Geocaching Milestone: 250 Finds

Today we, the Brownburys, reached a very special milestone. We have reached the 250 finds stage! This is unlikely to induce anyone into fits of jealousy and some may scoff, but to us it's something that's important for many reasons.



We began geocaching in December 2008 after reading an article about it in the Country Walking magazine and managed to find the first few without a GPS (which seems to be the way with most of us cachers). We quickly bought a Garmin eTrex Vista HCx GPS and used the 10% off code from Garmin towards buying a decent map for it and haven't looked back.

Over our time, so far, we've managed to pick up a couple of souvenirs, the most recent being the Leap Day 2012 souvenir. To be honest, we picked up the International Geocaching Day souvenir completely by accident, as we just happened to be caching on that particular day on our way to the churchyard project. They're nice little additions, which help add additional enjoyment to our little sport. Something else that adds enjoyment are trackables, of which we've found 20 and really like bringing up their travels on Google map. From some that are just beginning their adventure, to those that are more well travelled than us, they all have a special meaning to someone and a good story to tell!

It's only in the past week that we've been able to get at least one of each major type of Geocache, with the Letterbox Hybrid being found at Vaals and the Webcam Cache completed with a massive thanks to twigletcaz. If it wasn't for twigletcaz, we wouldn't have reached 250 today, but I'm glad we did and it was nice to reach this stage with family. My favorites, I must say, are Earthcaches and I try to look for them in every place that we visit so I can advance my level on the Earthcache Master series (we now have to place an Earthcache to become silver Earthcache Masters!).

It's fair to say that we haven't been constant with our finds. Sometimes caching falls out of favour for whatever reason. Although I'm really happy to say that recently, even though I've not been on top form, Mrs. Brownbury has been ace and wonderful in finding us caches that we can do that are close to the car and have low difficultly ratings. As you can see on the graph, the majority of our logged caches have been within the last year, with especially those from last year being traditional caches that have been in a series of sometimes 20 caches within 4/5 miles! Those were great days.

We've had great fun caching with family and friends, some muggles and some cachers, some human and some overexcitable, lovely, but rather crazy, canine cachers. It's fair to say that Geocaching has taken us places that we wouldn't have gone, introduced us to people we wouldn't have met, and provided experiences that we wouldn't have had. It's the ultimate 3D gaming experience and the best thing is that it's out there. In the big wide fantastic world.

Join us and leave the muggle world behind...