memorable

Geohashing expedition 2025-01-15 10 -61

This checkin to geohash 2025-01-15 10 -61 reflects a geohashing expedition. See more of Dan's hash logs.

Location

Empty lot off Bhagan Trace, Chandernagore, near Chase Village, Trinidad.

Participants

Dan Q
His partner Ruth

Plans

I’ve been on holiday on the islands of Trinidad & Tobago this week. These island nations span graticules that are dominated by the Caribbean and Atlantic Oceans, so it’s little wonder there’s never been an attempted geohashing expedition in them. So when a hashpoint popped-up in a possibly-accessible location, I had to go for it!

For additional context: Trinidad & Tobago is currently under a state of emergency as gang warfare and an escalating murder rate has reached a peak. It’s probably ill-advised to go far off the beaten track, especially as somebody who’s clearly a foreign tourist. The violence and danger is especially prevalent in and around parts of nearby Port of Spain.

As a result, my partner Ruth (wisely) agreed to drive with me to the GZ strictly under the understanding that we’d turn back at a moment’s notice if anything looked remotely sketchy, and we’d take every precaution on the way to, from, and at the hashpoint area (e.g. keeping car doors locked when travelling and not getting out unless necessary and safe to do so, keeping valuables hidden out of sight, knowing the location of the nearest police station at any time, etc.).

I don’t have my regular geohashing kit with me, but I’ve got a smartphone, uLogger sending 5-minute GPS location pings (and the ability to send a location when I press a button in the app, for proof later), and a little bravery, so here we go…

Expedition

Our plane from Tobago landed around 15:20 local time, following an ahead-of-schedule flight assisted by a tailwind from the Atlantic side. We disembarked, collected our bags, and proceeded to pick up a hire car.

Medium-sized two-engine turboprop aircraft on tarmac runway, facing away from the photographer, under slightly cloudy blue skies. Caribbean Airlines livery (colourful hummingbird on tail). — Our Caribbean Airlines aircraft, landed at Piarco airport.

Our original plan for our stay in Trinidad had been to drive up to an AirBnB near 10.743817, -61.514248 on Paramin, one of Tobago’s highest summits. However, our experience of driving up Mount Dillon on Tobago earlier in the week showed us that the rural mountain roads around here can be terrifyingly dangerous for non-locals¹, and so we chickened out and investigated the possibility of arranging a last-minute stay at a lodge on the edge of the rainforest in Gran Couva, or else failing that a fallback plan of a conventional tourist-centric hotel in the North of Port of Spain.

By this point, we’d determined that the hashpoint was in the old sugar growing region of Caroni, in which our originally-intended accommodation at Gran Couva could be found, and so it seemed feasible that we might be able to safely deviate from our route only a little to get to the hashpoint before reaching our beds. We were particularly keen to be at a place of known safety before the sun set, here in an unusual part of an unfamiliar country! So when the owner of our proposed lodge in Gran Couva called to say that he couldn’t accept our last-minute booking on account of ongoing renovations to his property, we had to quickly arrange ourself a room at our backup hotel.

This put us in an awkward position: now the hashpoint really wasn’t anything-like on the way from the airport to where we’d be staying, and we’d doubtless be spending longer than we’d like to be on the road and increasing the risk that we’d be out after dark. I reassured Ruth, whose appetite for risk is somewhat lower than mine, that if we set out for the hashpoint and anything seemed “off” we could turn around at any time, and we began our journey.

Ruth drives a car; Dan, in the passenger seat, looks into the camera as he takes a selfie. — Putting a brave/excited face on as we set off in our rental car.

Boosted by her experience of driving on Tobago, Ruth continued to show her rapidly-developing Trinbagonian road skills².

View through a windscreen showing cars ahead going over a speed bump and winding along a road between tropical shrubbery, with power lines overhead. — Driving down a network of crisscrossing roads.

