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