Dan Q

Tag: geocaching

Goodbye Ireland

I’m leaving Ireland a day late, from the wrong airport, and with one fewer functioning arm than I anticipated. It’s been quite the ride. I’ll be glad to get home.

Dan sits in an airport bar drinking a beer held in his right hand. His left arm is in a sling.

(for those that are concerned: I’ve damaged my shoulder, possibly while slipping down a hill in search of a geocache or geohashpoint; so, y’know, the usual reason I get injured… but I’ve got some physio instructions I’m supposed to follow, and I’ll be okay)

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Dan Q found GC8XWKX Shamrock #20

This checkin to GC8XWKX Shamrock #20 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

My mum and I have been visiting Ireland on a geohashing & geocaching expedition. We’d spotted this shamrock shape but it wasn’t in our operating zone so we didn’t get a chance to hunt any of them, until today’s journey up to Knock airport saw us take a comfort break nearby, and we figured we’d come find this cache, at least.

Dan smiles as he opens a zip-lock bag containing a geocaching logbook, alongside a diamond-shaped Irish 'crossroads' road sign.
I’m at a crossroads. Literally, not figuratively.

Found this well-maintained cache with no difficulty at all: I thoroughly approve of a cache that is hidden just barely enough to not be muggled, but not so much as to inconvenience a geocacher who’s sometimes in a hurry! Nice work, FP awarded. TFTC.

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Dan Q found GC8E8A0 Challenge 💖 Virtual x 15 💖 Country x 5 💖

This checkin to GC8E8A0 Challenge 💖 Virtual x 15 💖 Country x 5 💖 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

I’ve never much gone for ‘challenge caches’. Mostly they just bug me when I fail to filter them off my map and only end up realising that I’m arbitrarily disallowed from logging them when I’m already out and about.

So imagine my surprise when, stopping in town this misty morning on my way to Knock airport after a week of geohashing/geocaching along the West coast with my mother, I discovered by chance that I’m actually eligible for it. I’ve cached plenty enough to meet the virtuals count but I couldn’t for the life of me name the six countries I’ve apparently found virtuals in. Apparently I have, though, according to the checker, so I parked nearby and walked out here to find the cache.

Dan stands by some steps in a park, holding a strange-looking log.
Shall I sign the log? Oh, wait…

It didn’t take long before I spotted something suspicious and pulled it, and lo and behold, it was the cache. The lid is absent and the logbook missing, so I tore a bit off a bus ticket from my wallet and wrote the usual bits on that before returning the cache to its hiding spot.

Dan's name and today's date scrawled on a torn-off piece of a bus ticket, atop of log.
Guess I’ll just write this here.

I’m still not a big fan of challenge caches, but I enjoyed this cache for what it is nonetheless. Might need a new logbook and possibly a lid, though!

TFTC.

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Dan Q found GC9QNY4 NFCache

This checkin to GC9QNY4 NFCache reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

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!

Dan stands in a forest alongside a dry stone wall, looking at his phone. Near his feet, an A4-sized camouflaged board lies with a small white circle of card atop it.
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!

Dan, in a dense forest at twilight, holds aloft a large ammo can. His other hand holds his phone, used as a flashlight.
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!

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Dan Q did not find GC9VD2M Claremorris_01

This checkin to GC9VD2M Claremorris_01 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

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.

Dan Q did not find GC5EJVD Town Gossip

This checkin to GC5EJVD Town Gossip reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

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.

A sculpture (called 'gossip') is a bench with birdlike feet and a head comprised of a mouth with a long tongue and several listening tubes. Alongside it, Dan's mother - a woman wearing a grey bobble hat and a blue raincoat - attempts to mime the same mouth shape.

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Dan Q found GC5GDTX Walls and Games

This checkin to GC5GDTX Walls and Games reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

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!

Dan stands in front of a ruined priory.

 

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Guinness in the Bath

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.

A pint of Guinness alongside a can, on a tiled bathroom shelf.

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Dan Q wrote note for GC6VYP1 Congratulations

This checkin to GC6VYP1 Congratulations reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

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!

Dan and his mum, lit by phone-light, stand in a dark forest.

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