Despite increasingly heavy traffic on our minor roads, possibly resulting from a crash that had occurred on the Southbound carriageway of the nearby Uriah Butler Highway which was causing drivers to seek a shortcut through the suburbs, we made reasonable time, and were soon in the vicinity of the hashpoint: a mixed-use residential/light commercial estate of the kind that apparently sprung up in places that were, until very late in the 20th century, lands used for sugar cane plantations.

At this point, the maps started to become less and less useful: Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, and Bing Maps completely disagreed as to whether we were driving on Bhagan Trace, Cemetery Street, or Roy Gobin Fifth Avenue, as well as disagreeing on whether we were driving into a cul-de-sac or whether it was possible to loop around at the end to return back to the main roads. It was now almost 17:00 and we were greeted by a large number of cars coming out of the narrow street in the opposite direction to us, going in, and squeezing past us: presumably workers from one of the businesses down here going home for the evening.

Six-lane highway as viewed through a windscreen. Traffic ahead is flowing well but there's a jam underway on the opposite carriageway. — There are highways we’d been recommended to avoid because of the safety situation here, but this one was okay.

My GPS flickered as it tried to make sense of the patchwork of streets, and I asked Ruth to slow down and pull over a couple of times until I was sure that we’d gotten as close as we could, by road. Looking out of my window, I saw the empty lot that I’d scouted from satellite photography, but it was hopelessly overgrown. If the hashpoint was within it, it’d take hours of work and a machete to cut through. The circle of uncertainty jumped around as I tried to finalise the signal without daring to do the obvious thing of holding my phone outside the car window. A handful of locals watched us, the strange white folks sitting in a new car, as I poked at my devices in an effort to check if we were within the circle, or at least if we would be when, imminently, we were forced to park even closer to the side to let a larger vehicle force its way through next to us!

A mess of uncontrolled tropical plants between houses. — Pulled up at the hashpoint.

At the point at which I thought we’d made it, I hit the “save waypoint” at 17:06 button and instructed Ruth to drive on. We turned in the road and I started navigating us to our hotel, only thinking to look at the final location I’d tagged later, when we felt safer. We drove back into Port of Spain avoiding Laventille (another zone we’d been particularly recommended to stay away from) while I resisted the urge to double-check my tracklog, instead focussing on trying to provide solid directions through not-always-signposted streets: we had a wrong turning at one point when we came off the highway at Bamboo Settlement No. 1 (10.627952, -61.429083) but thankfully this was an easy mistake to course-correct from.

View through a windscreen and across a road into an overgrown wilderness between houses, under power lines. — View of the hashpoint again as we turn to go home

It was only when I looked at my tracklog, later, that I discovered that the point I’d tagged was exactly 8.59 metres from the hashpoint, plus or minus a circle of uncertainty of… 9 metres. Amazingly, we’d succeeded without even being certain we’d done so. Having failed to get a silly grin photo at the hashpoint, we sufficed to get one while we drank celebratory Prosecco and ate tapas on the rooftop bar of our hotel, looking down on the beautiful bay and imposing mountains of this beautiful if intimidating island.

Dan and Ruth clink champagne flutes under a dark sky, with city lights visible below them. — Silly drinky grins atop our hotel North of Port of Spain

Tracklog

I didn’t bring my primary GPSr, but my phone keeps a general-purpose tracklog at ~5min/50m intervals, and when I prompt it to. Apologies that this makes my route map look “jumpier” than usual, especially when I’m away from the GZ.

Achievements

Footnotes

¹ Often, when speaking to locals, they’d ask if it was our first time in Trinidad & Tobago, and on learning that it was, they’d be shocked to hear that we’d opted to drive for ourselves rather than to hire drivers to take us places: it turns out that the roads are in very-variable condition, from wonderfully-maintained highways to rural trails barely-driveable without a 4×4, but locals in both drive with the same kind of assertive and sometimes reckless attitude.

