Like the majority of Geocachers, after a few finds you start to think about places that you know that may benefit from a cache or two. From relatively early on I knew of a lovely spot locally that would be ideal and started to think about doing something about it.  

For a long time I pondered over placing just two hides in my two favourite spots. Mr Muddy however likes a series and the opportunity to find a few more. My location lends itself well to a loop but whilst one half of it is rather lovely, the remaining half is not quite so inspiring. 

I struggled for ages over the decision of quality v quantity. In the end I surprised myself and actually compromised for once and so Lofty’s Loop was created.

I’d recently dragged my Brother out on a walk around the area, scouting out potential hiding places and taking tentative GPS readings. An amusing walk as my office dwelling sibling learnt all about leaving the health and safety manual at home. One obvious hide had him exclaiming ‘But they might fall in the river!’

Well they might if they are an idiot. 😉

Historically he has taken great amusement from the fact I spend my time looking for hidden objects in unusual places, but I’m slowly wearing him down. 

He’s a marked man – I will make a cacher of him!

With my area scoped and ideas forming It really was time to actually do something about it. The ideal time arose with the household on Chicken pox lockdown. Whilst team Muddy rested, recuperated and got excellent value out of my Netflix subscription, I was busy trawling Amazon and eBay for containers, embellishments and inspiration. 

The next few days saw the postman working hard for his wages as my packages arrived and I got down to the task of cache construction. much fun and a whole lot of trial and error, experimenting with adhesives and containers.

All of my caches are intended to be easy finds, a short trail that children can easily be involved in. A variety of containers each with their own individual twist.

 

 

 With the caches made it was time to hide them, a final circuit of the loop putting the caches into place and taking a final reading of coordinates. In total I took five samples. On two devices.

 I was terrified of listing dodgy coordinates.

  

All in place it was time to finally list them on geocaching.com so that others would know where to find them. 

A time consuming job.  

Then to wait for the reviewer to pass judgement. Please don’t say no.

On Sunday I went out for an early morning training walk with a friend. As we finished our walk my phone pinged with the notification that a new cache had been published. 

Eek! The reviewer was at work.

An hour or so later, still nothing, I kept expecting to find that I needed to improve or change my listings. 

Then suddenly the continuous rattle of my phone that can only mean a series is being published. My little series being published. 

Now I was really nervous.

We all hedged our bets on who would be going for the glory of First to Find.

It felt like forever for the first email to come in. 

The thrill that somebody had found it, the relief that my coordinates couldn’t  be that bad! The surprise that none of us had correctly guessed who the FTF would go to and then the disbelief that the cacher was writing ‘Yeah baby’ logs as they went, clearly thrilled they were first. 

I’d hoped for a little more than that given the time and money invested.

Who even says ‘Yeah baby!’?

Thankfully the logs improved as they progressed round and I was pleased as punch when they commented they were enjoying the walk. 

That for me is what matters. Phew!

 

 

 Then things started to get a little more interesting, another cacher had joined in the fun. Working in reverse order to grab the remaining FTFs. 

The sneaky strategy paid off, gave us lots of amusement and some great logs too. 

Being a cache owner is rather cool, just as exciting being found as it is to be finding.