I tried a new thing the other day!! It is an awesome new thing and I am going to do more of it 😀

Yeay! New thing!!!

Ok…I’ll tell you what it is. Although I was super tempted just to leave the post at that and press publish 😀 )

This new thing is Geocaching!

I know…not a new thing as such…more a really well established thing that I had only vaguely heard of and never tried…until now 😀 so new thing to me 😀

Look…it is such a well established thing that it has made it into the OED…and my copy of that is 6 years old!!

This begs the question why haven’t I tried it before! It is such fun 😀 It also begs the question, why did I suddenly decide to try it now. We…first of all there is no limit to when you are allowed to try new things, but that is not the point. What actually happened was I was reading a blog written by a lovely lady in Wales who not only finds geocaches, but has some of her own which she maintains… and by some I mean lots!! You can read about it on her blog 😀

Go here and look!!

She mentioned it a few times and I was intrigued…so I on her advice downloaded the official free geocaching app and had a look around to see what was near me! It turns out there are a few near my work 😀 some are fancy ones that need you to solve puzzles or some such thing but you need the premium app for those, I am going to wait until I have got the hang of it on traditional ones first…

So one lunchtime last week, armed with my tracking app (just like a tricorder on star trek…honest…) I headed out to see what I could find…

Which turned out to be nothing… I found the locations of two but not the actual cache… I was slightly disappointed…but undeterred and I got a nice walk in the sunshine 😀

Look there I am looking pretty conspicuous searching for things in the sunshine…I really tried to look nonchalant but it is hard. It didn’t matter anyway, Horsham’s dog walkers are too British to ask what I was up to and probably just classified me as too odd to remember!

Anyway…as I said…undeterred I tried again the next day!! It was less sunny but more successful…partly because I read the instructions more carefully and discovered there was a hint as to location…that helped…

Look I found a thing!! It had small things inside and a little tiny notebook which I was apparently supposed to sign…however the instructions for that cache didn’t say I needed a pen…so I didn’t have one. It turns out, after some further investigation that it is quite common for little caches to not have a pen so you need to take one with you….well I know now 😀

The app gives yo a little smiley face when you tell it you have found it which is cool! I am definitely going to do more of this 😀 It feels a little bit like I have been let into a secret world…

Oh and it turns out that the little square colourful thing was a calling card from another geocacher…I might make some up at some point 😀