Challenge trip One.

Alright, so yesterday I was planning on starting soft, just two caches close to where I go to class on tuesdays. Yeah, that didn't work out.
Instead I ended up with nine finds, one DNF and, even if it has nothing to do with caching, delicious sushi for dinner afterwards.
Autumn has truly hit Oslo, so windy, wet and cold was the weather keeping me company that day.

I did a lot of backtracks and unnecessary turns, but without a map that stuff happens. It just got me more excerscise, which is great for the point I'm trying to make by doing this.
So, let me throw some numbers to you:

Total walking distance (from the second I started towards the first cache, until last find): 7.5km.

Number of steps taken according to stepcounter: 8663.
Number of finds: 9.
Number of DNF's: 1.
Ascent: 332m.
Descent: 152m.
Total time: 2 hours, 21 minutes, 45 seconds.

Something's gone wrong with my GPS, though, a lot of caches I know I put in has gone missing and everytime I tried viewing a cache description or hint it shut down on me completely.
Safe to say I won't be caching until I figure out what's wrong and how to fix it, but with seven more caches than planned, I'm ahead of schedule, so YAY!

Geocaching - Makes you realize you really need to buy a raincoat.
ThatDamnCat

Who dares to dare me?

Just a short notice on what will be going on for the next two weeks;
My shrink told me today that I have to stop hating sports and start working out. I, of course, told her that Geocaching can totally be counted as a "sport" and the walks between them is excerscise-ish.
She wanted me to prove it and dared me to find 20 caches until next meeting.
Naturally I have decided to not only get twenty, but pass it as much as I can. I am 22 finds away from my 500th, so that is an obvious goal as well.
In short; for the next two weeks I will be fighting the norwegian autumn, no matter how wet or cold, for geocaching. Just to prove a point.
Awesome.

Challenge Accepted!

Geocaching - Because I can.

ThatDamnCat

Birdhouse cache box.

Since I live in an apartment in the middle of the city I don't exactly have a place to build things, like birdhouses, for example. So when I find myself in Hangö, Finland with a big toolshed full of everything and more, it's hard to resist the urge of playing around a bit. 

With that, I present to you, my first Birdhouse Geocache:  

Here it is, in all it's uneven glory.

To many of you, this is a fairly common cache-find, to others it might be completely new.  I've encountered three kinds of birdhouse caches so far. Seing how I have 435 finds, they're not "too" common, at least. 

Tadaaa, here I am! 

To get a hold of the cache, you simply pull out the stick and the bottom falls right out. Simple, isn't it?  

A birdhouse is a great way to hide caches I think, as the risks of it being muggled is reduced with about a megazillion percent.

So there you go, my third published geocache, this time in Hangö, Finland.  Grandma's Chapel Harbour Road.

Keep on 'cachin. 

ThatDamnCat

Caching in Hangö, Finland!

At this moment, right now, exactly as I am writing this... I am in Finland. *gasp**surprise* *shock*

Hangö is Finlands most southern point, an absolutely fantastic harbour town.
So of course I've gone geocaching!

These pictures were taken as I attempted to get a cache along a cliffs edge. You know how you sometimes end up climbing high as hell?  Yeah, sometimes you have to wade through water first.
After leaving our shoes on a cliff we got into the shallow water.

Uneven rocky bottom, slippery stones and lots and lots of seaweed..... 

Ever since I was a kid I've had nightmares about seaweed tangling around my feet and dragging me down into the deep, so I have therefor always been terrified of it. Irrational or not, I've avoided it as much as I can. (When I was eight years old there was so much seaweed on a cliff you had to climb to get out of the water that I almost drowned. I couldn't go near it without panicking.  After about an hour of swimming I started to lose strength and started sinking towards the bottom. That's when someone saw me and helped me up. THAT is how scared I've always been of this soft, wet and mushy stuff.

That picture up there is proof that I finally faced my fear and, despite minor panic attacks and shakingly holding Utilikiltarians hand, I feel I did an awesome job.


After we reached a certain point, it was time to start climbing:

Some parts were easy and dry, others were slippery, wet and almost completely without any steady points to put your feet or hands.  

