One of my minor Covid lockdown activities has been geocaching. Fun, a bit of hide and seek, and an excuse to do more walking. As I knew I'd have a little down time during a month in the UK I decided to hunt a few caches there. The comparison between the hobby in US versus UK is interesting.
First of all the UK has way more cool places for geocache hides. Castles, ruins, natural landmarks, etc. And it meshes well with the extensive public walking paths that crisscross the landscape.
With all that going for them there seems to be little motivation to create tricky hides, clever camo etc. You get to a spot, look where the cache should be and there it is, usually in a regulation Official Geocache container. For those who like to swap little trinkets this is much more common in the UK.
Here's a couple of my favorites in the limited series of caches I had in walking range.
A cache at Thirlwall castle. This is a short stroll from one of my accommodations. The actual cache was pretty easy, and as you can see its a standard geocache container. You'd think a site where a magic dwarf is said to be guarding a hidden table made of gold would be a bit more exciting. https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC6RPPK
Another place I could walk to was called Allen Banks. It is a nature preserve along the very picturesque Allen river.
There were numerous geocaches in this preserve but the one I really wanted to find was near the remains of a summer cottage that had a floor made of sheep knuckle bones! As it happens it was pretty cool - how could it not be? - but did not quite live up to high expectations.
As in the US there seem to be long chains of geocaches that follow the better known walking and biking routes. Given the reality of needing to do ten miles plus daily on some of them the time for diversions could be limited. Especially as some of the same issues I encounter in the US are present there as well. Caches that are no longer there (a big storm at Allen Banks wiped out several) or have been replaced in creative but misleading spots. But as an add on activity it is fairly resource efficient. I found that my phone app was sufficient to locate most of these although the gps unit is always a bit better.
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