Geocaching

I know I had posted yesterday, but today was so utterly brilliant that I can't help posting again. I went geocaching with Andor today. We started on the island where we found both caches easily, except the second one needed a small amount of tree climbing.

Then we got on the bus and up we went into the hills. We picked up 5 more caches, first by a cave, followed by a three parter, which was a bit of a hassle. The view from the cave was fantastic. I could even see the castle ruin and abandoned quarry I know well over 100km away in the Northern hills. The three parter started with a dodgy one, but Andor found it in a few minutes. The ridiculous thing about it was that the cache owner made no reference to where exactly it was. In thick forest you can't always rely on the GPS, but it was given away by the sticks that hid it.

From the top of the mountain there were 360 degree views, including back towards the centre of the city and the river. On the other side there were lots of people sunning themselves and watching all the people up in the air. That part of the hills includes a small flat bit, which is an airstrip. Above it we could watch gliders in the air and being towed and/or winched up; hangliders, microlites and paragliders. We managed to get very close to the paragliders as they were taking off and that was fantastic. The real highlight of the day.

We found the cache just under the launch place hidden in a crack in some crags covered by thorny bushes. Ouch!! Then came a fairly long hike to a lovely old cedar tree which is "only" 150 years old. Apparently cedars live for over 1000 years. There was not much light to take pictures with, but I did anyway.

The cache was a few metres away in a dead fallen tree trunk, which we found very easily. The last one was near a lovely old lookout, which is built of stone and big chunks of wood and I always love to see it stand up to the ravages of time. At the end we managed to catch a bus, then a train and finally I caught a tram (streetcar)to get home in less than an hour from the lookout to my front door. It was a fantastic day, the details of which are as follows: 12.3km long, 588m of climb, 3hr 40min of moving and 3hr 38min of standing still. We obviously spent a lot of time admiring the scenery, the views, the flying machines and people, having lunch and having rests, but it was worth every second of it. Must do it again!!