It’s been quite a while since we found ourselves a geocache; in fact, until last week, we hadn’t found any caches since returning to Australia! How sad! But, a visit from the Durhams provided the perfect excuse for us to try and hunt down some of our local caches, and happily we found Neighbourhood Gossips without too much effort. The Bunyaville Substation cache still elludes us though – twice I’ve looked for it, and twice I’ve not found it!

Anyway, since moving home, we’ve been looking forward to helping the sport of geocaching along by placing a cache or two of our own, and we did exactly that on the weekend! I had found what I thought would make quite a nice little spot, inside a burrow-like hole in the stump of a tree (pictured here). So, we purchased a container, grabbed a few little toys to place inside, and created the Bowers Bennetts Burrow cache. Less than a week after submitting it, the cache was approved, and today it went live for the community to find!

I was absolutely amazed by how quickly it was first claimed! Less than two hours after being published, I already had two people logging the find (admittedly it’s a pretty easy find, and they found it together… but still!). Crazy! Cousin Laura (from Kristy’s Dad’s side) who is also a cacher tells me that this is pretty normal for Brisbane:

NO new cache on Brisbane’s northside will go unfound for more than a few hours. You’ll see logs online for new caches that look something like this pretty regularly: ‘Got the notification at 2am so i rang up my cacher friend and we drove 30mins, searched 30mins and got home and logged the find before bed at 4am.’

Now that’s hard-core!

Lovely Racey McRace bought us some lovely new trackables! Well, she bought new trackables for Kristy, but I’m claiming the whale coin for my own.

One cool thing about trackables is that you can give them a goal before setting them out into the wild blue yonder. For example we sent off a dog tag with the mission of reaching Ben and Michelle in Australia – and it’s so very, very close to making it there!

But we haven’t thought of a goal for either of these two yet… any suggestions?

Right back when we first started geocaching, we knew it would be right up Team WeStace’s ally, and oh boy were we right! In fact, McRacey got into it so much that she pronounces her geocaching username differently depending on if Wes is there (“the bramleys”) or not (“the bramley s”). She’s already clocked up more than double the amount of finds that I have, and around half of my finds have been with her!

We weren’t too surprised then to find out that the number one thing she wanted to do this weekend was to grab some caches in and around London. She and I even managed to chalk up a couple of finds in the city before coming home on Friday night!

On Saturday afternoon we headed down to Gunnersbury Park, and while Kristy napped under a tree, Racey and I found four of the park’s five active caches. We had to report one of them as missing, because its one that I had found it some time ago, but the container wasn’t where it should have been.

Today, Racey found a set of caches which were based on a walk around a lake, so off we drove to Surrey for the Papercourt Pathways series. It was quite a nice area, though not as remote as it had looked on google maps. Still, that’s not entirely a bad thing – we got to meet a lot of puppies who were out taking their owners for a walk!

After lunch at The Seven Stars pub in Ripley (possibly the best Sunday Roast we’ve ever had!), Stacey nominated one more cache for us to retrieve, simply because it had an interesting name. It was rated four stars for difficulty, but we figured we were up for the challenge – that is, until we got there and found the cache around six metres off the ground!

There I was all ready to give up and call it a day, when Stacey came up with this idea:

You’d be surprised just how well it worked – we managed to get the cache down in no time flat! Unfortunately, putting it up was another matter entirely. Thankfully – and with a bit of Macguyer ingenuity – we managed to loosely tie the canister back to the stick using a spare hair-tie, and then I hoisted Racey back up for the replacing. It took us a couple of attempts, but we got there in the end! An awesome cache, indeed.

Sadly we had to drop Racey off at Heathrow before coming home – but on the upside, it won’t be long before @thebramleys are back in London for another adventure!

As predicted, we enjoyed a lovely four-day weekend in The Lake District with Stacey and Wes! Our drive up was fairly uneventful, save for the double caramel latte that Mr Fool at Costa thought I wanted. And the look he gave me for using my KeepCup! “You want it in this?!” – yes, Mr Fool – why else would I have given it to you?!

