Central

A special little project for me was Central. This is my place of employment, as a train driver for CityRail.

It just so happened this week I was working on very early morning standby shifts – these are shifts where you have to be on-call just in case they need you (e.g. if another driver doesn’t show up for whatever reason). I had a midnight start – so it was the graveyard shift…. and an ideal muggle-free time to go looking for the elusive Central geocache.

I ventured out to GZ about 1:30am for a look.  Taking into consideration the GZ, the clues, the comments left by other cachers – I was fairly confident I knew exactly where this urban micro cache would be hiding.

Sadly – no luck.

A work colleague turned up a few hours later and we both had another look together at 4:30am.  Again, no luck. But something good came out of this – my work colleague is now into Geocaching and later that day he located his first cache close to his home!

Ancient Artifacts

Caching isn’t all fun and games. It can be dangerous, muddy, dirty, and … bloody.

It started when we thought we’d seek out the Ancient Artifacts cache in Rumbalara Reserve.  It was all going pretty smoothly – sure it was a long walk down a steep pathway and lots of stairs into a somewhat wet and boggy lush valley.

We found what we considered to be the “artifacts”, but no cache. It was frustrating. We’d just had two successful finds – surely this one would not beat us. Well, after about 45 mins of searching, and turning over stones and rocks – we came up with nothing.

It was a long walk back to the car. Along the way Guy noticed two leaches literally squirming their way through the fabric of his runners – making a quick path to his feet for a feed of blood. We were able to get them out of his shoes in time, but were amazed at their tenacity and strength.

I was wearing sturdy boots, so I figured I was safe – and surely I would notice if I had any leaches drinking my succulent blood.  So… we left, went and got some lunch, came back home – and I kicked off my boots. After about 10 minutes of sitting around in the lounge room I noticed something running down my leg – it was blood!

They got me!  I went to the bathroom to discover both my legs were bleeeding. It was a real mess. We located a leach in the dirty washing – it had crawled out of my sock.  My socks were also blood stained.

So let this be a warning for others seeking to find Gosford’s Ancient Artefacts cache!

Go Ask Charles

After securing our first find late yesterday (Dragon’s Lair), it was time to try our luck with some more Geocaching. We thought we’d start with a Multi-Cache that’s close to home.

A multi-cache is a type of hunt where you a guided to one location to obtain some clues, to then go to a second location – from there either getting more clues or finding the cache. Go Ask Charles is such a multi-cache, and is close to home too. It is in fact, our “closest” cache officially, but not closest to get to given the geography of the area.

Charles was pretty helpful, in providing us the clues to get to the next part of the multi, which we solved quite readily and were now heading in the right direction to the location of the cache.

Sadly, on this day the cache was not to be found. We still have lessons to learn about finding caches.