5x50 Day 28

[swanscot]

Today's activity was a 11 km walk around the woods above Inverness with hubby and son. I was looking for goecaches and son was recording the track (and taking photos) for the Open Street Map website (a wiki mapping site), so our route was determined by where I wanted to go to find the caches and where son wanted to go to track unrecorded paths and tracks.

I felt a bit cold most of the time when we were out, so I hope I'm not 'coming down with something'. It could be just generally 'run down' as I had a poor night's sleep again last night. You'd think my body would just zonk out after all the exercise I'm getting, but no.

[George42 Graduate]

I am having trouble sleeping too, doesn't seem to matter how much excercise I do.

I went out for a pre breakfast run that turned in to part run part walk.

It was pretty cold first thing this morning.

[DeliaItaly Graduate]

Wow Swanscot, you never fail to impress me, goecaching! Sounds positively geeky but do tell us more!

[swanscot Graduate in reply to DeliaItaly]

Positively geeky and, in my case, an excuse to buy a new toy (Garmin Oregen GPS).

Geocaching is a worldwide outdoor treasure hunt. The idea is to find hidden containers, called geocaches (or caches for short) using a smartphone or GPS. You simply download the coordinates to the caches from the geocaching website, then plan a route to the location using maps and ultimately following the compass on the GPS. Some of the containers have goodies to swap (children's toys, small books, pens, badges, etc) and others are much smaller and/or so well disguised that it's a real challenge is to find the things. Many of the geochaes are hidden in urban or road-side locations, but I tend to stick to looking for those in woods or at least on footpaths.

geocaching.com/

For me, it's often an 'excuse' to walk a wee bit further or it will take me to a particular woodland I'd never been to before. Earlier in this 5x50 Challenge I went looking for a geocache hidden in a wood beside a WW2 ammunition building. This wood is only about 7 miles from my home, but I never knew the buildings were there before geocaching. I didn't find the cache that day, so will return to search again.

I posted photos in my 5x50 Challenge album on Facebook (pictures 8-11) of the buildings.

facebook.com/media/set/?set...

There is a series of recently-hidden caches in a woodland that I'm saving up to do when I can run and cache! I've mapped out a couple of routes, each about 12 km long and when I feel I can comfortably run this distance (running and stopping) carrying a small rucksack, I plan to do these. Meanwhile I'm enjoying more cycling and caching trips.

[DeliaItaly Graduate in reply to swanscot]

Wow, sounds amazing - digital age treasure troves, right?

[Angel108 Graduate]

Yesterday did a 20k cycle at the gym then hours gardening and trips to the local tip. Today taking 2 eldest grandchildren horse riding so will see if I get some time to myself to clock up a few k's. Must say I find it more difficult to fit in on the weekends.