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