The Geocaching Trip
On Saturday morning, my friend Josh and I were up bright and early to hit the road for our first out of town Geocaching trip. This is the first time we have been out of the Dunedin Area together to get Geocaches and we had planned this trip carefully to maximise efficiency of getting a large number of caches, 67 to be exact. There is no point travelling so far and using so much petrol to waste time piddling around. Preparation for this included printing off maps, the cache pages, making labels and uploading GPS data to the GPS receivers.
To start off, about 1/3rd of the caches we planned to getting were on the way up to Oamaru. Unfortunately for us, the first cache on the road we passed before we knew it, so were started off pretty bad, but then we managed to get seven for seven on the next map which rose our spirits again. We did considerably well on the way up there finding half of the ones on the road, missing the other half with a few did not finds but mostly we skipped the rest so we could make out way to the main destination for food and because we would maximise the number of caches we could get in in the same time period.
When we got there, we stopped for food. For some reason, all the fast food places were really full of people, there was some concert thing in a park and the main street was an absolute mess. Lucky for us, we don’t need to be there so after eating, we made our way to the first cache we plan to get in Oamaru. When we were going to our first one, there was a lady walking around there which we though would make it difficult to get to the cache. Lucky for us, her husband was down underneath getting the cache so we were lucky enough to meet a fellow Geocacher.
Next we slowly made out way to the closest caches to the previous one and made our way around. We were cutting it for time so we had to cut all the more difficult multi-caches from our maps. Still as we went around, we again only found about half of the ones we attempted. There are way more caches in Oamaru than you would expect and a lot take a bit of time to get to, and time is something we didn’t have much of. When we realised we only had about an hour left before we should start heading back, we decided to just go for the easy ones to get to and do them and then make our way back home.
Unfortunately for us, we only managed to find about 1/3rd of the ones in Oamaru. We will definitely need to come back here some time to acquire the rest. Although if there is a next time, we won’t be spending a great proportion of our time getting the ones on the road there. Partly because we have already got half of them. Our trip wasn’t as successful as we would have liked with some of the caches no where in site and mostly us running out of time to find the other caches. Our final stats for the day were 27/67 caches. Not too bad although it would have been nice to get them all. Maybe next time our trip will go as well as we planned. Still had a blast roaming around looking for the Geocaches anyway!
Related posts:
I would love to go geocaching for real
I found out about geocaching when I found one at the beach hidden under the boardwalk