Up and down we went, somewherer there was a cache, but the coordinates were iffy and there were tons of nooks and crannies to hide a Small container.
As I look up towards the top another head pops up, I ask if he's a cacher and he answers yes - but in finnish. I'm half finnish, but never learned the language, so I had to ask if he knew Swedish or english. Turned out he didn't, but somehow we managed to agree to looking for this cache together.
(I later found out through the GC-page and google translate that this was his first day of geocaching and  this cache became his 2nd find.)

Another ten minutes of climbing later and I found myself on a very thin ledge and, of course, that was where the cache was hidden.  I slowly balanced my way to the end, grabbed the container, got the stranger and utilikiltarian to meet me in the middle and we logged it together. Then the stranger left and Utilikiltarian and me had to backtrack to our shoes again.

The weather was awesome, the cache experience was out of the ordinary and I faced one of my fears.
Don't think I could ask for a better day than that, really.
The cache is called Varisniemi. Check it out!

Caching - Not for the faint of heart.
ThatDamnCat

My 3 seconds of fame.

I feel like such a fangirl right now. First the TB-tattoo and now my dog and I are in one of geocaching.com's official videos!  Wiiiie!
Can you find me?

Don't hide who you are.
ThatDamnCat

Summer is here!

...And with it comes some sweaty, but awesome forest geocaching!
I got sick of seeing a "404" on geocache finds, I mean, it's like being stuck in error mode (Bad joke thursday, Ba Dum TSS!). So a trip was planned together with Ellinormor and out we went.

We bled, we fell, we slipped, we got our feet stuck in swamps... You know, like it's supposed to be.
We had planned to take a series of 13 caches called "Tur i Skogen" (Walk in the forest), but after four hours in the blazing heat (Norway decided to skip spring and go from freezing winter to summer-hell. Yeah... I'm not a fan of super warm weather...) we had gotten a hold of 11 caches, one not being part of the series, but more of a... "Oh look what I stumbled across"-type of thing. We agreed that it was enough for the day and started finding our way back.

Oh, and for the first time of my geocaching-in-Norway history we arrived to the area by car!  Okey, so to me it's a big deal, so let me have this one. I always take public transport, having to plan my trips carefully, memorize bus and subway switches and... Let's face it, it wrecks the fun a bit.

One of the awesome things with this walk was that ALL caches were regular sized, something you don't see too often, at least not here in Oslo... Or in Stockholm...  And yes, my face goes bright red at the smallest hint of exercising, but I'll give you this one. Look, a cache!

Oh, while stumbling along one of the few paths we managed to find we bumped into this rebel of a tree which had ibvously gotten sick of the tree-type conformity and decided to grow horizontally instead.
(This is also the first full body picture of me taken in years. Just sayin'.)

So! If you find yourselves in Oslo, Norway and want to get out of the city centre, then this is a great place to visit.

A newly broke geocacher usually has a good GPS.
ThatDamnCat

400th adventure.

This will be the first post without a single geocache in the photo, but I did grab seven of them, passing my 400th find. But what I want to share this time is an adventure me and my favourite englishman found ourselves in on a sunny day in a Norwegian forest.
 I love geocaching in Norway, you are always less than 30 minutes away from beautiful nature, no matter where you start off.

It started with a sunny, fantastic day, perfect for a forest hike.  The birds were singing, the lake was glistening... And the gun shooting range on the other side caused echoes bouncing off the trees.

We went upp and down, climbing, laughing, balancing and sliding. The bridge-like thing in the background freaked me out, so while the englishman walked over it without any trouble, I stumbled around on the rocks next to it, claiming "Please, I'm not scared of no sticks, I just want to take the tricky way!" (Yeah, very convincing....)

Suddenly we find ourselves stuck between a rock and a hard place.  And yes, of course there was a geocache in the furthest back. It was hard not thinking of the wonders of nature when stumbling over beautiful areas like this.

As we kept walking everything became more beautiful and we stumbled across a trickling little water fall with Clean, yes, I said it, Clean water. It tasted delicious. At one point I ended up dancing around underneath it as well, which thankfully, there's no pictures of.

After a while we discover that we're facing a mountain which supposedly has a geocache at the top. Naturally, we arrive from the "wrong side", but thinking it couldn't be That far, we began climbing the steepest and most difficult area I've ever encountered. Hanging off of tree-roots, trying to stand on rocks that start rolling downhill while bouncing off of other rocks....
After about an hour we reached the point we thought was the top. Oh yeah, we were wrong, big time!
The above picture is the view from what turned out to be only half way up.
We seriously considered giving up and going back down - for about three seconds. Looking where we had come up, we realized fast that there was no chance of us getting down alive, so our only choice was to keep climbing. Typical, eh?

