The Caching Marathon

The 26th April 2009 may be known as the date of the London Marathon, but for a few geocachers in the Midlands it will hold a memories of a different milestone event, although it shows some similarities.

Firstly for the uninitiated what is geocaching, basically it is searching for hidden boxes that are hidden all over the world by the use of GPS receivers to hone in on the spot where they are hidden, for more information visit http://www.geocaching.com

Back to the the 26th April, we started off at stupid o'clock from Birmingham to travel to Blackburn / Bolton for about 7am where we met up with another 2 cars worth of geocachers who was looking forward to a days caching and hopefully hitting the golden 100 finds in one day.

Roll call time, Stokesy, Graham1875, Team Balders, Pete3, [Monki], Blue Nora, The Washers, [MF]taz and AJIgeo also known as Richard, Graham, Kev, Pete, Ash, Nikki, Ron, Lee and Alan we should also not forget Sophie the GeoDog the 10 of us walked 21.8 miles and found 84 geocaches while walking in Lancashire a place that is not known for its flatness.

While some of us was more physically prepared than others for the day I was worried if I could make it, I certainly would not have considered doing this trek last year, as I suffer with an arthritic condition Ankylosing Spondylits that causes my spine to fuse together and can leave me in chronic pain, for a few months I have had staggering results with my Anti-TNF treatment that has given me a new lease of life, I had not noticed how much pain I was in, until it had been taken away.



We started this quest at 7:30am where we found our first cache under a pine tree, and finished at 6:00pm with a cache called Last Man Stands, an apt name for the final one, this took us climbing up banks, navigating through boggy terrain, moooving cows, birthing sheep, (well we saw a lamb that had just been born) climbing hills, climbing a lot of styles. It was also a lot of fun as is always the way when you get a group that have a common interest you always have something to talk about.

While we did not hit our 100 milestone for a day's caching the day was a success and anyone who caches would not be able to say that we 'only' did 84, not only was it 84 caches, they was 84 quality caches, most of them had been placed by one geocacher L E G E N D who has also placed a lot more caches in the area, each one worthy of the hunt.

I looked at it not as one big massive walk but as lots of very small walks, setting the gpsr at each cache and it saying that the next one is less than 2 tenths of a mile away spurs you on and makes the journey a lot easier.

TFTC TNLNSL

or

Thanks for the Cache Took Nothing Left Nothing Signed Log

Lee aka [MF]taz