I can’t emphasise enough how lucky we were with the weather. Statistically, it rains 96% of the time at the Lake District, and yes, I most certainly did make that up on the spot. Things weren’t looking good on Friday when we arrived to find it overcast and drizzling on our shnizzles, but goodness me did things pick up on Saturday morning! Nothing but blue skies did we see, right through until Sunday evening! I even got a little sunburnt!

If you’re going on a holiday with Wes and Stacey, you can bet your bottom dollar that there’ll be some walking involved. Not that we’re complaining of course; we’re well into walking now, and even more importantly, I now look like someone who’s well into walking. Check out how technical and well equipped, and yet so wholly nonchalant I look here:

Now I have to give some credit to my new backpack which WeStace helped me pick out; not to mention the new hydration system that they also recommended. But let’s be honest; I make this stuff look good.

Anyway, back to the walks – we covered a fairly decent chunk of terrain over three days! Here’s a few of the walks we enjoyed.

The Grizedale Sculpture Trail:

This supposedly contains over 90 separate sculptures, each made out of naturally occurring materials such as wood and stone – however we only managed to find four of them! Admittedly we were only there for two hours, and we spent a good part of that foolishly following Stacey through marshlands in search of a geocache (well, that’s how I choose to remember it); but I’d be lying if I said that the trail lived up to my expectations.

Still, the sculptures that we did see were pretty cool – I wasn’t sure if this was one of them or not, but you can see one ducking out behind the shrubs on the left (or check out what it looks like up close).

Humphrey Head:

We conquered this one on Saturday morning, and picked up a couple of geocaches while we were there. In order to make it out to the edge of the headland, we had to walk through some fields of sheep, including lots of little spring lambs! And just when you think that things couldn’t get any less chalant after that magnificent display of nonchalantness above – check this out for Mr Casual!

Meathop

This one wasn’t so much of a walk as it was a quest to find the Meathop Mini Maze multi-cache, and OMG was it a challenge. Anything more than a casual glance at the description should have really managed my expectations a bit better:

The final cache has you scrambling up crags so make sure you wear suitable footwear. There are some big drops off the edge so be careful. The crags will be slippery if they are wet.

This really redefined the term “scrambling” for me. Those boulders were steep, and sharp! I even shed a little blood when my left hand collided with one of them! Thank goodness it wasn’t raining!

(Don’t take any of that as a complaint; in fact, scrambling up those boulders was the best stage of them all! Danger? Shmanger!)

Walla Crag:

By far and away the highlight of the weekend! This was a four hour walk over almost every type of terrain – mud, snow, beach, grass, streams, and even a little bit of the lake. And I think you have to agree with me that the view from the top was “not terrible”.

When we weren’t out and about on an adventure, we were back at the apartment just relaxing, and exchanging friendly banter that you’d expect at a gathering of friends. Stacey and Wes were kind enough to explain the meaning of “Gerrod music” to me – “anything with strained lyrics and heavy guitars”. I have to admit – that’s pretty much bang on.

Even the Lake District knew that our holiday was over today, as we woke up to find it absolutely teeming down with rain. Fearing the wrath of London traffic, Kristy and I high-tailed it out of there, and yet we were pleasantly surprised to find the roads flowing quite freely! We made it home only an hour later than Doug (i.e. TomTom) had originally predicted – not bad, given that half-an-hour of that was our lunch break!

All in all, it was a fantastic weekend away, and a brilliant introduction to the Lakes. Make sure you check out the rest of the photos – there’s some doozies in there!

While we were in the Uffington ‘hood, we decided to seek out a wee cache. We found it pretty quickly (it was an easy one), and we dropped off a travel coin that we’d been holding for a while.

Sadly for said travel coin, the dude who had dropped it prior to us picking it up never actually recorded his drop. I e-mailed the guy when I picked it up and asked him to log the coin into the cache, but after a month there was still no sign of this happening. And since I knew we’d be dropping off the coin on Saturday, I was forced to “grab” it from his hands (instead of logging it out of its cache), which means its travel history will now be slightly skewed. So etiquette lesson number one: log your trackable items as quickly as possible.

Lesson numbers two and three concern the things you put in a geocache. Firstly – food is a big no-no. Animals have a keen sense of smell, and will often attack the cache to try and get to the contents inside. Worse still, don’t put half eaten food in there, like this “delicious” looking orange chuppa-chup that we found on the weekend. That’s just disgusting.

