Highlights from 2013

From a geocaching perspective 2013 was an exciting year. Firstly I celebrated ten years of active geocaching and that in itself is quite an achievement. Hobbies come and go but this is one that I still find enjoyable. Of course I have seen a huge development in the game both in terms of positive and negative trends. I love the creativity that some geocachers exhibit in designing their cache containers and in field puzzles that show great ingiuity. On the other side of the scale I hate the meaningless micros lying around in non-descript places where no thought or effort has gone into pushing a torn up scrap of paper into a pill bottle and calling that a geocache. However, geocaching has so many aspects to it that there is something for everyone to enjoy.

I am divided when it comes to geocaching with a smartphone. They are still not as accurate or as rugged as a dedicated GPS’r and battery life is a joke, but they have so much going for them in an urban environment in terms of instant availability to full geocaching information, satellte imagery and online logging. However, for that last item please note that just writing “TFTC” is like a red flag to a bull when the cache owner has put a lot of effort into creating and placing a cache. Mind you if it’s the log for finding the aforementioned micro lying around in a non-descript location it’s a polite log.

Some of my other highlights from 2013 were huge and some were small.

I suppose that the biggest highlight of the year was turning sixty and being able to use this as an excuse to visit USA with my partner for a couple of weeks and experience several geocaching highlights.

I completed the Jasmer challenge on a sunny August day in great fashion by finding Firestone. That cache was placed just north of San Francisco in October 2000 and as well as being the cache needed to complete my Jasmer challenge it is also the westernmost cache I have found. N37° 54.637 W122° 37.590.

View from GC78 “Firestone”

Highway 1 view

I found a couple of hundred caches along the famous ET Highway and saw “UFO’s” as the sun set over the mountain range. (OK, so they were probably planes flying around the air base at Tonopah) as well as spending a night at the Little A’Le’Inn.

ET Highway cache #1

In addition to the ET Highway power trail we also did part of the Route 66 power trail just for good measure on our way to the Grand Canyon.

Route 66 close to Barstow

Reaching my 4000 finds milestone also occured in 2013 and was my first find in France at Death Road to Cimetière St Hilaire just a couple of days after finding Belgiums oldest cache Geocache making that the next to last cache for me to find in my quest to complete the Jasmer challenge. During the few days we spent in the area that encompassed Belgium, Luxembourg and France where we were able to enjoy good weather, great beer in Belgium and lovely food in all three countries.

ds8300 with GC40 “Geocache”

The second major highlight of the year was one that I hadn’t really dared to hope that I would manage. It was to fill the Difficulty/Terrain matrix. At the beginning of the year I had seven unfilled cells, six of them being T4.5 & T5 and the seventh one a D5. One by one I was able to tick them off and realising that I was able to handle the difficult terrain caches as well as the easier ones. The first two cells to be completed were Matagouri Challenge and Little G Says – It’s Oh! K both in New Zealand.

Lake Tekapo close to the Matagouri Challenge cache

The rest I found in Dalarna, Uppsala and Gävleborg in Sweden. After finding Myggstenen together with Slas in October I just had one cell left. Unfortunately, as my geofriends had other commitments the weekend after I had to find Trädmonumentet on my own so I had noone with me to share the victory.

I started off the year with a month in New Zealand, as I do most years. I met Ingabo and family on my arrival day just as they were leaving for home. When I heard how many caches they had found on a non-geocaching vacation I knew I just had to better it as after all, I was there to find caches. With 368 finds in January alone I wasn’t really surprised when at the end of the year I had found 1003 caches – my best year ever.

Best year ever with over 1000 finds

After such a memorable year it will be interesting to see what 2014 brings in the way of geocaching activities. I am in the process of setting myself some new targets but they will be quite different to those for 2013.

USA geo-trip overview

There were a number of good reasons for visiting the West of USA this August, most of them related to geocaching 🙂 more of which will come in the following posts, but the official reason for being there was to celebrate my 60th birthday. A present to myself and partner Lisbeth from me. It turned out to be a road trip of 3600 kilometers (2250 miles) over some fantastic scenery. We did an anti-clockwise loop starting and ending in LA.

Our road trip went clockwise from Los Angeles which is also where it ended.

By many cachers standards we found very few caches especially considering that we were on two power trails that together had more than 3000 caches! In total we found around 250 caches including a good number of earthcaches and virtuals.

Cape Kennedy Space Center

The day before NASA launched the space shuttle STS-134/Endeavour on it’s last flight I had the opportunity to visit Cape Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral. Because of the pending launch we were not able to get closer to the launch pad than the LC-39 Observation Gantry. Unfortunately, I had to work the day after so I missed the actual launch.

The observation gantry is about 2 km from launch pad 39A so even with my 105 mm telephoto lens on my Nikon D90 the shuttle was a not as large an object as I had hoped to see. It’s a new excuse to buy that 70-200 mm tele lens that I was looking at a while ago. 🙂 Right now, launch pad 39B is in the process of being dismantled as the shuttle program nears it’s end.

Space shuttle Endeavour ready for it's last flight

One thing that we did get quite close to was the crawler-transporter that had carried the shuttle out to the launch pad. To judge it’s size look at the bus to the left of the picture.

Shuttle crawler transporter - note size of bus at left

It weighs in at around 2700 tons and has a maximum speed of 1.6 kph when loaded with the shuttle. “Hans” and “Franz” as the transporters are called have been in use since 1965 and have travelled about 5500 km during their life.

The future program will be rocket launched again. As part of the tour we visited the Apollo program site where an Saturn V rocket was to be found. The rocket is amazing, at 111m it is twice the height of two space shuttle on top of each other.

Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo program

So now on to geocaching. As I had two muggle colleagues with me I didn’t feel it appropriate to drag them off for a full day of caching so we just chose two caches at random on the way back to Orlando after the Space Center visit. The first cache was called Turtle Trek and despite the name nothing clicked until we actually got out of the car and started heading along a sandy track in the bush towards GZ. A large turtle crawled slowly across the track and disappeared down a burrow.

40cm turtle

GZ was about five meters off the track in the bush and I walked in as normal, well perhaps a bit heavier on the feet than normal, as I didn’t want to step on a snake or alligator. My colleagues were reserved and wouldn’t leave the track until I called then in to see the cache. In fact I thought that one of them was going to have an accident before we got out of the bush and onto clear ground again. He really expected an alligator to come charging trhough the bushes. The turtle was about 40cm long and probably as many years old.

DS8300 & muggle friend Janne

The second cache we grabbed was in a little hovel at the side of the road with the name Christmas! The main attraction was an RV park. Not a classy place in other words. The kitschy site had a plastic christmas tree, a concrete santa and sleigh and a signboard surrounded with tinsel. Yeow! Well, after a few minutes hunting we found Christmas Forever, a silver coloured micro hanging in the tinsel.

Isn't it tacky...er beautiful?

Find of the day!

Finding just two caches in a day is really bad, but considering that I had two muggles with me who were more interested in other things I was pleased to have been able to have found them. It gave me a geocaching souvenir for the state of Florida as well so not too bad. I just have another 46 states to go for the full coverage of USA. Way to go!