The Road Not Taken

Our second find for the day in the Kincumber Recreation Reserve, The Road Not Taken (GC17JYD) by Super Snoop is the logical one to do while making your way out to (or back from) Trafalgar Square.

Located along the Sid Pulsford Trail, this small-sized geocache is an easy and relatively-flat 10 minute walk from the main car park. When we got to ground zero, finding the cache in it’s clever little well-hidden nest only took a few minutes of sniffing around.

Wolfie sniffing out The Road Not Taken

After signing the log book we left a clear blue stone and took a cute little star. You can think you’re all alone out here, especially early on a Saturday morning, however while we were signing the log and doing the swaps a power-walking muggle appeared from nowhere coming from the opposite direction, but went off in a different direction. Thankfully she didn’t see us!

We carefully replaced the cache in it’s well-covered nest. Thanks for a great find Super Snoop.

Whitehall

Whitehall (GCYBT5) is another in cphoenix‘s series of Monopoly-themed geocaches – each cache find representing a square on a standard Monopoly game board. Whitehall is one of the Purple squares on the English version of the game.

It’s located in the Kincumber Recreation Reserve – along with several other caches, so we decided to spend a morning there finding as many of these as we could. Turned out to be a great morning where TeamWolfie got some much needed exercise after two days of Christmas feasting.

The search for Whitehall takes you about 600m in a southerly direction from the main picnic areas at the Kincumber reserve, to a pleasant rocky outlook with sweeping views across the village of Kincumber below, and far beyond.

Wolfie lands on Whitehall. $10 Rent owed!

We found this cache fairly quickly – making it our official 50th cache find, and puts yet another of the Monopoly series under our belt!  We left behind a Soldier and took a Sheeps Head (not a real one).

This was a great little small sized cache in a very pleasant location, with lots of unusual trees and great views. Thanks for giving us an excuse to come here. Another great find.

A Swell Place

It was by shear accident we stumbled upon this geocache whilst out on a Boxing day drive around the local area. TeamWolfie had been sitting at home, full of Christmas cheer – when it was decided to get out of the house to see what the locals are up to. We’d deliberately decided NOT to go geocaching today – this was to be a simple relaxing drive. No pressure, no maps, no plans.

Our drive took us over toward busy Terrigal, then up to the more quiet Forrester’s Beach where we decided to check the headland with the communications tower on top. After driving as far as the road would take us, we turned the car and headed back down the hill when something on the screen of my GPSr caught my attention. There was a waypoint on my in-car GPSr navigator right near our current location – indicating a cache was nearby up on the headland.

A use Mio Digiwalker C510 for my in-car navigator – I bought this long before I knew anything about geocaching. These days my Mio is used for in-car and out-of-car activites. I find it to be very accurate when hunting for those caches in places where the iPhone lets me down. I have all the cache waypoints within a 20km radius of home loaded into the Mio which saves a lot of manual typing of coordinates. My “Points of Interest” (waypoints) are categorised, and I leave my Mio set up so the only waypoints normally visible on screen are geocache locations.

The Mio simply shows us the location, and the cache name “A Swell Place”.  Time to get out the iPhone and log into the geocaching app to get some more information… A Swell Place (GCHPZZ) by GeoMonkeys, Diffficulty: 2, Terrain: 2, Size: small.  We read the description, and recent logs, and had a quick glance at the hint before heading off up the track to get our find.

To get to the cache we parked in a nearby handy little parking bay, and walk up the track to the communications tower, and beyond. The views were spectacular to say the least.

A Swell Place, with Swell Views

Turned out to be a fairly easy find. I’m so glad we got out of the car and walked up to the top to take in the spectacular views. We’d left our normal geocaching backpack at home – so we had no swaps with us. Even Wolfie, our trademark dog who loves having his picture taken at almost every cache we visit was resting at home this afternoon, guarding the Christmas presents!

It was a great accidental find, our 49th find in fact, and shows again what a handy tool the iPhone can be for those “unexpected” finds. Fantastic to stumble upon this great location. We signed the logbook, took nothing, left nothing. We’ll be back one day soon to explore more of the Coast Walk track when our stomaches aren’t so bloated from Christmas feasting. 

Thanks for the cache!