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Found

1st cache of the year

I got out to do some real caching today – although almost all of them were urban, it is another 7 more cache finds. I’ve not got out to do any for ages so I really enjoyed these ones. 2 caches I couldn’t find – i suspect they’ve been muggled. I’m waiting for a response from the owners to confirm that the cache is there still.

Jeff’s #2

Plook asked if I wanted to join him and some others in going to do encrypted cache and Jeff’s #2. The answer was yes of course, so we headed on down there this afternoon. Had a good time finding the cache which was easy to find when you know what you are doing. I’m glad I had confirmed my coordinates though – a 136′ error (which I had initially) would not have helped in finding the cache.

Here’s the Beef finally found

Finally managed to solve Heres the Beef. This puzzle cache has taken forever to solve (almost a month) and it was only when i saw a new alteration to the cache page that it confirmed I was on the right lines to solving it and it actually sped the solution up. I went and found it in some nice woods this morning and was relieved that noone else had got there first. The annoying thing is that I was *this* close to solving the puzzle yesterday afternoon but was really struggling with the placement of numbers. A good puzzle but I don’t think the rest of Dublin are up to this standard of hiding puzzles yet as only one person has found mine and I’m the first to find this cache.

Google maps of found caches

With a bit of help from the gpsbabel mailing list, I’ve now been able to work out how to use the google maps api and the main page of this blog now shows all the caches that I have done around my home. As I find more and more caches then I’ll have to start the page zoomed out a bit more 🙂

Feed script fixed

Updated the latest found script this morning after I noticed it wasn’t working. The weird thing is that it was breaking on a temporarily disabled cache which had the <strike> tags around it. By removing the strikes and changing it to “temporarily disabled” the script now worked (but the temporarily disabled cache does not appear on the list as I only display the last 10!)

Friday finds.

I woke up early on Friday, checked the geocaching website and there was a new cache near me – Well,Well,Well which had not been found. A quick load of the gpx onto the pocketpc, the coordinates punched into the gps and I jumped into the car to go find it. I think it took me longer to find the carparking space that it did to find the cache. It was well (haha) hidden but I eventually found it. Opening the lid, there were quite a few goodies, probably freebies from reps of people visiting the hider but I didn’t mind and came away with a nice First To Find prize of a pen. Nice and heavy with a blue neon type light if you push the pen top.
I also managed, at my third attempt, to find Jeff’s puzzle #1. This cache had plagued me for a while as I just could not find it. My streets and trips drawings gave me about 4 different places to search and when I was on the ground, there were loads of places a cache could be hidden. On my second visit I used the projection capabilities of the gps and was confused to see that one of the points was about 5 miles away from where I was standing. I went back home, ran some more projections in the gps and plotted them onto street and trips, and again came up with two points 5.6 miles apart….hmmmmm.
After a tipoff I used a palm emulator to solve the problem and with some coordinates that now matched from both sets of projections I went back to the site on Friday evening and found the cache.
So Friday was a good day – but now I have 1 temporarily archived cache and 4 multi’s in my nearest 10 unfound. So the next lot of caches will take slightly longer to do.