² tl;dr of driving in Trinidad & Tobago, as somebody who learned to drive in the UK: (1) if you need to get out of anywhere, don’t wait for anybody to yield because they won’t, even if you theoretically have the right of way: instead, force your way out by obstructing others, (2) drive in the middle of the road wherever possible to make it easier to dodge potholes and other hazards, which are clustered near the soft verges, and swing to your own side of the road only at the last second to avoid collisions, and (3) use your horn as often as you like and for any purpose: to indicate that you want to turn, to warn somebody that you’re there, to tell somebody to move, to say hello to a nearby pedestrian you recognise, or in lieu of turning on your headlights at night, for example. The car horn is a universal language, it seems.

Small-World Serendipity

As part of our trip to the two-island republic of Trinidad & Tobago, Ruth and I decided we’d love to take a trip out to Buccoo Reef, off the coast of the smaller island. The place we’ve been staying during the Tobago leg of our visit made a couple of phone calls for us and suggested that we head on down to the boardwalk at nearby Buccoo the next morning where we’d apparently be able to meet somebody from Pops Tours who’d be able to take us out¹.

At the allotted time, we found somebody from Pops Tours, who said that he was still waiting for their captain to get there³ and asked us to go sit under the almond tree down the other end of the boardwalk and he’d meet us there.

We’d previously clocked that one of the many small boats moored in the bay was Cariad, and found ourselves intensely curious. All of the other boats we’d seen had English-language names of the kinds you’d expect: a well-equipped pleasure craft optimistically named Fish Finder, a small dual-motorcraft with the moniker Bounty, a brightly-coloured party boat named Cool Runnings, and so on. To travel a third of the way around the world to find a boat named in a familiar Welsh word felt strange.

Small six-seater day boat named 'Cariad', afloat. The letter I is dotted with a heart symbol. — Either you’re an extremely long way from home, boat, or else somebody around here has a surprising interest in the Welsh language.

So imagine our delight when the fella we’d been chatting to came over, explained that their regular tour boat (presumably the one pictured on their website) was in the shop, and said that his cousin would be taking us out in his boat instead… and that cousin came over piloting… the Cariad!

As we climbed aboard, we spotted that he was wearing a t-shirt with a Welsh dragon on it, and a sticker on the side of the helm carried a Welsh flag. What strange coincidence is this, that Ruth and I – who met while living in Wales and come for a romantic getaway to the Caribbean – should happen to find ourselves aboard a literal “love” boat named in Welsh.

There probably aren’t many boats on Earth that fly both the colours of Trinidad & Tobago and of Wales, so we naturally had to ask: did you name this boat?, and why? It turns out that yes, our guide for the day has a love of and fascination with Wales that we never quite got to the bottom of. He’d taken a holiday to Swansea just last year, and would be returning to Wales again later this year.

It’s strange to think that anybody might deliberately take a holiday from a tropical island paradise to come to drizzly cold Wales, but there you have it. It sounds like he was into his football and that might have had an impact on his choice of destination, but choose to believe that maybe there’s a certain affinity between parts of the world that have experienced historical oppression at the hands of a colonial English mindset? Like: perhaps Nigerians would enjoy India as a getaway destination, or Guyanans would dig Mauritius as a holiday spot, too?⁵

Dan stands waist-deep in seawater; land is visible in the far distance. — I wrote previously about visiting the Nylon Pool, an waist-deep bit of ocean on a sandbar a full half a mile offshore.

We took a dip at the Nylon Pool, snorkelled around parts of Buccoo Reef (replete with tropical fish of infinite variety and colour), spotted sea turtles zipping around the boat, and took a walk along No Man’s Land (a curious peninsula, long and thin and cut-off from the mainland by mangrove swamps, so-named because Trinidadian law prohibits claiming ownership of any land within a certain distance of the high tide mark… and this particular beach spot consists entirely of such land, coast-to-coast, on account of its extreme narrowness. All in all, it was a delightful boating adventure.

(And for the benefit of the prospective tourist who stumbles upon this blog post in years to come, having somehow hit the right combination of keywords: we paid $400 TTD⁶ for the pair of us: that’s about £48 GBP at today’s exchange rate, which felt like exceptional value for an amazing experience given that we got the expedition entirely to ourselves.)

