiel Stamps (GC1TF34).
And just around THIS bay…We spent plenty of time in the dunes.An ancient settlement.
We found it tucked away amongst the ruins of an old settlement… now for us to get back to civilisation!
Another gorgeous beach.Guess the prevailing wind direction.The mainland.
We rounded the last corner and got onto the home straight to Cache and Tache (GC49X05) which made no sense for a cache name until we discovered it was full of stick on moustaches! We of course graced the log with a picture of our moustachioed selves!
Blue – Yellow – GreenWe logged this cache. HA!
There’s always room for a pun… we were getting really quite tired by now, but we had also got all of the clues for the multicache! With a couple of hours left to get off the island we only had one more traditional cache and the multi’s final stage to find and log to finish off all the caches!
Back to square one.
We started the second lap for Lindisfarne to get our last traditional cache of the day, View across the Pilgrim’s Way (GC51Z12). We came across lots of interesting things in the beach, and could here lots of animals hooting – probably seals!
A natural arrangement..?Team Dunefrog make their mark.A view over the beach.
And that was the last traditional cache of the day! On the way back to civilisation we passed by a strange collection of glass.
Nearly helpful litter collection.
Back in the village we plugged in our answers to the multi cache, got coordinates and went off in search of the final multi stage… we wondered if we were going to run into the cachers who we’d been following all day! We also passed by a farm which had a yard full of birds – chickens, roosters, ducks, geese, swans…
These geese had a nice campervan.
We dived into the bushes off the road and got the multi cache final! We picked up a travel bug and then Terri said that she hadn’t seen the name of the cachers we had been following! We realised they couldn’t be far behind us, so quickly hid the container and sure enough, we spotted a couple walking towards us, GPS in hand! We stopped them and said hello, and it was the two cachers who had been following us all day! They were very nice and had enjoyed their day just as much as we had enjoyed ours.
We went back to the car park and took the weight off our feet – we had been walking for a long time! FInally, we crossed the causeway again, measuring its length for an earthcache, Lindisfarne Causeway (GC2993D).
From the mainland – picture for an Earthcache.
We completed the other Earthcache tasks, and finally, we finished off the tenth cache back on the mainland – A View of Holy Island (GC1BJ3Q). It was another quick find, and we just about made it back to the car without falling to the ground through tiredness!
The last cache of the day was hidden by a large concrete cube. Hm.
We had a lovely day on the island! A little weatherbeaten – and with aching legs – we dived into the nearest pub for a good feed and a refreshing drink. Aaaah… what a brilliant way to spend a day.
A visit from Matthew (an out-of-towner) necessitated a tour of Newcastle taking in the sights, and the Newcastle Invasion geocache (GC3Y1AF) fitted the bill perfectly. This cache is a multi-cache, which means there are lots of intermediate stages before the coordinates of the final cache are revealed. We had a lot of fun going around the various sights, finding mosaic aliens all over the city. One of the aliens evaded us, and we missed another one in the Baltic by accidentally waiting too late so it closed – despite having gone into the Baltic and played in the lift earlier in the day!
We didn’t have quite enough information on the first day to complete the cache, so the next morning we had another go at the one we’d missed in the town centre. It was completely obvious where the alien was! No idea how we missed it… We plugged the answers into the clue given, and came up with a set of viable coordinates. These led us to a lovely little spot where we quickly grabbed the cache and signed it. I really enjoyed this one! We headed down to the quayside to watch the bridge tilt and popped into the Baltic to photograph the alien we’d missed…just for the sake of completeness.
Tilt
We also revisited another cache in the centre of town, Meet Under the Clock (GC235X2). I’ve had a few goes at this, but this time a clue from a previous log gave me the prod I needed to look closer at something.
You are here.
I showed Matthew the site of a cache I’d found before, Eldon Square from … New to Old (GC4T967). Which is a brilliant hidden-in-plain-sight cache. He found it very quickly – three in one day isn’t a bad start!
Sun and Cake 