GCXXC8 – Mooney Views

On the way home from Hawkesbury River we literally had to drive over and under two caches which we had previously recorded as DNF (Did Not Find), being Mooney Views, and Mooney Valley Micro.

You see, the F3 Freeway literally goes over the top of Mooney Valley Micro, and underneath Mooney Views. Neither is accessible directly from the freeway, but rather you need to take the Old Pacific Highway to get to these two locations. Furthermore, the Old Highway is presently not a through road due to a landslip near the Gosford end, so some backtracking is required. 

We went to the northernmost point first – being Mooney Views. 

Rather than being so freaked out by the view we took a more systematic, dare I say, dogmatic approach – and took our time to carefully read the clues and hints. This approach paid off and TeamWolfie was soon rummaging around the contents of this small-but-fun cache. We were quite amazed at the variety and quality of swappable items in this cache.

We liked it so much, this is where we left the Travel Bug, previously retrieved from Creek Shrub.

Bye Bye Travel Bug

This Travel Bug has come a long way from Germany, so we’re really hoping someone will collect it from Mooney Views soon and send it further along to another exotic location.

It was great to finally get this cache knocked over.

TeamWolfie’s First Trackable

TeamWolfie discovered a Travel Bug while examining the contents of the Creek Shrub cache. A Travel Bug is one of two main types of trackable items used in Geocaching. The other is a Geo Coin.

Travel Bugs look a little like a dog tag, they have a unique tracking number on them, and participants in Geocaching are encouraged to pick up and move these around from site to site – and most importantly, log these movements on the geocaching.com website.

The Travel Bug we took from the cache today was a special Unite for Diabetes bug.

Wolfie holds the Travel Bug, temporarily.

It’s Travel Bug etiquette not to hang onto them for too long – after all, the purpose of a Travel Bug is to travel from location to location – and for the owner of the trackable item to track it’s travels around the world on the Geocaching website. As a general rule – don’t hang onto these things for more than two weeks – or it’s bad luck. Well… maybe not bad luck – I just made that bit up.

The travels of this particular bug is quite fascinating. It started out in Germany back in December 2006.  Since then it traveled to several locations around Germany, then in July 2007 hopped its way to Malaysia where it visited several locations before being collected and brought to NSW Australia where it has been hopping around ever since.

TeamWolfie is planning to place this bug in an interesting new home where it can continue it’s travels. We’ll keep you updated here as soon as that happens.