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!

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!

On Saturday, we headed back to Putney to grab the last of our stuff from the house, as well as give our room a proper scrub down. Cleaning that little shower was hard work! The roof was just too high for me to reach easily, and the tiles were definitely not the easiest to scrub in the world. But it’s all done now, sparkling and clean and ready for the next tenant.

We also took the opportunity to have one last BBQ in the backyard, and what a BBQ it was! Pork and apple sausages, marinated chicken, asparagus and corn – delicious!

After lunch, we headed out with Julian to hide the travelling coin that we had found a few weeks ago. There are a heap of geocaches in Putney! The first cache we found was in Leader’s Gardens, a delightful little park right next to the river.

It was a tricky find – beautifully hidden underneath some logs! But it was a lovely setting, especially with all the trees turning yellow for autumn. We left the travelling coin there, and given that it’s in London, I wonder if an international someone might pick it up and take it further?

The second cache we sought out was quite a lot trickier to find! There were a few cryptic clues which we thought we had figured out, but after 20 minutes of searching, we came up empty handed. Oh well! That’s the first one we haven’t been able to find, in about 7 – not too bad a ratio!

Last weekend, Kristy and I joined Nick and Suzie down in The New Forest for some mountain biking fun. Well, for Kristy, it was for some R’n'R fun, but Nick, Suzie and I did our best to tear up the terrain! And what an awesome time we had! The New Forest is extremely well suited to mountain biking, with heaps of scenic paths through the woods. In fact, if you follow Nick and Suzie’s lead, everything becomes a path through the woods, so there really is no limit to the places you can go!

Don’t believe me? Check the video! As usual with extreme(ish) sports, they eventually (d)evolve into The Nick Show, but lets be honest, he is by far the most entertaining one of us .

Time – 3:30, Size: 24.70 MB

Star of Shannon trained down from London to join us for dinner at The Glasshouse – a spectacular pub in the town where we were staying, Lyndhurst. It was amazing! We all walked out thoroughly full!

The New Forest seemed like a perfect place for geocaching, and sure enough there’s quite a few down there to be found! So Kristy, Shan and I went for a bit of a hunt on Sunday morning after breakfast. We farewelled our travelling monkey at Ben’s Ramble, our first find of the day (and a tricky one to find it was!). However, it seems we weren’t to be without a trackable for too long, as we picked up a Travelling 2c Coin at our very next stop! The adventure continues!

And, despite how much fun Shannon made of the two of us, I think secretly, she was loving it!

I have no idea who first told me about Geocaching, but I liked the idea right from the start. Rather than try to explain it in my own terms, here’s the description from their website:

Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online. Geocaching is enjoyed by people from all age groups, with a strong sense of community and support for the environment.

It’s pretty easy to get into, especially if you’re equipped with an iPhone – you simply register an account at their website, then buy the geocaching application (about £5.99), and you’re ready to go! You don’t need an iPhone of course – almost any GPS receiver will work – but the iPhone is a nice way of looking up caches whilst out and about.

Anyway, we found our first three caches last weekend down in the Isle of Wight. We perhaps should have chosen a different cache for our first attempt, as it turned out to be in a graveyard, and we felt a little shady walking around the graves, looking for the geocache, but not really knowing what we were looking for. But finally we found it – a little film canister containing a log roll!

We found our second cache on top of a very windy hill, about an hour later. It was a multi-cache, meaning it had multiple waypoints that we had to find. At the first waypoint, we had to solve a (fairly easy) puzzle in order to find the co-ordinates for the second waypoint.

We aren’t fancy enough to have a stamp yet, however we did draw a little map of Australia against our log entry.

We got lucky with our third cache, as it contained a trackable item – a little stuffed monkey with a dog tag around his neck. We can follow his journey around the world as people log him in and out of caches! He hasn’t travelled too far yet – only 117.5 miles – but I’m sure he’ll be racking up the miles very quickly. We gave him a new home today; I wonder how long before someone else picks him up?

Anyway, so far geocaching has been top fun, so now I’m on the recruiting drive to try and get more people into it. So sign up, and add me as a friend!