March month has passed and I thought I'd take a look at how the month went by in terms of Geocaching. I decided that instead of publishing something every time I go find something cool I'd rather compile it all into a larger post at the end of the month. I'll probably still be making separate posts about it every now and then.
What is Geocaching?
Geocaching is a real life outdoor treasure hunt. People from all around the world hide boxes and containers tied to a set of GPS coordinates. These are called caches. Other people then go to these coordinates and find the caches, sign the logbook and put it back. There's millions of caches hidden all around the world. It's a great activity to get you going outside, discovering new places and being active. I've written a more in depth explanation in this post.
Geocaching
March Madness
March marks the first month for us this year where we're out and finding new caches, not counting two random finds in January. The weather is getting warmer and nicer, and the snow has finally gone for good I hope. That means it's time to get out there and do some exploring!
In total we found 26 caches in March. That's our second to best month ever, with June 2020 being the best where we found 50 caches in total. We spent most of our time chasing down caches that had eluded us in the past. Either because we simply were inexperienced and couldn't find them or perhaps we gave it up because there was to many people around.
We also had a focus on getting more urban caches this month. Due to Covid doing it's thing the city centre isn't as lively as it usually is so we decided to chase down quite a few from the city core. More than half of this months finds are from the city. City caches usually require a lot of timing and patience since ideally you don't want people seeing you snoop around behind signs and between rocks. Hiding bags and boxes in holes in the walls could look suspicious to random passerbys.
Nonetheless we found a lot of them and were able to get a ton of smiley faces in the city! Finally! There's still a lot of work to be done but before March started there were only a couple of smileys to be seen.
Wonders of the World
Every now and then there's global events going on. There's currently one that's been going since November last year called the Wonders of the World. It doesn't really add any diversity to the whole activity but there is a chance that each cache may contain a virtual stamp. Each stamp corresponds to a, you might have guessed it, Wonder of the World.
In the events first stage before the new year we were collecting the Modern Wonders of the World, seven in total. Then we moved on to the Classical Old Wonders of the World. Now for the third and fourth stages that started this year we're collecting the Natural Wonders and the Solar System Wonders.
We managed to get all seven Natural Wonders as well as get started on two of the Solar System Wonders. Some are quite rare and you might have to target them to check them off. We did that when missing only the last Natural Wonder. You can filter out which caches has each stamp so we went for it. We didn't want to "waste" finds for the next stage of the event, seeing as the Solar System Wonders are even more rare than the Natural Wonders. That's the thing with Geocaching. If you find a cache it's found forever. You need to find an actual new cache in a new location if you want to find more stamps.
Totaling up
With the finds from March that brings me up to a total of 157 Geocaches found! My girlfriend has a couple less. That's not entirely bad seeing as we started this hobby last June. Due to not having a license or a car we have to chase down all of them by foot. If we had a car the number would probably have been double as big if not more.
Now that we're moving into April the weather is getting even warmer so there's no excuse to not get out and get looking. Who knows, maybe we'll be breaking records this month. Time will show.
The Gallery
We took a lot of pictures on our trips this month so I'll be ending the post with a gallery. This way you can get to experience our fine city as well! Enjoy.
All pictures in this post are taken and owned by me and my girlfriend.