But aside from the fantastic voyage we got to go on, this expedition was noteworthy in particular for Cariad and her cymruphile captain. It feels like a special kind of small-world serendipity to discover such immediate and significant common ground with a stranger on the other side of an ocean… to coincide upon a shared interest in a culture and place less-foreign to you than to your host.

An enormous diolch yn fawr⁷ is due to Pops Tours for this remarkable experience.

Footnotes

¹ Can I take a moment to observe how much easier it was to charter a boat in Tobago than it was in Ireland, where I left several answerphone messages but never even got a response? Although in the Irish boat owners’ defence, I was being creepy and mysterious by asking them to take me to random coordinates off the coast.

² It’s possible that I’ve become slightly obsessed with frigatebirds since arriving here. I first spotted them from our ferry ride from Trinidad to Tobago, noticing their unusually widely-forked tails, striking white (in the case of the females) chests, and relatively-effortless (for a seabird) thermal-chasing flight. But they’re really cool! They’re a seabird… that isn’t waterproof and can’t swim… if they land in the water, they’re at serious risk of drowning! (Their lack of water-resistant feathers helps with their agility, most-likely.) Anyway – while they can snatch shallow-swimming prey out of the water, they seem to prefer to (and get at least 40% of their food from) stealing it from other birds, harassing them in-flight and snatching it from their bills, or else attacking them until they throw up and grabbing their victim’s vomit as it falls. Nature is weird and amazing.

³ Time works differently here. If you schedule something, it’s more a guideline than it is a timetable. When Ruth and I would try paddleboarding a few days later we turned up at the rental shack at their published opening time and hung out on the beach for most of an hour before messaging the owners via the number on their sign. After 15 minutes we got a response that said they’d be there in 10 minutes. They got there 20 minutes later and opened their shop. I’m not complaining – the beach was lovely and just lounging around in the warm sea air with a cold drink from a nearby bar was great – but I learned from the experience that if you’re planning to meet somebody at a particular time here, you might consider bringing a book. (Last-minute postscript: while trying to arrange our next accommodation, alongside writing this post, I was told that I’d receive a phone call “in half an hour” to arrange payment: that was over an hour ago…)

⁴ Come for the story of small-world serendipity; stay for the copious candid bird photos, I guess?

⁵ I’ll tell you one thing about coming out to Trinidad & Tobago, it makes you feel occasionally (and justifiably) awkward for the colonial era of the British Empire. Queen Elizabeth II gave royal assent to the bill that granted the islands independence only in 1962, well within living memory, and we’ve met folks who’ve spoken to us about living here when it was still under British rule.

⁶ Exceptionally-geeky footnote time. The correct currency symbol for the Trinidad & Tobago Dollar is an S-shape with two vertical bars through it, which is not quite the same as the conventional S-shape with a single vertical bar that you’re probably used to seeing when referring to e.g. American, Canadian, or Australian dollars. Because I’m a sucker for typographical correctness, I decided that I’d try to type it “the right way” here in my blog post, and figured that Unicode had solved this problem for me: the single-bar dollar sign that’s easy to type on your keyboard inherits its codepoint from ASCII, I guessed, so the double-bar dollar sign would be elsewhere in Unicode-space, right? Like how Unicode defines single-bar (pound) and double-bar (lira) variants of the “pound sign”. But it turns out this isn’t the case: the double-bar dollar sign, sometimes called cifrão (from Portugese), and the single-bar dollar sign are treated as allographs: they share the same codepoint and only the choice of type face differentiates between them. I can’t type a double-bar dollar sign for you without forcing an additional font upon you, and even if I did it wouldn’t render “correctly” for everybody. Unicode is great, but it’s not perfect.

⁷ “Thank you very much”, in Welsh, but you probably knew that already.

Note #25492

The Nylon Pool is a sandbar in the Buccoo Reef, off the coast of Tobago. Despite the distance from the shore, it’s only about waist-deep. Truly mind-boggling.

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.

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!