Finally, a word on advertising. If you’re really looking to search out a new audience, perhaps placing ads inside a cache container seems like a great idea to you; I, however, think it’s about as classy as the dudes that hand out those “collector cards” (*ahem*) in Las Vegas. Cheap, and nasty!

I didn’t even bother trying to work out the nature of the business that this guy was advertising; though on reflection, I can only assume it was something to do with the hire and sales of one-eyed penguins. And now that I think of it, perhaps Kristy should have paid the ad some more attention – after all, she’s always wanted a penguin…

At 294 metres above sea level, Leith Hill is the highest point in all of south-east England. And, at only an hour’s drive (or thereabouts) from Chiswick, it makes a perfect destination for a one-day adventure – so off we trolleyed with Julian and Shelley on Saturday to make the most of the beautiful weather!

At the top of Leith Hill stands the very creatively named Leith Hill Tower, which was apparently built in order to raise the top-most point of the hill to over 1000 feet above sea level. Yes, really. No, I don’t understand why either; but to be fair, it did provide a great vantage point for 360 degree views. Since the day was so clear, you could (barely) make out London City to the north-east in the middle of the top photo (the distinct shape of The Gherkin is the giveaway); and Gatwick Airport was a bit easier to see, at only nine miles directly to the east.

Unsurprisingly, the area is also littered with Geocaches; we managed to find In the Shadow of the Tower 2 which was a great adventure to find, and the very craftily hidden West Side Wandering, which I think was the hardest cache we’ve found to date.

Being a hill, and being in the forest, it’s also a very popular destination for mountain bikers. We (obviously) weren’t equipped with bikes, but that didn’t stop Julian catching some huge air over a jump on the way down.

Impressive!

We thought Geocaching would be right up your ally, and we really wanted you guys to get into it! So, we bought a travel bug and sent it on a journey, with the goal of finding you all the way over there in Australia. Surprisingly, it made it there a lot faster than we had expected it to!

Perhaps if you have time one day, you could stop by in Bardon to try and pick it up?

Miss you both!
g&k

On one of our lunch journeys to Victoria this week, I checked to see if there were any caches near my work, and to my surprise there was quite a lot of them! Al and I decided to try and find one on our way back to work. We settled on Victoria Square since it was kind-of enroute.

Before reading about this cache, I had no idea that Victoria Square existed, even though I’ve walked past it only one street away for the last two-and-a-bit years. It’s amazingly quiet in there, given how loud the surrounding roads are!

There were a number of people sitting in there enjoying their lunch breaks, so we must have looked a little bit strange when we wandered in and started examining all the small surfaces we could see! Eventually we found it – just a little nano cache on the back of a sign. We didn’t have a pen with us so we couldn’t sign the log book, but Al was still pretty stoked to have found his first cache.

After our coffee in Margate, we decided to have a quick check to see if there were any caches around us, and sure enough, there was an abundance of them! Since it was very cold and windy, we decided to just try and find the one closest to us: Margate Rocks.

The description said it was a “nano-cache”, and other than thinking that it would be rather small, we weren’t too sure what we were looking for. We ended up having to use the clue to help us find it (did I mention it was very cold and windy?), but we were glad that we did. It was tiny!

The cache itself is magnetic, and this little fella was attached to the back of a street sign. It was so cleverly placed that I originally mistook it for a bolt through the back of the post! It was only when I gave it a little tap and it moved that the alarm bells went off. Very cool!

Kristy and I went and checked out Gunnersbury Park, which we’ve been to before and loved. Now that it’s Autumn (or do they call it “Fall” here?), all the leaves have changed colour and fallen off the trees, which makes for some excellent playtime – especially in the wind!

Time – 1:04, Size: 7.31 MB

We also decided to check out if there were any caches in the park, and there’s heaps! We found The Wall, Potomac Pond, and The Boating lake. My favourite of these was The Wall, because of the way it was very cleverly hidden behind a brick in a hole in the bottom of… a wall.

We had set out to simply have a bit of a wander, but ended up staying for about two hours. Gunnersbury Park is definitely one of our favourites, and now that it’s just around the corner, I think we’ll be visiting it more often!