theOlster.net

Firstly, Mark and I have decided to continue our religious debate from previous posts via email and not on our blogs. We both agree that this is not the kind of content we think our readers (if only I was that lucky!) would want to read. If you do want to know how we are getting on - please get in touch and we’ll forward our discussions to you.

On Thursday evening, C and I drove down to Steyning in W.Sussex to visit her parents. Every Easter their Church has a Good Friday walk, and despite taking part last year, I had completely forgotten about it. It seems that 10 miles rambling over the South Downs was more than enough exercise for me! Even though I picked up a rather nasty blister and discovered that I really do need some new walking boots, I was relieved to find that I wasn’t quite as unfit as previously thought. Phew…

On Sunday afternoon we thought we’d round off a great Easter holiday with Geocaching venture number 2: Mission Impossible I - In Search of The Raven near Chanctonbury Ring. This was supposed to be a quick walk, but turned out to be a lot more effort that we had thought. It would have helped though if we had read the instructions properly before leaving the house! Duh!

Anyway, I took these photos along the way:

A dewpond:

I really love the dark looming clouds in this one. Most of the scenic photos I was taking were very dull, so I tried underexposing and this was the result. Nice!

Two male pheasants…

Finally after a good couple of hours we found the cache! NB The GPS handheld (GARMIN GPS38) that we have borrowed is very old and proves very hard to use near buildings and large hills. This made the achievement of finding this cache nearly impossible (*cough* I mean challenging! :))

Goodies…

And our first travel bug… next stop Oxfordshire…

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.