Dan Q found GCA0R10 Leabharlann 📚

This checkin to GCA0R10 Leabharlann 📚 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

QEF for my mother and I as we passed through Claremorris. Excellent hiding place for the area and a great condition of cache, FP awarded. SL, TFTC.

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.

Dan Q found GC6VYGY Absolute Beginners

This checkin to GC6VYGY Absolute Beginners reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

My mother and I are visiting Ireland (from Lancashire, UK and Oxfordshire, UK, respectively) on a mission to find geohashpoints in previously-unexplored graticules, and find a few carefully-selected geocaches along the way. Today we were our near Kilsheelan, down the Suir Valley, making a successful expedition for the 2024-11-24 52 -7 geohashpoint which turned out to be deep within a forest on the hills over the River Suir. Flushed with success, we had our lunch, visited Cahir Castle (and found its nearest geocache), and then made our way over here to attempt this circuit of caches.

We knew we were starting late and were risking the mercy of the setting sun, but we figured that powerwalking and quick finds might see us through. We parked right next to this first cache, found it (it doesn’t have a logbook, by the way!), retrieved the first number, and marched on. Could we do it? Time would tell!

(FP awarded on behalf of the series, which was excellent)

Geohashing expedition 2024-11-24 52 -7

This checkin to geohash 2024-11-24 52 -7 reflects a geohashing expedition. See more of Dan's hash logs.

Location

Forest in the Suir Valley, South of Kilsheelan, Ireland.

Participants

Dan Q
his mother

Plans

Day three of our geohashing-focussed holiday in Ireland, and the other hashpoints near us look likely to be inaccessible to owing to flooding, but this one’s in a hillside forest. Should be easy, right?

Expedition

It took us around an hour and a half to drive from our accomodation out to Kilsheelan, from which we’d planned to cross the bridge and ascend the hill into the forest where the hashpoint could be found.

Dan's mum climbs a hill into a forest. — The route up the hill into the forest wasn’t especially steep, but it seemed to take a while.

We’d originally anticipated that we’d tackle the trail of geocaches alongside the River Suir afterwards, but looking down from the bridge made it clear that this was not going to be possible: the riverside path was completely underwater where the river had broken its banks.

A riverside footpath is completely flooded. — Yeah, we’re not walking along that footpath.

We pressed on up and into the forest. It’s mostly a managed pine forest, surrounded by pockets of native deciduous trees. The trails are, for the most part, wide enough for the forestry vehicles to traverse, and – apart from the points at which streams has escaped their culverts and flooded the path – it was mostly dry and easy walking.

Dan walks ahead on a wide, muddy forest trail. — The trails were muddy, but very navigable.

The maps indicated the the fastest route to where the hashpoint could be found would have been along a road, but we opted to climb to an altitude of about 150m to take a forest trail parallel to the road, instead, and it was certainly a more-welcome view.

Under a blue-white sky, a rounded hill towers over a fertile green valley dotted with little white houses, as seen from between the trees of an ancient forest. — Especially impressive was the view of Slievenamon across the valley, which I shared from the field.

Getting closer to the cache, we found a trail leading down and began to approach it. We seemed to be endlessly stuck at around 370 metres away as our track wound back and forth with the contours of the hill, but eventually we began to approach it. I was momentarily panicked when we disovered an area of new plantation, surrounded by a 3-metre tall wire fence, because it looked as though the hashpoint might turn out to be inside it and therefore inaccessible, but as we continued to walk we discovered to our delight that it would, instead, be in one of the mature parts of the managed forest instead.

A fenced-off area full of newly-planted pine trees sits just off the side of a forest trail. — Uh-oh, this fence looks like trouble.

We broke off the track with around 50 metres to go and began to hack our way through the slippery mud and tangled undergrowth.

A GPSr shows 48m distance to a target, off a path and into a forest. — We need to go… thisaway!

Before long, we came across a stream, converted into a torrent by the floodwater and the mountaintop’s melting snow!

A GPSr shows 28m to go... through a stream. — This stream could be a problem…

After scouting for the narrowest point (and giving up on attempting to construct a bridge) I leapt across, and then reached back to help my mother do the same.

