Woodbury’s Inn

Woodbury’s Inn (GCRVE2) is a geocache by Shifter Brains located at a historic site located just to the west of Wyong township. The plaque on the monument here provides an excellent description of what Woodbury’s Inn was – the monument itself being located in the middle of the foundations of what little remains of this building.

It’s a popular park on weekends – it seems to be a popular picnic place, as well as a convenient meeting place for groups before they set off on adventures and tours in the nearby forest or country side. For this reason, it can be hard to get this park all to yourself. This was in fact the fourth time we had driven past here – every other time, the park being busy with muggles.

This micro-cache took a bit of hunting to find. We’d already looked in the right spot, but obviously just not hard enough. Then we looked elsewhere, but ended up back at the first place we searched – this time searching a little harder and prodding a little deeper, and at another angle.

Braving the spider webs, I got my fingers rattling on something that felt like it could be something unusual. The issue then was getting the damned thing out. I wiggled it and wriggled it, and poked it and prodded it. Finally I got it at the right angle to come out of its very well concealed place.

Signed the log, and returned the cache. So pleased with ourselves, that we totally forgot to take a photo to commemorate the find – so you’ll just have to use your imagination – picture a stuffed toy dog, sitting in a park having a picnic, and you’ll get the idea.

Thanks again Shifter Brians for another of your clever caches.

F3 Futility – Pie in the Sky

TeamWolfie was hungry – and there’s no better place to feed two hungry geocaching wolves than a famous eatery on the old Pacific Highway that serves a delicious range of pies, and they are atop a mountain with a great view, and to top off a perfect lunch – a micro cache awaits us in their car park.

F3 Futility – Pie in the Sky (GC19236) is the first of stubby holder‘s caches we have encountered – and if this is the indication of the quality and thought stubby holder puts into all his/her caches, then we are really looking forward to finding a few more of them.

Being Sunday lunchtime this place was packed. Always very popular with bikers and tourists alike, but we managed to find a parking spot on the grass fairly close to ground zero.

But first things first – let’s eat. Surprisingly, getting a seat was a relatively easy process, and we woofed down 2 pies each and washed them down with a couple of bottles of the popular Bundaberg Ginger Beer before heading back to the car to plan our hunt. Thankfully even though this is a very popular place, the cache location is away from most of the activities, although we still had to be discrete and mindful not to be spotted by muggles in our search.

GZ lead us to the fence in a fairly sparse area with limited options for a cache hide, and if it weren’t for the fact I had seen this type of cache design on an American geocaching video podcast recently, there is every possibility I would never have discovered this cache.

This was a very clever and well designed custom-made cache.  We made sure muggles could not see us take the cache, and took it over to the car where we signed the log and examined its design in amazement.

The tricky part was taking it back – with groups of people coming and going, we had to choose our timing just right. Thankfully it was small enough to conceal while carrying, so it was just a case of waiting for the right time to return it to its home, which we did soon enough.

Smile for the muggles, Wolfie!

Not so lucky were we when we were taking a our trademark Wolfie picture of our dog (above). While I was taking this shot I didn’t realise a car load of muggles turned up and one of the older men in the car was pointing and laughing at me, obviously bemused by the fact that a grown man was taking a photograph of a stuffed dog.

Well, I guess the dog distracts attention away from the cache itself – and that’s the important thing in these cases. He’s our dog – and we love him.

Thanks again stubby holder for a fantastic cache.

The Buck Stops Here

A couple more kilometres further up the road from FeO is our next attempted find – a geocache by COD called The Buck Stops Here (GCPM2Q). We’d hoped this would be a quick-and-easy find, and by some accounts in the logs it seemed quick-and-easy for some.

Being mindful of it being in a residential area, the roadway is getting busier, and being parked in a no-parking zone we didn’t want to spend too long here. To make matters worse, during our seeking a taxi pulled up to drop off someone at the house directly at the cache location.

Sadly, we left without a find this time. Given this cache is a 3.5 difficulty-rating, we can take some consolation this was not meant to be an “easy” find! We’ll probably return soon to give the area another going-over.