I’ve only been driving in Ireland for several days, so less than 100% of the iconography of the signage makes sense to me instantly, for now. But this one’s a complete mystery to me.
Is this warning joggers than tiny cars might bounce off their heads? Or is it exhorting distant swerving motorists to put on their right indicator to tell people which way to run to
avoid being hit by them? Or maybe it’s advising that down this road is a football pitch for giants and they’ll play “headers” with you in your car if you’re not careful? I honestly
haven’t a clue.
Despite having been hidden as recently as 2022, this “feels” like an old-school cache. A non-trivial offset, a real scramble through the terrain to find it, and a generous-sized
container at the other end. Back around 2010 many more caches felt like this, and in a way I miss them: being able to find a quick-and-easy traditional cache on every street corner is a
quick win, but it takes some of the satisfaction out of the old days when you’d expect an extended journey and hunt.
That said, our expedition to this cache was perhaps quite a lot harder than it needed to be. There’s a few reasons for that. The first reason is that we didn’t start out until the sun
was getting close to the horizon, which made searching for the first part hard and the second part – by which point we were using our phones as torches – extremely challenging. Another
challenge came from that first part, which was not where it ought to be: we found it on the floor, rather than hanging as indicated, some metres away from the correct location, and
having lost *both* of its NFC tags. Digging through the leaf litter eventually revealed one of the tags, and we’ve left it stacked with the board, but without being re-attached to its
tree it’s going to get lost again the next time the weather turns bad. Worth a look!
It took a long time to find our target at stage one. It took almost as long again to decode its data into a usable format.
The next challenge came from the encoding of the NFC tag. It’s possible to encode an NFC tag so that it says “this is text”, but the CO has encoded it to say “this is a URL”. As a
result, my phone insisted in trying to open the coordinates as a URL (stripping all space characters from it as it did so), leaving me to reverse-engineer it back to coordinates. And
then remembering how to convert my GPSr from DDM mode to Decimal so I could enter the coordinates in the right format. But I managed eventually. And wow: the CO wasn’t kidding when they
said this was on the opposite side of town!
My mum and I rushed across to the new location. Thankfully our first guess as to the place where we’d be able to park our car was correct, and we pressed on into the woods in the fading
light, tripping over branches and sploshing through streams as we tried to find out way by our phone torches alone. Getting close, we spiralled out, hunting for the cache. Eventually,
not helped by the hint (there are so many candidates!), and fearing our expedition at an untimely end, we hit the old logs, and found that the photo in log GL1A022W8 by macadonis to be
extremely helpful: even in the low light, we could see a hinted object and – after a little debate about which way we should be facing it – soon had the cache in hand. Hurrah!
We must’ve searched at the base of thirty or forty trees before we found the right one.
We signed the (proper size) log book and returned it as we found it. Thanks for a wonderful adventure; FP awarded for the effort that’s gone in to
making a cache that simultaneously felt both “modern” (with NFC tags) and “old school” (with the high effort-to-reward ratio, the challenging terrain, and the difficult hides). If stage
1 could be re-attached to its host and perhaps re-programmed to expose text, rather than URL, data, this cache could go from great to spectacular. TFTC!
After a boat tour of the bay and a delightful late lunch, my mum and I came out here to find this cache as the last of three muggles present were packing up. TFTC!
This can’t be done. Right? Right?! Except maybe it can. I’ve found a few folks with boats and I’m going to phone-around in the morning and see about chartering one.
Expedition
I left lots of voicemails and messages lots of people, but nobody could offer me a lift to this random spot on the edge of Ireland. We later took a tour boat out into the bay but it
didn’t go near it either (but was a delightful ride, and we just-about came within sight of the hashpoint).
It’s actually about 10km away at this point. We could’ve gotten closer, but we couldn’t quite get close enough.
Found by my mother and I while exploring the area. What a beautiful estate, thanks for bringing us here. Log slightly damp but usable. TFTC.
Greetings from Oxfordshire and Lancashire, UK!
Two of us hunted for about 10 minutes without any luck. We found a the host object without difficulty and soon found a man-made hook upon touch we suspect the cache might once have
resided. Eventually we had to give up and move on. Nice location, but might need CO attention.