Dan looks concerned next to his mother, in a forest. — “You think we can jump it?” “I think I can jump it, but I don’t know about you.” “Can you… pull me over?”

Dan and his mother cheer alongside a raging stream. — “We got over it!”

Now we were able to pick our way around decaying wood and slippery leaves to finally get to the hashpoint. We arrived at 11:20.

Dan raises his hands in a victory pose in a forest. — Victory pose!

A GPSr shows 0m distance, muddy ground is visible beneath. — Ground Zero!

Panoramic view of a forest with a woman in it. — A panorama from the hashpoint.

Dan and his mother smile for the camera in a forest, holding a GPSr between them. — Requisite silly grins.

Retracing our steps to the path and continuing our descent, we returned via the road to the bridge we’d crossed at. We enjoyed a spectacular view of Slievenamon to the North, a mountain that towers over the valley. Returning to Kilsheelan, we had a great lunch at Nagle’s Bar, then continued on our day’s adventures: taking in some history at Cahir Castle (and finding a nearby geocache), dodging the rain at coffee shop Keep Coffee, and then taking on a challenging series of caches on the Millennium Loop of Glengarra Woods, where we almost found ourselves stranded by the setting sun, short on batteries for either GPS, phone, or torch use, and having to carefully pick our way back to the car before a long dark drive over the winding Kilmallock road to get back to home, beer, and baths.

Dan sits in a bar; the word 'Nagles' is over his head on a sign. — Lunchtime!

A wonderful adventure that’s left me heavy of foot and light of spirit.

Tracklog

Full journey

(includes the driving sections and our other expeditions, including some lunch, touring a castle, and geocaching a valley)

Download full journey tracklog.

Walking

(just the bit from where we parked up into the forest, to the hashpoint, and down again; minus a bit at the start where I forgot to turn my backup GPSr on)

Download walking segment tracklog.

Dan Q found GC9DV9P GST 64 – Lift me up buttercup

This checkin to GC9DV9P GST 64 - Lift me up buttercup reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

We almost gave up trying to find the hint object before spotting something that once had the colour of a buttercup but has since enjoyed some extra camouflage! Retrieving the cache was a bit challenging for my fat hands but my mum managed to help. FP awarded for this more-imaginative hiding place! TFTC.

Loughrea Unlocked

I’m on the map! No matter what else my mother and I achieve this week, my name will forever be recorded as the unlocker of the Loughrea graticule in Ireland: https://geohashing.site/geohashing/Ireland

Dan Q found GC2BY40 Pallas Castle

This checkin to GC2BY40 Pallas Castle reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

My mother and I are visiting the area in search of virgin graticules for geohashing purposes. This morning we set out for the 2024-11-22 53 -8 geohashpoint and found it down in a disused pasture down in the valley, then we decided to celebrate by seeing if there were any nearby geocaches to find, too!

Bring the only cache in the area (!) and at a castle (who doesn’t love a castle?) we figured it’d be worth a go. By the time we’d found a bridge over the river and walked up the winding road up the hill, we were ready for our lunch, so we explored the castle grounds while we ate our sandwiches. Now, re-energised, we were ready to find the cache!

We quickly found the tree from the description, but 5 to 10 minutes hunting didn’t reveal the cache’s hiding place. We checked the hint, but it didn’t help: none of the things around here are what the hint describes, for a strict definition of the word! So we started checking the old logs. Somebody mentioned finding the cache around 7 metres from the coordinates, and that was helpful: we followed the nearby wall about that distance and quickly spotted a solid hiding place. We had to clear a bit of leaf litter to get to the cache, but soon we had it and were signing the logbook.

Thanks for bringing us to this excellent location. FP awarded. Greetings from Lancashire and Oxfordshire, UK!

Geohashing expedition 2024-11-22 53 -8

This checkin to geohash 2024-11-22 53 -8 reflects a geohashing expedition. See more of Dan's hash logs.

Location

Field East of Abbey, Ireland.

