Out for a walk on my 43rd birthday, left the kids playing with their other parents in the (beautiful) ruins of the abbey or I hacked my way around to the GZ. Started searching at my
evaluation of the target point and spiralled outwards, eventually finding the cache about 10m away (downhill and further from the abbey) after interpreting the hint. Good sized
container in a great location, TFTC and greetings from Oxfordshire!
Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?
How do I play? Let me count the ways!
RPGs
I’m involved in no fewer than three different RPG campaigns (DMing the one for
The Levellers) right now, plus periodic one-shots. I love a good roleplaying game, especially one that puts character-building and storytelling
above rules-lawyering and munchkinery, specifically because that kind of collaborative, imaginative experience feels more like the kind of thing we call “play” when
done it’s done by children!
Family D&D and Abnib D&D might have a distinctly different tone, but they’re still both playtime activities.
Videogames
I don’t feel like I get remotely as much videogaming time as I used to, and in theory I’ve become more-selective about exactly what I spend my time on1.
Similarly, I don’t feel like I get as much time to grind through my oversized board games collection as I used to2,
but that’s improving as the kids get older and can be roped-into a wider diversity of games3.
Our youngest wakes early on weekend mornings and asks to kick off his day with board games. Our eldest, pictured, has grown to the point where she’s working her way through all of the
animal-themed games at our local board games cafe.
Escape Rooms
I love a good escape room, and I can’t wait until the kids are old enough for (more of) them too so I’ve an excuse to do more of them. When we’re not playing conventional escape rooms,
Ruth and I can sometimes be found playing board game-style boxed “kit” ones (which have very variable quality, in my experience) and we’ve
recently tried a little Escape Academy.
Ruth and I make a great duo when we remember to communicate early-and-often and to tag-team puzzles by swapping what we’re focussing on when we get stuck.
They’re not the only satnav-based activities I do at least partially “for fun” though! I contribute to OpenStreetMap, often through the
“gamified” experience of the StreetComplete app, and I’m very slowly creeping up the leader board at OpenBenches. Are these “play”? Sure, maybe.
And all of the above is merely the structured kinds of play I engage in. Playing “let’s pretend”-style games with the kids (even when they make it really, really
weird) adds a whole extra aspect. Also there’s the increasingly-rare murder mystery parties we sometimes hold: does that count as roleplaying, or some other kind of play?
A chef, a priest, and a librarian walk into a party… stop me if you’ve heard this one.
Suffice to say, there’s plenty of play in my life, it’s quite varied and diverse, and there is, if anything, not enough of it!
Footnotes
1 I say that, and yet somehow Steam tells me that one of my most-played games this year
was Starfield, which was… meh? Apparently compelling enough
that I’ve “ascended” twice, but in hindsight I wish I hadn’t bothered.
2 Someday my group and I will finish Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 so we can get
started on Season 0 which has sat
unplayed on my shelves since I got it… oooh… two or three years ago‽
3 This Christmas, I got each of them their first “legacy” game: Zombie Kids for the younger one, My City for the elder. They both seem pretty good.
4Geocaching is where you use military satellite networks to find lost tupperware. Geohashing uses the same technology but what you find is a whole
lot of nothing. I don’t think I can explain why I find the latter more-compelling.
Found while walking into High Wycombe to work after dropping my canine caching-companion (pictured) off at the nearby veterinary hospital for an operation. Didn’t need her help with
this easy find, luckily! Shame about all the fly tipping littering this otherwise pleasant path. Greetings from Oxfordshire!
The poor little geopup’s only got tiny legs, and the 8km we’ve walked so-far has got her pretty tired-out, so this’ll be the last cache of the series before we go and find ourselves
some lunch and go home. It’s been a very enjoyable series so far, and I fully intend to return to complete it (and perhaps find some of those earlier caches that I failed to spot).
For this final cache of the morning (well, afternoon: barely!), I found the likely spot straightaway and picked up something that looked out of place. Nope, no sign of the cache though;
that’s strange. It took a few seconds to realise that yes, the cache was hidden behind the thing I’d picked up… it was just also covered with leaf little and detritus.
Soon had it retrieved in the end, though.
A huge number of butterflies flocked in the field to our right: it was quite impressive. I’ve snapped a picture showing just one, so that I can later look up what kind of butterfly it
is!
Sometimes the geo-sense “just works”. This was one of those moments. I was approaching the area and checking the distance. Then I walked straight to a likely location. Then I picked up
the cache. Done and done.
Turning South and crossing our own path, the sun came out at last and we were bathed in glorious warm light. Between that, and the familiarity of the trail we passed, the geopup and I
completely forgot for a moment that we were out to look for this next cache and overshot it: we had to turn back to get to the coordinates and find the cache. TFTC!
Worra lorra porkers! The geopup is a huge fan of sausages but I don’t think she understood that the cornucopia she was looking at across the field was the same thing, just a few years
off being ripe. Great cache container too. TFTC, and let’s chuck an FP in because this series as a whole
has definitely earned another one in my mind by now…
The geopup and I tried a couple of likely hiding places before we found this one. A nice-sized container and well-suited to its hiding place, here, TFTC!
Came by this location while doing the nearby WAG series. Was delighted to see that an OpenCache was on the route too so the geopup and I dedicated the time to a decent search. We think
we found what was once the hiding place, but the cache itself was sadly nowhere to be seen.
Between nearby GC7QC7R, which acts as a spur to this series, and OK00F7, which sits on (and predates) this series, I was feeling confident of a find here… but after an extended search the
geopup and I had to admit defeat. To be honest, she was willing to give up and press on immediately, having seen a muddy puddle up ahead that she wanted to play about it, and her
persistent lead-pulling in that direction might have reduced both my patience and the efficacy of my search! But we found a few things that might match the hint and didn’t see success,
soo… 🤷♂️
As a quick diversion from the nearby WAG series, the geopup and I meandered out this way to find this cache. Once I was in the vicinity of the cache something stood out to me as
unusual, so we went to pick it up… it turned out to be a chunk of wraught iron, but finding it soon pointed me in the direction of the cache. TFTC.
A quick and easy find: we walked straight to where the coordinates said and there it was. My phone, having been rebooted during the last leg, was now behaving much better at narrowing
down a satellite fix!
These woods are really quite amazingly beautiful and serene. It’s quiet and calm here, and both the geopup and I really appreciate the excuse to have come here.
Took several attempts to find the correct hiding place and the poor geopup – who didn’t like the tight-knit undergrowth here except when it suited her (when she wanted to chase after a
pheasant!) – eventually had to be tied to a tree while I pressed-on without her to get the cache in hand. Phew! TFTC.
This was the moment when I found myself wishing that my dedicated GPSr unit was with me and working, as my phone’s GPS fix started jumping all over the place. The geopup and I made a few valiant attempts to search in the obvious places, criss-crossing our way
through some quite fierce brambles as we did so, but without success. Eventually, we had to move on and chalk this one up as a DNF. I’ve
no reason to believe it’s not out there somewhere, but it’ll be a job for somebody whose satellite navigation kit is playing ball.
The geopup made herself useful for this cache, running straight to the cache location. (I suspect that some prior canine visitor may have left their mark somewhere very near to the
cache, and she was more interested in smelling that than she was at helping me find the container, but I can dream of a dog who’s a useful geocaching assistant, can’t I?) TFTC.
