Urban caching in Greenwich and Central London

Despite the recent excitement with the bomb scare in Wetherby this week, we decided not to let it put us off urban caching and headed straight to London this Saturday for some urban hides.

Caching in Greenwich

We were particularly attracted to Greenwich as there were 3 virtuals, a good handful of traditionals and a wherigo in the vicinity to keep us busy for the morning. We started with the virtual Whisky Galore at the Cutty Sark which unfortunately wasn’t a very exciting virtual as the ship is all boarded up whilst they are doing work to restore it after it caught fire in 2007. The ship is costing millions to restore so should look fabulous once they have finished. It’s nice that the CO has been able to modify the virtual to keep it alive during the work though.

Next it was on to Maritime Greenwich where we started our Wherigo and the Greenwich Hemispheric Exploration virtual. At the start we saw 13 famous travellers carved into the building. A very impressive addition to the building.

3 of the 13 navigators

12 DNFs! WTF?

Today we decided to tackle the WTF series near Ealing, London. The series was recommended for biking, so we took our bikes with us on the trail. We ended the day with 33 finds, however it wasn’t plain sailing all the way and we ended up with a massive 12 DNF’s! I think the most we have ever DNF’ed in a day is about 3. Needless to say morale was quite low…

A brave start

I had filtered the terrain and difficulties for the series and noticed that one particular cache stood out as having an unusual difficulty rating, WTF: Metal (jin). We knew it was high up under a bridge from reading previous logs and that we would need to go into the river. We decided to get prepared and purchased a fold-up grabber and a telescopic magnet to help us with this task (and future caches!) We parked nearby and walked to this cache, leaving the bikes in the car. We went in the river in wellies, however had obviously picked the wrong time of year to attempt it as the river was too high and we couldn’t get to it without flooding our wellies. The cache was probably about 1 meter too far along. Damn. Unfortunately we couldn’t use our new tools, however they did come in handy for future caches on the trail. We had to give this particular cache a miss and retreated back to the car to grab the bikes.

London Geocaching Hat-Trick

For the third and final time this year we popped to London to do some caching. We decided that this would be the last trip for the year as there are some major underground works for rest of the weekends in November, and December will mean London is quite busy. We ended up picking up 29 on a trip just as enjoyable as all of our previous visits. This time however, we concentrated less on virtuals and more on clusters of caches that looked in close proximity. I think we still managed to walk just as far as on the previous trips though (It felt like that anyway)

We started off at Aldgate tube station (As we mis-read the signs when meaning to get off at Aldgate East) and grabbed a quick find with ‘Tardis – It’s (Bigger) On The Outside!‘ and then headed to the Gherkin for a nearby cache, ‘Gherkin‘. It was here that we realised the GPSr wasn’t going to be our friend today when it went absolutely crazy. We therefore had to ignore it as it wouldn’t zoom in to more than 120ft. We had to use our cacher senses and very soon it was in our hands. I couldn’t believe it! The Gherkin seemed to stalk us all around London. It is so big that we couldn’t miss it anywhere we went.

The Gherkin!

Another caching trip to London

By ‘eck England, it was cold on Saturday 25th, wasn’t it? Or was it just me? I’m thinking I may need some thermal undies! Well, despite the cold we still decided to do another trip into London as we enjoyed the last one so much. This time however I took my Nikon D40 DSLR instead of my compact Nikon. I can really notice the difference, so think despite the size and weight my DSLR may have to come with us on all trips.

In this trip we did 17 miles on foot, at 3.5 miles on tube as we had to dart about London quite a bit. We grabbed 7 virtuals, 1 web cam, 2 earth caches and 19 traditional/multi caches. A total of 29 finds for today. [...]

Yellow = On foot, Orange = On tube

London Cache Bash

Yesterday we went “Daaaaan ta Laaaaaaaaandan!” In a previous post I had blogged about wanting to go around London picking up the many (40-odd) virtual, earth and web cam caches that were there. Well, yesterday it became a reality and we had such an amazing time! My theory was that as London is such a big city, picking up real caches would be a nightmare and so virtuals were the way forward. Actually, this wasn’t true and we ended the day with 12 virtuals, 1 earth, 2 web cams, and 15 traditional caches (30 in total). We only managed half of the virtuals that I’d planned, however there’s always another day. I really recommend a trip to London caching. The only problem is you’ll have to use your geo-senses as sometimes the concrete jungle sends the GPSr crackers. There’s a good variety of different types of caches and if you plan your route wisely you can hop on the tube from cache to cache. We however walked everywhere and couldn’t believe our eyes when we pulled up the route on the GPSr and it read 18.8miles!!! Despite walking so far we didn’t actually managed to get very far as we just kept going around in circles! hehe! Read on for more on caching in London [...]

Proof that you can walk nearly 19miles and get absolutely nowhere!

Cass’ Big London Special Cache Bash

I’m thinking of organizing a little trip down to London to grab some of the special (Earth, Virtual, and Web cam) caches. I’ve done a lot of planning and it looks like you could grab 30-40 in a day.

I’ve been through all of the caches and created a word document with information on all of the caches available in the area, as well with a map showing the cache names and locations, and another showing a good order to do the caches in. I’m not sure whether just to go just the two of us or as a small group. If anyone reading this fancies doing this on say one Saturday in August, drop me a mail through geocaching.com (User cassandy)

Map of caches with labels

Cache map with directional arrows

Details of all of the caches can be found here:
OrderedLayout

Caching in Guildford

I went with my brother and mum to Guildford today (A 170mile round trip!) for my brother’s graduation ceremony. They were kind enough to let me hit two caches. Conveniently the ceremony was in Guildford Cathedral where a church micro cache was. A 500ft stroll from the Cathedral whilst we were waiting to enter for the ceremony took us straight to it.

I am extremely proud of my brother for what he has acheived. He studied a Bachelor’s in Computer Sound Design, and as much as I hate to admit it (as he’s my brother, sibling rivalry and all that!) his work is outstanding.

University of Surrey, Computer Sound Design class of 2010!