Geocachng - a brilliant form of exercise.

I have been loving doing geocaching. I have found it to be a great new hobby. I also think it has to be a great way of exercising. Don't get me wrong some of the ones we have done haven't involved covering large distances, but others do.

We went out the other night and were walking for over two hrs and covered just over 3 miles as far as the marked route was concerned. While that may not sound like much I may point out that it was along a river walk which started way above river level, dropped down to level with the river and then climbed up high again. Then of course you have to reverse this so we did get breathless for short periods of time more than once. Was climbing over trees lying across the walk, navigating round other obstacles and walking round in circles and backwards and forwards till we actually found the caches, so add on more steps to that as well, up hillsides, hanging onto trees with one hand and leaning down to look in gaps and other silliness.

You don't realise how far you are walking, you just think we will get to the next one, maybe 400m in between each, one more to get, ok lets just keep going etc. Much better than being sat on my bum at home typing up blog posts.

So on Tuesday night the weather here was lovely. Tea had been on slow cook all day and was not coming to any harm and so we set off. We parked up at 5.30 and set off.

over the bridge from the car park

the view from the bridge

down hills and steps

finding the first cash

complete with treasures

onto the second one

complete with its treasures

puling out the third one

complete with its treasure. I have started leaving a business card in them all.

Not only do you find caches you also get to admire the best that nature has to offer.  From wildlife, flowers and scenery. 

from bluebells

looking down to the river

hunting up hills and in boggy bits

admiring the country lanes as you travel from one cache to another

getting deeper amongst the trees

lovely reflections

the river running over the rocks at river level

We had set off after seven cache the other night. This was the first of the seven, but I looked under every inch of this style and could not find it. Down on my hands and knees feeling under it, over the far side and looked again. I checked for rotted posts or buried in the base of the uprights, but no we gave up on this one. We were running out of time after we had found the first three, with nearly a mile to cover to find the other three. But allowing for  another mile there and then back again we decided it was going to be too late in getting home for tea. But next time we go back we can walk faster to the point we gave up at and use that as our starting point to find the next three.

the style

a random tree on a hillside. 

We got back to the car at five to eight. I have to say my legs ached when I got up on Wednesday. 

I did this walk purely on GPS having downloaded the caches and saved them offline before we went out. Did not have an issues with this, and it used approx 30% of my battery for the two and a half hours.We were under tree cover a lot of the time as well but the GPS managed fine.

 Certainly a lot less battery intensive than using my data, but we still found all the places we were looking for. 

Have you been geocaching? Please feel free and link up your posts to encourage others to enjoy the hobby.