We did get to the top, eventually and finally.  The view and 30 minutes of breathing made it easy to forget the horrific experience. 

This became the last photo taken, and might as well. Trying to descend from the other side we got completely lost, I almost ended up getting bit by the only venomous snake in the frikkin' country, we accidentally got a wee bit too close to the shooting range and in the end we found ourselves in the middle of nowhere, among barnyards, cows, tractors and fields.

As I am writing this you realize that I survived, which is awesome. 

But overall, it was a pretty awesome day. I passed my 400th find and learned that when faced with danger, i have some kick ass reflexes for a chubby chick, haha. 

Geocaching to escape from reality.

ThatDamnCat

Too stubborn to admit defeat.

If you are a geocacher I'm sure you've encountered a cache or two that just does not want to be found. You know, the kind that no matter how long you spend looking for it it just refuses to show up. So you declare that it has clearly been muggled. I mean, c'mon, finding these things is a talent we have down fo sho! (Sorry for the type of writing style, I'm having a fever and choose to blame it for any insanity I spew out today). But when you log onto the page to give out your expertise on how this obviously needs replacement, you discover someone has found it AFTER you were there yourself.  The tip of it all is a "Easy find, my 3 year-old found it from a kilometer away".
... Alright, so not exactly like that, but you know what I mean. It is sure to put your ego down a notch.

I´ve had many caches like this, but this one takes the price. At least i was lucky that more people than me left the location with a DNF, but it was worse for me. Yep, I said it. (Again, soooo sorry. I turn into a whiny five year old when I'm sick).
You see, this cache has for almost a year been the one closest to my home still to be found. I mean, sure if it was a mystery or something super advanced, but no. It's a frikkin Traditional and driving me bonkers. the first 6 months it was disabled, when the snow came it got impossible to get to it, but all the time in between..... Gah! It even had a spoiler-pic. SPOILER PIC! It makes it sound easy, doesn´t it?

Four Times did I go to try and find it.
Four times that I spent about an hour crawling in the mud, turning over stones and even checking if it had fallen into the nearby river.  Nothing! At one point I even lost my dog (who is lousy at geocaching, btw, so no help there). Lucky for me he's a total coward and started howling like mad when he ran into a tree. (Yeah, he really isn't very smart, that one).
I'm not the kind of person who admits defeat, in fact, I never really do. I can take a "long" break, sometimes for years, but I do not give up. (For example, my seventh grade substitute teacher is still waiting for my report on the solar system. No seriously, she found me on facebook and told me. O.o) 
I decided to do the best thing under the cicumstances, asked for CO to confirm it had not dissapeared (as I said, I wasn't the only one leaving with a DNF) and put it on my watchlist.
Imagine my surprise when after a month of silence, including from the CO, someone out of nowhere logs it as found!
That was it for me, I will NOT let this cache get the better of me, probably cause I realized I passed that point the moment I got pissed off at a complete stranger for finding something I couldn't. (Competitive, anyone?).

I packed my bag, leashed the dog and promised myself that I would Not leave the cache-area until the cache was found. Of course saying this was basically challenging any higher power, kind of like saying "It can't get any worse", and they delivered.
The rain started pouring down like mad, the forest path to the area was one giant slippery slope of mud and the river next to the GC-area was flooded.


On the good side, I didn't have to worry about muggles.

I did indeed find the cache that time, but I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry when I did. Not only did it only take ten minutes to find it (so a total search time over all being 4 hours and 5 minutes. Ugh...) but it turned out to be hidden at a place I had, in fact, checked All Four Times  without spotting it. It's not like one of those specially made containers, just a frikkin box covered in black duct tape.
That's right, I was outsmarted by Tape! (Made me feel about as intelligent as my dog).

Wet dog and a wet cat with the geocache

Speaking of nothing, those five minutes was all it took for me to be covered in mud up to my knees and elbows. I'm pretty sure the busdriver that took me home tried to telepathically send me evil threats about what he would do if I tried sitting down and make the seat all muddy.

The area was a beautiful forest path, though, even in the rain, so I gave it a favourite point and definitely recommend it to other cachers, just...
Try to take it on a dryer day, alright?
Svartdalen - eo #27

Cache like no one is watching.
ThatDamnCat