Sometimes odd things pop into my mind. Mostly in that twilight state, craving sleep but needing to stay awake. Those I remember, I write down, a habit formed after many years of snatching sleep between caring for an ill parent. They're not all pleas...
Some of you asked about this weird thing the boys and I do, so I will give you a brief rundown on what it is like, geocaching downunder. https://www.geocaching.com is the official website.
They call it the world's largest treasure hunt and in a way it is. Simple. You join for free or upgrade for a very small annual fee to 'premium' which gives you access to premium sites, these often being bigger/better or more challenging caches.
Okay. You check the map on the app and see what's around you. There could be any mumber of hidden caches, one could even be next door. The concept is two-fold, you have people who hide caches and then leave a set of coordinates and you have people who find these caches, based on these coordinates. Sometimes there are cryptic clues; sometimes you must solve a series of them to get to the final, big cache.
It gets funny. We were at the strip of park dividing the Primary School from the beach opposite. The road was divided by this strip of green, which had a few large trees, some flagpoles and a memorial to WWII. The 'cache' was supposed to be right there. I had four boys with me. They had the coordinates on their phones. The cache was 'micro' meaning small. Really small. We must have looked odd, holding the phones up, counting paces, walking around trees and poles, arguing about distances and directions. Traffic was going up and down the busy road and we were tooted at, and stuff was yelled out of car windows. Never found that one, despite going back there and enduring the same embarrassment several times...
Then there are some which are very clever indeed, People go to a lot of work to 'hide' these caches, often in plain sight.
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This twisted and rusted bit of wire was a plug, and once you pulled it out, there was a small plastic tube inside, where you recorded your name and the day you 'found' it.
Sometimes you had to do weird things. Like climb the side of the freeway overpass and yeah, try reach a crack in the concrete!
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But some! You would find yourself deep in the forest, butterflies flittering around, kookaburras cackling, and no trail - 'bush bashing' as we called it, scrambling over fallen trees and crashing your way through waist-high vegetation... One time it was just Dylan and I and we got caught in thin trailin gvines which grabbed on to your clothing and - well you couldn't move! The had these tiny raised hair-like thorns and we had to fight to free each other from their grasp - at one point we just stood and laughed because we were both covered in these vines and were trying to reach out and untangle each other. The cache, when we eventually reached it was spectacular! A big toadstool 'house' filled with all sorts of 'goodies' from around the world! The etiquette is if you take something, you must leave something behind see, so the cache always has 'treasure' in it, if it is of the larger variety.