Today we need to drive North up the entire length of the M18 and M17 to get to our next accommodation. If we take only a minor diversion at Tuam we can see how accessible this hashpoint
is, on the way!
Expedition
On today’s leg of my mother and I’s expedition to go hashing around the West coast of Ireland (hampered only by the floods of Storm Bert) we were scheduled to drive a few hours up the
country to move from our old accommodation of the last few nights to our new accommodation of the next two. On our way we accidentally drove the wrong way down the M6 for a spell (as
you can see on our tracklog) as we intended to visit Athenry for some geocaching, before pushing on to the hashpoint.
102 metres to go, but we’ll need to find a gate… and some better footwear…
We drove past the field with the hashpoint in order to dodge an incoming tractor and to scout out safe parking spaces. Finding a suitable verge, we pulled up and took a look at the
pasture with the hashpoint. The gate into it was seriously churned up with mud, so I switched to my wellies and my mother pulled on a pair of waterproof trousers, and we waded out.
Some of the early bits of the field would suck us ankle-deep, but by this point things were better.
Once past the gate, it got a lot easier and we were able to quickly find our way to the hashpoint at 13:10.
One great thing about having a geohashing buddy is they can take a “victory pose” picture of you!
It was the middle of a muddy field. Not exciting, but a good view of rolling countryside and wind farms.
Fields as far as the eye can see. Until you hit the treeline.
We swiftly made our way back to our car to avoid any questions from passing farmers about what we might be doing hanging our near a piece of mystery agricultural equipment we were near.
Requisite silly grins, as required by geohashing law.
Then, after changing back into our regular footwear so we didn’t bring tonnes of mud into our rental car, made our way down into Claremorris. There, we enjoyed a celebratory carvery
lunch, toured a handful of local geocaches, explored a path that Google Maps (only) claims exists – possibly a trap street? – and walked around a lake with lots of scultpures until we discovered that the route we’d planned to take was underwater. At that point, we figured it
was time to go check-in to our new AirBnB and returned to our car to set off.
I had the curry, but my mother managed to order a portion of gammon and mash slightly larger than her own head.
A highly-successful trip.
Tracklog
Full journey
(includes drive from old
accommodation, geocaching, hiking, drive to new accommodation, etc)
Like many others before us, we failed to find this cache. Based in the hint, we’re confident we were looking in thir right place. A real shame for it to be missing, but my mum and I
enjoyed this piece of art.
QEF for me and my mum during our flying visit to the town. Attached is a photo of us about to enter the Konami Code and see if it gives us extra lives or something.
A delightful walk under the walls of the castle and the priory while visiting Athenry on our way to a geohashpoint stone way North of here. Clues easily collected, we quickly found the
cache and signed the log before the rain got any heavier! TFTC!
It’s been a long day of driving around Ireland, scrambling through forests, navigating to a hashpoint, exploring a medieval castle, dodging the rain, finding a series of geocaches,
getting lost up a hill in the dark, and generally having a kickass time with one of my very favourite people on this earth: my mum.
And now it’s time for a long soak in a hot bath with a pint of the black stuff and my RSS reader for company. A perfect finish.
We really wanted to attempt this one, but it wasn’t to be. We added up all the numbers we’d collected on our journey but got a number three out from the requisite checksum. We attempted
to guess what we’d recorded incorrectly and had a couple of reasonable guesses, but the growing darkness was making it increasingly difficult (and a little dangerous) to be out
exploring without torches, so we had to give up (we’d probably not have found it in the dark anyway).
The whole series was delightful and we loved finding them. It was a shame not to get the bonus (which was our own fault really: setting off too late and having to rush made us make a
mistake, clearly!), but we had so much fun with the ones we did find that it was all worthwhile anyway. Big kudos to the CO; thanks!
Struggling in the dark, I slipped onto my bottom as I attempted to get around to the far side of the twisted host, and while I picked myself up and beat off my muddy jeans my mother
quickly found the cache. Hurrah!
We had to try a couple of candidates in the growing dark before we found the right host, and even then needed to stretch quite a long way to open and close this cache container. But
eventually we’d managed.
