The Bikeabout 6 Geocaching Page

Over on the main blog pages I talked about geocaching occasionally and mentioned the occasional webcam plus the idea of visiting all the regions, but let’s be honest here...this whole trip was about geocaching. I wouldn’t have done it at all if I hadn’t made caching the primary point of it. With that in mind, I had four basic goals, and here’s how they played out:

1. Get all the available webcams. If you followed the various entries, I posted pictures of each of the 5 webcams I went to (London GC6F12, Royal Tunbridge Wells GCMXZ4, Exmouth GCM8ZK, Liverpool GCMZ57, and Coniston GCQ5WB). There are two others in England that are listed as disabled but are locked (Leeds GC24CD and Liverpool GCQZCN) and are likely permanently gone. Of the five I found, the lighthouse one in Liverpool is actually archived but the camera started working again and the cache isn’t locked so I was able to legitimately make a find there (most archived cams are locked, but not this one). So this brings my webcam total to 312, and I’ve found every available (unlocked) cam in Europe. In fact, not counting the impossible Antarctica cam, and the two locked ones I mentioned already, there are only 8 cams left in the world that I don’t have.

2. Visit all the regions of England. Well, as you can see from the map to the right, I was able to make that happen. Northern Scotland was the one really difficult one, because it was a very long ride across Southern Scotland to cross that bridge north of Edinburgh, where I found a single traditional (the only thing anywhere close by the bridge except a multi that could only be done if the other side of the bridge was open, which it wasn’t) before leaving. If I’d been able to do the webcam in Leeds, the route south from there would’ve been a lot different and I might’ve had to divert a bit to pick up Eastern England, but as it was I simply headed to Cambridge and that took care of that.

3. Visit all the islands that I can get to that count as separate countries. I do love the country/region finding aspect of geocaching (obviously) so I wanted to rack up as many new country visits as possible. With some research beforehand I learned that three of the Channel Islands (Guernsey, Jersey and Sark) as well as Isle of Man all count as different countries in Europe. I’m not sure why Sark does since it looks like part of Guernsey on the map, but whatever...I made sure I took a day trip over there while staying on the main island. The other three are territories of England, sort of, but different enough that they all have their own currency. I didn’t make it to Ireland, but it was that or skip Scotland, and I know I’ll be back in Ireland probably next year so I didn’t mind that too much. If I visit Ireland I want to get all five regions there anyway, which I already knew wasn’t happening this trip. Oh, and one other thing...if you go back to the original blog page and look at the map, you’ll notice I didn’t have a route to the fifth webcam (Coniston), a mistake I noticed somewhere along the way, so that original route was shot to hell anyway, I just didn’t know it until later on.

4. Use caching to take me to fun and entertaining locations. Well, this is sort of always one of the goals, because that’s part of what geocaching is all about. Like I mentioned at the end of Bikeabout #5, a very large number of the cool places I took pictures of were places that caching took me to, and I wouldn’t have seen without this game pointing the way. A very large number of them came from virtuals and earthcaches, but especially lab caches, which are new to the game since the last trip. Honestly, if you’re in some new place and want to check out the local sights, pull up the list of lab caches and let them be your guide.

Anyway...there weren’t nearly as many caching finds this trip as on the cross-country tour last time, mostly because I was having so much trouble with the hills and weather, and just didn’t ever seem to have enough time to stop and find 20 caches per day like before. There were some days it was all I could do just to force myself to pedal to the final destination, never mind stopping for caches. Furthermore, there were a few days where there just didn’t seem to be many caches at all to find, because I was mostly out in the countryside and just didn’t go near that many. If you were thinking I’d find 500+ finds again this trip, well, we’re both disappointed...but I still got a respectable showing. The UK is now the country I have the most finds in (after the USA), even beating out our neighbor Canada (for now), and I got over 100 finds in the various islands as well. Here’s the complete breakdown:

Average fnids per day: 16.57
Maximum finds in a day: 46
Minimum finds in a day: 3 (on a day the ferry took almost 9 hours)

By collecting a couple of specific challenge caches on the way out of London, I was able to complete my 29^th D/T loop. I managed to attend one event (missing another because I was on a ferry going past it as it was happening, and another by just a few hours). That was a community celebration at the end of Day 2, and was one of the highlights of the trip, actually. There were three new souvenirs claimed, one for Guernsey, Jersey, and Isle of Man (none for Sark) and since I got every region of the UK, if they ever decide to make souvenirs out of them like they did for Germany, I’ll instantly gain 12 new ones. There are also 10 lab caches not listed, 5 in the airport in Charlotte and 5 more in Chicago on the way home, because those did not fall on actual biking days.

Geocaching definitely made this a whole lot more fun than it would’ve been otherwise. All future trips I take will definitely include caching on the itinerary, you can count on that!

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