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After several days of really unproductive work, and moping around, today my wife finally got me out of the house. We borrowed a really old GPS unit and went Geocaching! The original idea was to go kite flying, but since we broke our kite in high winds last time we took it out, would need to fix it before leaving, and it was blowing a gale and would probably break again; we decided to search the internet for the nearest cache to the White Horse at Uffington.

Geocaching is basically the modern equivalent of world wide treasure hunting. Except that the map is replaced by a GPS and the ’spot marked with an X’ is a longtude and latitude coordinate. More details can be found on the official website.

Since the GPS we borrowed is very old, and is a hand-me-down anyway, it took us a while to get it linked up to all the required satellites. Even after we did that, it was often quite confusing to tell if we were going in the right direction or not. Eventually though, we got the hang of it.

However, it seemed that getting to the location of the cache was the easy part, ignoring the interrogating looks of ramblers as we scrambled through the bushes was much harder. But eventually (encouraged by the freezing wind chill) we succumbed to decrypting the clue from the website, and found it quite easily.

Because geocaching is very well documented on the web, I was not surprised by some of the strange random stuff that we found in the cache. All the same it was very exciting, and well worth braving the cold!

We will definitely be looking out for other caches when we next go out for a walk.