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!