Participants

Dan Q
his mum

Plans

When my mother proposed that we take a holiday together somewhere, and that I could choose the destination, I started by looking at the Geohashing Expeditions Map.

Where, I wondered, could I find a cluster of mostly-land graticules (“square” degree of latitude and longitude) in which nobody had ever logged a successful expedition? I’ve been geohashing for ten years now and I’ve never yet scored a “Graticule Unlocked” achievement for being the first to reach any hashpoint in a given graticule.

So this week, we’re holidaying on the West coast of Ireland, doing a variety of activities that take our fancy and, hopefully, finding a geohashpoint or two in previously-unexplored graticules!

Looking at the nearby hashpoints, we decided that this was our best bet. An hour and a half’s drive from our accomodation to a village near the hashpoint and we might be able to make the rest of the way on foot.

Expedition

My mother’s never been hashing before, but unlike most people I’ve told about the hobby she didn’t turn her nose up at the idea so she was happy to accompany me on this unusual adventure.

Random dog we met along the way. — We met a surprising number of dogs out, alone, “taking themselves for a walk’. Like this one.

We drove to Abbey, which turns out to be a delightful village, and parked outside the community centre (where my mother was able to use the bathroom).

Abbey Community Centre, plus a car. — Parking was plentiful in Abbey.

Sign saying The Lazy Wall. — We still don’t know what makes this wall “lazy”.

Then we switched to foot, walking along the banks of the stream and following the road to the East, towards the field where we’d hoped to find the hashpoint.

A quick survey around the outskirts of the area suggested that it was, indeed, in what had once been an active pasture but had been abandoned and disused for many years. The grass and brambles grew high and were caked in snow, but we hopped the gate and pressed on for the final hundred metres.

GPSr showing 106m, snowy overgrown field ahead. — Very close…!

We made the right choice: the hashpoint was just barely inside the disused old field, and we were able to get to it with only slightly wet feet and without disturbance (except for some kind of nesting bird that was unhappy to see us, and some kind of medium-sized mammal – possibly a fox – that ran away as we approached).

We reached the hashpoint at 11:24.

Dan and his mum grinning. — Obligatory silly grins.

Flushed with success at this relatively easy victory, we continued our walk to a nearby dairy to see if they’d sell us some cheese (their farm shop was shut), and then crossed the river and climbed the nearby hill to find the fantastic geocache at Pallas Castle.

Pellas Castle. — The castle was a wonderful diversion on our way back.

Circling around from the hilltop to return to the car, we drove back home, completing our expedition (hashpoint, cache, and all) in a little under 7 hours.

Tracklog

Download tracklog.

Dan Q found GCAA274 Garrigues #23 – El Vilosell

This checkin to GCAA274 Garrigues #23 - El Vilosell reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The geokids and I are staying nearby and came out for a walk this morning to discover this under-appreciated cache. What an amazing location and such a great view! We searched many “obvious” locations without luck, then translated some logs to get a clue. We should have checked the attributes! A little danger later and the cache was in hand. SL, TFTC/GPC! FP awarded – thanks so much for bringing us here. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!

Dan Q found GC6TKBN MALIP – Monument a les il·lusions perdudes

This checkin to GC6TKBN MALIP - Monument a les il·lusions perdudes reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

After failing to find this yesterday, I came back earlier this morning for another go. Thanks to the hint, I was pretty confident I’d been looking in the right place, and a message from the CO helped confirm this (gracias!).

There are, in my mind, two significant challenges to this cache:

1. It’s a challenging and unusual hiding place and you will need to use the hint. I see from previous logs that some people used the hint… and still got stuck! Got to look around and see what it could mean. This bit… I got right. In fact, I touched the cache yesterday but just didn’t know it for sure!

2. It’s a busy area in which searching for a geocache… looks a bit suspicious! I came at almost 08:00 yesterday and, probably because it was a weekday, the area had lots of muggles. I felt self-conscious hunting for the cache and that made it harder. Coming back today an hour earlier made all the difference.

A really sneaky cache good enough to hunt for twice. TFTC/GPC. FP awarded. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK.