by Kevin | Oct 4, 2019
The Problem at Hand
Over the last few weeks I’ve tried some technological explorations into the presentation of geocaches in various mapping tools. Read my Memory-Map and Back to BaseCamp posts. My success in doing so has lead to a measure of confidence in such things. So I tried to do some more Garmin icons based on the work in other tools. I have a Garmin Montana 650 that I use for long days of caching.
I probably understand such things at a level well above the average geocacher right now. It seemed reasonable to investigate how to extend this work into the display on the Garmin Montana. It was slow work, but I eventually improved upon my previous attempt. It’s better, but not quite as good as I wanted.
Exploration
Not long after I got the Garmin Montana (the first one, which I ultimately lost down a drain in Letchworth) I explored changing the icons to make them more visible against the collection of fairly busy and colourful maps on the device. I was happy with the results (see Garmin Custom Icons) at that point, but a couple of things still irritated me about it.
One irritation was the inability to tell whether a puzzle (or multi, letterbox or wherigo) was solved already or not. Another was the inability to tell which caches are disabled. I regularly spend ages at a site looking for a cache before realizing it had been disabled for some time. Sometimes they are there, so I still want them on the GPSr, but I like to know when I start searching that it might not be there.
Frustration
It proved to be a very frustrating dive into some fairly dark recesses of the internet. After much pain, I eventually found a post on a forum site from a well-known London cacher. I discovered that on the Montana your options are very limited. He suggested the best thing to do, and that’s what I’ve implemented. What he confirmed was :
- Custom icons on the Montana can only be applied to waypoints, not to geocaches
- The Montana relies on a fixed relationship between cache type and icon which is embedded in the firmware somewhere, not in a configuration file – the <sym> tag in a GPX file is irrelevant because the Montana doesn’t use it
- The list of acceptable names for geocache icons is quite limited – it doesn’t cover the full range of geocache types at all, presumably because many of them are rarely available in practice
- If you provide a Montana with a cache type it doesn’t understand then it defaults to the bucket “Geocache” icon
What this means in practice is that it can’t even represent every single cache type, never mind having variations relating to status. You’ve got to get a bit creative with it. The way to implement your creativity is to amend the cache type in GSAK before downloading to the device. I guess I kind of knew this already, and had previously been using the “Benchmark” cache type to highlight solved puzzles, and the like. I’d been doing this manually, by changing attributes in GSAK one by one. Tedious, and prone to error.
Revelation
I wrote a macro for GSAK that changes the cache type as follows. The custom icons on my Montana to reflect these names. It’s very bespoke, but it does what I want, or at least the closest I’m going to get to it :
- Cache In Trash Out Event.bmp -> Indicates “owned” caches, represented by something that looks like a star in a green circle
- Event Cache.bmp -> Used for all event types (CITO, Event, Mega, Giga, GPS Maze, Community Celebration) – there’s never enough to worry what type of event each one is. I always know in advance whether I’m going or not, so having them on the GPS is not necessary really.
- Webcam Cache.bmp -> Used for Adventure Labs points. There’s so few webcams left that there’s no point in giving them their own icon.
- Traditional.bmp -> Used for traditionals and for the HQ cache.
- Geocache.bmp -> Identifies disabled and archived caches, plus random non-caches (like waymarks and benchmarks) that might creep in.
- Virtual Cache.bmp -> Used for virtuals, webcams and locationless, should one of those fall through the net.
- Mega-Event Cache.bmp -> Used to highlight caches that have corrected coordinates, represented by an icon that looks like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. I use it only for puzzles, multis, letterboxes and wherigos.
- I use all other icons to display the native cache types if they are uncorrected, active and not mine (Multi, Unknown, Letterbox, Wherigo.
- Geocache Found.bmp -> Used to display any cache that I found. I normally don’t download them, but sometimes they slip through the net. The Montana checks this before anything else, so it is always used for finds.
- The six other icons represent the child waypoint types of the same name (Trailhead, Question to Answer, Stages of a Multicache, Reference Point, Parking Area and Final Location).
Quirks
Some icons represent more than one cache type. In this case I just add the cache type onto the end of the name. It’s rarely a thing of significance, to be honest.
If Garmin ever changes the firmware to allow more of the standard geocache types or to allow a “corrected” modifier then I’ll revise this scheme, but it doesn’t seem to be high on their priority list.
Downloads
To implement this, I created yet another pack of icons (shown above), and two macros for GSAK. One macro changes the cache type in GSAK, recording the original settings into the “User Data” fields. The second macro restores the original settings from User Data so that the GSAK database is as it was previously. This is necessary because the GSAK menu option to download to a Montana doesn’t allow any configuration. I assume this is because the device won’t implement it properly.
The little bits of magenta in the icons are because the Montana translates magenta (RGB 255:0:255 or #ff00ff) into “transparent”. The icons look a little neater on the Montana than on the PC.
So to execute this method, install the pack of icons onto the \Garmin\CustomSymbols folder of the Montana’s onboard storage. Don’t put them onto any installed microSD card. In GSAK, run the SetSymbols macro, then download caches to the GPSr using the Send Waypoints option. Finally, run the RestoreSymbols macro to reset GSAK.
by Kevin | Oct 2, 2019
Having spent a week or so getting Memory-Map to display custom icons (see Memory-Map), I went back to Basecamp. Basecamp is a preferred technology for some locations. You can get good-quality, free, vector maps that can be mimicked on the GPSr.
Garmin doesn’t publish a lot of documentation about customization. They must assume that most users don’t delve deeply enough for this to be an issue. The fact that there is little internet chat supports that assertion. Most people aren’t in the game for heavy customisation. A few people are, and I’m one of those. So this post is very much in the “niche” category. I make no apology for that.
Objectives
As a geocacher, most of my dislike for Basecamp stems from the fact that there are only two on-screen symbols. They are a locked treasure chest and an open treasure chest brimming with gold. These represent an unfound cache and a found cache respectively. So by default there is no method of telling different types of cache from one-another. There is no way of indicating whether those caches are mine or someone else’s, or whether I corrected the coordinates. And finally, there is no way or highlighting disabled or archived ones. That makes the tool of limited use for planning journeys.
So my objective was to figure out how to make it more useful by being able to use custom icons to display those various status flags. Simple, really.
Planning
Garmin advises that you can use custom icons (see Garmin Support – Custom Icons). This page gives some basics about what custom icon files need to look like and where you have to put them. What it doesn’t tell you is how to use them.
I did some research and discovered that the symbol displayed by Basecamp is whatever is defined in the <sym> tag of the input GPX file. GSAK has a number of different ways of producing a GPX file, depending on what you’re intending to do. Put another way, GSAK outputs GPX files using different tags according to what the destination application wants to see. There are options for Garmin POI files, generic GPX files, Basecamp specific files, and so on. My focus was on the generic “GPX/GGZ/LOC File…” and the “Garmin MapSource/BaseCamp File…” options. You can see the dialogs that those options spawn in the pictures below.
The key points to observe on these two diagrams are :
- On the Basecamp export (right side) there’s a list of cache types and associated symbols which are placed in the output file – these can be altered by pressing the Change button
- Also on the Basecamp export you can see checkboxes labelled Override with database symbol name… and Use a macro for symbol generation – the meaning of the second one is obvious but the first caused me to go looking – there is a database field called Symbol
- On the generic export dialog (left side) you can see there’s various controls that talk about symbols, but not at the level of granularity that’s on the Basecamp specific one – experimentation showed that with the Force use of Geocache symbols only and Make symbols same as last GPS send checkboxes both off, the <sym> tag in the output takes the value of the database Symbol field
The net result of this investigation is that it’s possible to select various methods of setting the symbol to a custom value, and that they can be achieved using macros. My plan was therefore clear – draw up a map of the custom symbols I want to use, and then figure out how to implement that in a macro in GSAK.
Implementation
The steps to implement the solution turned out to be rather straightforward. There are just 3 things to do :
Firstly, configure GSAK so it knows about the custom icons. Download the configuration file, unzip it and move it to the local data folder for GSAK. In my case (on Windows 10) this is C:\Users\’Me’\AppData\Roaming\gsak where ‘Me’ is the folder for the current user. Look at the Export to MapSource dialog above. If you press the Change button you get a further dialog in which you can assign individual custom icons to each set of statuses.
We only need to do this for child waypoints, because for geocaches we’re going to use a macro to populate the database and then use the Override with database symbol method. Once you’ve installed the config file and restarted GSAK you should see the new icon numbers and names in the dropdown lists on this dialog. Go to the Child Waypoints tab and configure the six child waypoint types with custom icon numbers 58 thru 63 as per the picture below.
Secondly, set up GSAK. Download the Macro file and install it into GSAK as normal. Change your display of columns in GSAK so that you can see the Symbol field. Try running the macro – you should see the value of the Symbol field changing as you do so.
Finally, install some icons for Basecamp to use. Download the icons file and unzip the contents into the folder where Basecamp expects to find them. On my Windows 10 PC this is at C:\Users\’Me’\Documents\My Garmin\Custom Waypoint Symbols.
Conclusion
And that should, theoretically, be the end of it. Having tested it, you can now either use the generic GPX output or the Basecamp one. Both place the content of the Symbol database field into the <sym> tag of the output file, and that seems to be all that Basecamp uses. Browse to an output file through Basecamp and install it, and you should see the new icons straight away. You’ll notice also that they have been imported into Basecamp as geocaches, not waypoints, so when you double-click you’ll still get the geocache dialog.
The macro allocates custom symbols as per the rules shown in the GarminOther.txt configuration file. You are free to change these, and the icons, as you see fit. The convention for naming the icon files is 000.bmp, 001.bmp, etc. This convention automatically associates the <sym> tag “Custom 1” with the icon file 001.bmp. You can use any of the other standard Garmin icon names if you want, but you’d need to change the macro to match what you’re setting up.
Note also the specifics of how I wanted to see the icons. I’ve used little indicators in the icons to show corrected coordinates and active/disabled. Ones I own have a totally different icon style, as do ones which are archived or found.
Final Annoyance
Surely, there can be no more annoyances! There are. One stands out.
Basecamp, by default, shows a text name alongside each cache or waypoint. Whether this is displayed or not is controlled by a tag in the GPX file, but there is no way in GSAK to set that tag, as far as I can tell. It is contained within an extension to GPX that GSAK doesn’t use.
You can open each item in the cache/waypoint list and suppress display of the name by changing “Symbol and Name” to “Symbol Only”, but for some reason in Basecamp you can bring up an “Open” dialog for multiple waypoints but not for multiple caches. For caches you have to do it one-by-one, which is tedious in the extreme.
The quick way is to select all caches and waypoints and then “Export Selection” in Basecamp to produce a new GPX file. This contains the relevant tag, so you can edit it and substitute all instances of “SymbolandName” with “SymbolOnly”, save it, and import that one back into Basecamp. Bob’s yer proverbial uncle. It’s irritating that I didn’t figure out how to programme that, but it’s a fairly small irritation, and to be honest, unless you’re loading thousands of caches into Basecamp you might find the labels useful.
Show me some pictures then
Pictures below show a few examples of how this looks in Basecamp.
On the left you can see a picture of my current list of caches to do in Milton Keynes. The small cyan coloured dot on some of the icons is how I represent a puzzle, multi, letterbox or wherigo when I’ve added some corrected coordinates. You can also see a few of the trads have a white bar through them, indicating that they are temporarily disabled.
In the centre you can see what the area of my Flags of All Nations series looks like. The circular stars are “owned” caches. The red boxes with crosses are archived. I’m using the pink benchmark icon (“Benchmark” cache type in GSAK) for planning locations to replace the archived ones. The circle with star is a bit bigger than the other icons, so I might change that one.
On the right you can see a bunch of smiley-face icons with corrected coordinates. These represent a massive puzzle series I did in France in 2018 (see Val D’Oise Madness).
All of these examples are shown with Freizeitkarte maps, but obviously the icons will superimpose over whatever maps you choose to use.
by Kevin | Sep 15, 2019
After several years of trying to use Garmin’s Basecamp tool to plan the layout of caches, I finally got to wondering what else was available, and I started exploring Memory-Map (see Memory-Map). I spent a while doing it, but now I’m finished I really like it.
It’s no good without maps
The first step in any new venture into geocaching applications is to figure out what the maps are like. In Memory-Map’s case, the maps are whatever you buy. You can get a free trial for the UK Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 scale maps. These look much like the OS Explorer “Orange Top” printed maps. I guess the printed maps are just a rendering on paper of the electronic versions. Anyway, these electronic maps have the problem that they are raster maps so they get blurry at fine detail. At the sort of scale you need for planning a geocaching trip (which is wanting to see between 2 and 10 km of map across the width of your screen) the resolution is fine and the maps look lovely.
When your trial period runs out they will sting you for about £100 for the full Great Britain mapping. That’s cheaper than buying the whole country for Garmin Basecamp though, despite being the same thing. They look nice, as you can see in the samples below.
This leads me quite naturally into a discussion about the main weakness of using Memory-Map though. They don’t sell up-to-date maps for very many places apart from Great Britain (the 1:25,000 OS Explorer maps), France (the IGN 1:25,000 map) and the USA (DeLorme 1:24,000 topo maps). There’s a bunch of free ones for much of the world but they aren’t detailed enough for planning caching trips. Coverage of the world seems patchy. I also failed to find any reasonable way of making Memory-Map compatible maps from other inputs like Freizeitkarte. That’s not to say you can’t do it, it’s just to say I’ve not had the patience to do it.
You need some geocaches too
So, moving on, the second thing you need to make a decent geocaching planning tool is a way of uploading shed-loads of geocaches onto the map. In this case I wasn’t quite sure where to go until I stumbled across some documentation on Google about a macro written for GSAK. I use GSAK a lot. The macro outputs content for Memory-Map based on caches stored in GSAK. It was written by rutson and is one of the standard downloadable macros from GSAK on their online macro index. I won’t explain how to get there – if you don’t use GSAK you don’t need to know, and if you do use GSAK you’ll know where it is. It’s in the online list as “rMMe” (rutson’s Memory Map export).
When I tried this the first time it was fully functional, but I had two issues with it :
- I didn’t like the way it allocated icons to cache types. Some cache types were missing and the selection criterion for various parameters like “Found”, “Archived”, “Owned” and so on didn’t seem to be complete (Yes, I have some caches that I have found and that I now own, and which have corrected coordinates. The macro wouldn’t allow all of those in one icon).
- I wasn’t particularly keen on the icons. If you’ve seen the post about Garmin Custom Icons you’ll know I like big, bold and clear colours and geometric shapes. They are easily discernible against the background of a busy map.
The way to get rid of these issues, as you would expect, was a bit time-consuming.
Cache Processing
The solution to the first of the two problems is evidently to rewrite the processing macro in GSAK to produce a different range of settings that equated to the items I wished to see. I started off with maintaining rMMe’s approach of marking caches that contain a trackable, but ultimately decided that I generally don’t plan on the basis of whether caches contain a trackable or not, so I decided to ignore that parameter. The things I thought to be important to include in the model were :
- Found Status – this takes priority over the type of cache, as it does on the Groundspeak website – if I’ve found it, I don’t care what type it was any more. Found caches are always shown as smileys.
- Cache type – Traditional, Unknown, Multi, Virtual, etc – There’s more different types than you think, so I contented myself with all the key types and then use a bucket “other” type for ones that will never occur frequently enough to be of concern (like “Project APE” and “Lost and Found Celebration”) – I chose to represent the type on the icons by using different colours and letters in a square box.
- Active Status – is it Active, Disabled or Archived? – I represent this status on the icons by adding a grey diagonal bar for Disabled and a red diagonal bar for Archived, but I didn’t bother with Disabled for a “Found” cache
- Ownership – For caches I own, I add a small green circle to the bottom right side of each icon, including on smileys. There was no need to create an “Owned” variant for some types, because I’ll never own a Virtual, a Webcam, a GPS Maze, a Mega Event or a Giga Event, for instance.
- Corrected Coordinates – for types where the cache isn’t at the given coordinates (like Unknown, Multi, Letterbox and WherIGo) I add a small cyan circle at the top right when those corrected coordinates have been added to the cache, and not when it hasn’t. This identifies which caches are available to be found and which need some work (either now or in the field). You can add corrected coordinates to any cache on the Groundspeak site, but it’s meaningless on types other than the four listed here.
More Customisation
Once I’d been through the process of deciding what different icons were needed for each cache, I also included some extra parameters which make the macro more useful for one of my purposes – blogging about historical days out. I often write blog posts well after the actual day. Sometimes that means the caches are in varying states of disrepair or are archived. I therefore included a “Show All Caches as Active” flag, which makes the macro ignore all the settings about status and just forces use of the “Active” variant of each icon. Occasionally I might like to draw a picture of all caches that someone else might see, i.e. ignoring my finds, so I added another flag to perform a “Show All Caches as Unfound” function.
You can update coordinates directly on the Groundspeak website. This isn’t great if the whole point of the trip was to create some GeoArt (see Val D’Oise Madness, for instance). In that instance the Groundspeak website displays found caches at the given coordinates, so GeoArt restores itself. To make Memory-Map do that you have to tell it to. The original coordinates are available in GSAK, but you have to choose to use those rather than the corrected ones. So, I added a “GeoArt Mode” flag, which forces use of the original rather than the corrected coordinates – see the third picture above – the one with the Mickey Mouse ears.
The original rMMe.gsk macro file already had the right structure for performing a loop over all of the displayed caches in GSAK and including an output line for them. It also had a small block for drawing the child waypoints out. This meant that all I had to do was to figure out how to change the core of the module to assign a different set of icons, and to apply the various control flags I wanted. That proved to be fairly easy once I’d read through the example a few times. The structure and meaning was quite apparent and quite simple to understand. Result!
Icons
You can use as many different icons as you can be bothered with creating and programming for. There are some limits to how you do it, but the number can be quite large. The constraints on the icons are as follows :
- They must be 32×32 pixels in size
- They must be saved as 256-color bitmaps (.BMP)
- Pure white (RGB 255.255.255) is treated by Memory-Map as a transparent layer, so if you need something white, pick a light cream colour instead. I found that RGB 255.251.240 gives a decent looking shade
I chose to edit them using MS Paint – it’s easy to use and clear enough for these very simple files. One issue is that MS Paint always allows you to edit in the full 256x256x256 RGB colour-space. It’s a bit of a lottery whether the colours you’re using are actually available in the 256 colour palette (I couldn’t find a reliable source). The way around that is to pick a colour you like, then save the file as a 256-colour file, and then reopen it. MS Paint corrects any colour you’ve used to something that’s compatible with the 256-colour palette.
Somewhere in the configuration for Memory-Map is an entry which determines which pixel in the icon is placed over coordinates. In mine, it’s set to about 16,16 and I drew icons that are about 20 pixels square in size (always at the top right of a 32×32 frame. This means that the icon is mainly to the top-left of the coordinates when you see it in Memory-Map. For caches that are directly on a public footpath that’s advantageous, because the icon mainly covers the whitespace above the path on the map rather than covering the path.
Enough with the chat, how do I use this for myself
Here are the things you need to do to set this up.
There are two downloads here. One contains the GSAK macro, the other contains all the icon and configuration files.
- Download and unpack the GSAK macro. Install it in GSAK by taking the Macros -> Run/Manage menu option and then hitting the Install button – this produces another dialog where you can browse to this macro file and upload it
- Select a database in GSAK that has some caches in it and then Run the GSAK macro for the first time. This will, amongst other things, hunt for an installed version of Memory Map and create the relevant folders for later use. It installs rutson’s original icons into the directory but doesn’t use them.
- Navigate to C:\Users\’Me’\AppData\Roaming\gsak\MemoryMap\icons (where ‘Me’ is the current user) – You should see a bunch of icons and config files. You can delete all of them if you want. rutson’s original version has his icon data embedded in the macro and I didn’t remove this.
- Download the .ZIP file with the icons in
- Unpack the icons .ZIP into C:\Users\’Me’\AppData\Roaming\gsak\MemoryMap\icons
You’ve now installed everything, so you’re good to go. The key file for this bit of configuration is header.txt – This makes the association between the icon file name and the integer number used to represent it in the Memory-Map upload.
How do I use it?
It’s quite easy. When you run the macro it brings up the dialog below. You can tell I didn’t spend much time tidying it up. I may do that at a later date. The result is that some of rutson’s original features don’t work now (as I didn’t want them).
Key areas of the dialog :
- At the top left, select the folder to put the output files into. I create them in the same folder that I keep the icons and input config files.
- Below that, you can define the name for the output file – it creates a .CSV file. You can use the last name, or the GSAK database name, or choose a custom name.
- Below this, there’s a number of checkboxes which control the outputs. The names make it fairly obvious what will happen. “Add route?” adds a simple straight-line route from one cache to the next (but as far as I can tell the means of doing this is uncontrollable). “Display Spiders?” shows original and corrected coordinates separately and draws a straight line between the two on a cache-by-cache basis. “Display All as Unfound?” and “Display All as Active?” override the GSAK status for found and active/disabled/archived statuses. “GeoArt Mode?” ignores corrected coordinates and displays caches at the original coordinates (where there’s a difference).
- On the top right is a group of controls “Links To” which I ignored and don’t use.
- Below that are three flags to control child waypoints. I removed clutter by suppressing child waypoints if they’re at the same place as a cache. You can also choose to suppress output of children for found caches or for disabled/archived ones.
Hitting the Go button on the dialog takes the selected parameters and creates an output file. It then invokes Memory-Map and uploads the created file.
Quirks
Memory-Map isn’t clever enough to figure out whether there’s already a waypoint with the same name. You’ll get duplicates if you reload the same caches. I’ve noticed this causing some strange behaviours and it certainly clutters the whole shebang. My recommendation is that you should delete all the current caches before you run the GSAK macro.
The Overlay Objects panel in Memory-Map shows the caches grouped by cache type and find status. You can double-click items in the side-panel to get the map to centre on that item.
As a final act, I also figured out what to post into the input file so that you can use Right-Click->Open File to invoke a browser with the cache details in it. It took a couple of attempts to get it right and at the moment it’s kind of hard-coded to my own PC setup. In the original macro it simply tried to post a “http://coord.info/…” string. This doesn’t work because MemoryMap doesn’t know that you use a browser to open an http link. The solution is to change that string so it begins with the full file location of the browser executable file (chrome.exe in my case) followed by “coord.info/GC…” as a parameter to the executable. Works a treat, and if your browser is already open it just starts a new tab. #jobsagoodun
Waivers and Restrictions
The downloads above are, to the best of my knowledge, free of malware. However, I take no responsibility for that. Please scan anything you download (from anywhere, not just from me).
You may make copies whenever and wherever you want. However, if you break it then you own both pieces.
There is no copyright on any of the downloadable material. If you are going to rework it, I would appreciate it if you could credit myself and rutson when you do so. You may not use this material as the basis for a commercial offering. It’s free shareware – please keep it that way.
These materials are for personal use by myself. You use them at your own risk and I don’t provide a helpdesk. I may update the features and repost occasionally. There is no warranty and I take no liability, under any circumstances.
by Kevin | Jul 21, 2019
The Sketch
A sunny Sunday afternoon in July, and I over went to Eltisley and Caxton, to the west of Cambridge for a bit of geocaching.
I’d fiddled with this year’s Groundspeak souvenir hunting exercise. They do one every year, They publish souvenirs to cachers who meet certain criteria for finds over the summer period. This year’s one includes some massive complexity in the setup. Caches were arbitrarily identified as being various parts of some crime detection game. You had to first find a policeman, or something. Next you had to find a handful of different clues and finally you had to locate five different jewels. On the previous day I didn’t really understand how it worked. I ended up making a couple of finds that didn’t contribute towards my progress. A friend told me it was best to just go out and find lots of caches, and see what happened. So that’s what I tried.
The village of Eltisley has a couple of relatively new series stretching towards Caxton. One series between the two villages was mainly over agricultural land, and the second, running east from Caxton, skirted the edge of the nearby town of Cambourne.
On with the walking
I parked up in Caxton, which meant the series formed a kind of figure-of-eight shape from where I parked. I decided to head west first mainly because it was the larger of the two loops.
It turned into a very warm day, and like a complete numpty I wasn’t carrying enough drinks. I’d got some, but only put one bottle in my bag. That was barely enough to sustain me around the first loop. This being the countryside, there’s not exactly a plethora of corner shops en route. At least I was able to pick up another bottle when I got back to the car.
By the time I started the second loop from Caxton my legs were starting to ache a bit. This part took me over a stretch of what I would call fields, but maybe more accurately scrubland. No real agriculture, as such. It took me to the edge of a new housing development in Cambourne where the builder had obviously been forced to construct a small linear park along the edge, ideal for walking dogs, screening off noise, and hiding tupperware.
A Change of Scenery
When I got back to the car it was still quite early in the afternoon. I’d sort of run out of enthusiasm for a while, so I decided to drive back towards home. On the way back I made a quick stop at Caxton Gibbet services to grab a McDonalds milkshake do a couple more caches. When I got nearer to home I elected to have a pop at a few new caches in Milton Keynes.
Pesh had planted a few new ones for his summer geocoin fair, and I hadn’t been to get them. I thought I’d be able to do them as a series of short walks, but once I started walking to the first one I concluded I’d be best off just walking around.
They were in a housing estate where parking opportunities are limited. Leaving my car in the only large car park in the village seemed best. It did make for a slightly longer walk than I could have done with. There was a cricket and jerk festival organised by the Friends of the Caribbean on one of the playing fields which involved lots of music and cooking, and also an ice cream van. I’m not sure how authentically Caribbean a 99 with flake is. After a long day out caching I wasn’t in the mood for food, even though it smelled fantastic. Maybe if I’d gone back in the evening.
The Finds
I found 79 caches on the day. Most were near Eltisley and Caxton, as shown here.
by Kevin | Jun 16, 2019
The Sketch
It felt like a good day to try to get past 1,000 total finds by ryo62. There’s some benefit in doing that. Anyone who passes that milestone gets awarded a “Congratulations” cache, which is a nice touch. At the start of the day I needed a further 79 ryo62 finds. That may sound a lot, but to be honest it’s not that many for a day in June. What better way than by sketching a rabbit’s head onto my caching map by attempting the Heidi Rose Bunny Hop series, near Bassingbourn.
When Ross sets puzzles he sets puzzles which are very doable. His real speciality is series of 50 or more caches that are packed in at near maximum density over a closed loop. And he’s working in an area where there isn’t much challenging terrain. What all that means is that it’s generally fairly easy to sustain 12 finds an hour or higher when walking his series.
Couple that with the fact that there were two new series (new to me, anyway) in close proximity which totalled 70 of the required 79, and which also take you close to a selection of Village Signs, War Memorials, Village Halls, Church Micros and his own “Congratulations” caches. I reckoned I could see more than 90 of Ross’s caches that could be done in those two loops.
On with the Bunny Hop
The first loop started in Bassingbourn, which is a village I’ve cached through several times on Ross’s other series (especially the Hatley Heart Attack). I’m fairly sure I’d had record-breaking days here, but after the 2018 journey to France, setting a new record for finds in a day has become a lot harder. This first series was the “Heidi Rose Bunny Hop” – a series of puzzles on a vaguely rabbity theme. In reality, the series is basically all straight lines.
I parked up in the leisure centre car park in the village and started the series at the official #01, which is a bit of a rarity for me. This loop notched up the first 63 finds for me, which was good.
Off to Wrestlingworth
Once I’d finished with the hopping bunnies, I set off for the way to the second loop. I grabbed a couple more random village caches on the way past before finding myself in Wrestlingworth. Well, I wasn’t actually in the village itself. Wrestlingworth is, to be honest, one of my bogey locations. There’s nowhere to park in the village that I like the look of. The roads are narrow and there’s no village hall or leisure centre that has nice off-road parking. So when I go there, I tend to park on a small lay-by just outside. Again, it’s a place I’ve been to on several previous occasions, chiefly for bits of the Hatley Heart Attack.
The walk on this occasion was quite slow and quite hard work. I’d already walked for more than six hours. My feet were struggling a bit, and this series was uphill on the way out of the village. The loop has 23 caches on it and there were another 5 in the village, which took me to a very creditable 95 total finds for the day. You can’t argue with days like that. I have to say though, that by the time I got back to the car I had most definitely had enough. I’m getting older, and I’m carrying too much weight. The result of that is that I get very stiff when I spend all day walking.
Anyway, it was a Sunday, so there was a traditional Sunday dinner with the family waiting for me at home.
The Finds
I found 95 caches in Wrestlingworth and on the Heidi Rose Bunny Hop. These are on the map below.
by Kevin | Apr 28, 2019
The Sketch
A warm Sunday afternoon and the opportunity for a bit of tupperware action. Specifically, drawing a picture of Mickey Mouse on the map near Cambridge by attempting the “Mickey’s Mystery Tour” series.
On this occasion I was accompanied by the Happy Hunter, and in our sights we had a recently released series that forms a big picture of Mickey Mouse’s head. It’s a series of fairly simple puzzles that results in a loop of caches around the village of Toft, which is a place I’ve been caching through on multiple occasions in the past (see CacheAthon Part 2, Will This Ever End ? and No More Heart Attack !). In fact, this was fourth time I’d been through here, and maybe the third time I’d parked here. Hmm! Cache Central!
On this occasion I parked down a side street on the way to the church, having stopped rather dubiously for 10 minutes in a bus stop (it was a Sunday and there weren’t any buses due) to collect the materials for a couple of multis which we assumed would be on the route. They were. In fact, they were only just outside the village.
The walking for Mickey’s Mystery Tour was fairly easy. They don’t really have any hills in Toft, and the fields were all dry, so progress was quite swift. Most of the caches were fairly easy to find, with accurate coordinates and straightforward (non-cryptic) hints.
The series forms a couple of loops – a small inner loop that we walked first, and a larger outer loop that runs all the way out to Caldecote and Comberton.
It was a good day out, but I have no way of proving that. For some reason I didn’t see fit to take my camera with me.
The Finds
Here are the 62 caches I found Mickey’s Mystery Tour.
by Kevin | Apr 14, 2019
The Sketch
It was a balmy Sunday in April and the time was right for a good-old day of cache hunting. I decided to head off to Titchmarsh, where there seemed to be two looping series with a total of over 80 caches that form a figure-of-eight shape. They were called the Titchmarsh Trackable and the Clopton Coordinate, which is a fairly typical naming convention for the owner, poshrule.
I parked up in the middle of the village, which meant I was starting at one end of the figure-of-eight. This meant I had no opportunity to duck out once I got going. The total distance to be walked was approximately a half-marathon, which is a long way when caching, however the early stages were made fairly fast by the fact that they were along a paved road. In fact, of the 83 caches I found on the day, more than 60 were alongside paved roads. That makes for relatively easy walking, especially in this area, where there aren’t many hills. In all it took me 6 1/2 hours to complete the walking parts.
There were several parts of the walk that I’d definitely been to before. It’s difficult to remember every part of every trip but there were definitely a few déjà vu moments. I’d been to some parts of this in 2015 whilst doing the Molesworth Melee and Thurning and Back series.
By the time I got back to the car in Titchmarsh I was done with walking for the day.
Driving home was easy if a bit painful due to the onset of stiffness. All in all though, it was a good day of caching. For some reason I didn’t anticipate finding anything interesting to photograph, so I didn’t take my camera.
The Finds
The 83 caches I found around Titchmarsh are shown on the map below.
by Kevin | Feb 23, 2019
What’s that all about?
We were on our annual trip to Brighton for a half-marathon event, but it’s not worth going all the way down there for a single day, so we made a weekend of it.
We drove down on Friday evening, stopping for food on the way. We’d booked ourselves again into the Premier Inn in Lewes, as we do. We came here the previous year too, and concluded that the hotel had the right balance of comfort, accessibility and proximity to central Brighton.
Saturday is parkrun day
We’d come down on Friday night so we could run a new parkrun. There are several in the area that we hadn’t done, but we opted for Hove Promenade on the basis that it begins with a letter “H” and therefore contributed to everyone’s A-Z or parkruns. We found it easy to park on the side of the main road and the weather was nice. It was sunny and quite warm despite being by the sea. The run itself is essentially a double out-and-back along the seafront. There’s a promenade that’s only about 1.3km long. So to get in a parkrun you have to go up and down twice. It was dead flat though. If we’d been adequately trained we could almost certainly have run a very fast time here.
We didn’t linger for breakfast once we’d finished though, as we’d got an appointment with a full lardy back at home base. A lazy breakfast was followed by a similarly lazy journey through the bathroom and a change of clothes into something suitable for going outdoors.
The Devil’s Dyke
The warmth and stillness of the morning continued into the afternoon and we decided we’d make use of that by going for a walk somewhere scenic. The chosen place was the rather impressive Devil’s Dyke, which is a very deep v-shaped valley on the South Downs just outside Brighton. The reason it’s such a big valley is, apparently, solifluction, or put another way, melting snow saturates the little bit of unfrozen soil on top of the frozen chalk, causing it to run off like a gloopy mess down the nearest hill. I’m sure a proper geologist would describe it differently, but I like to think I understand the principles, especially seeing as I just read them on wikipedia.
Despite the rumours, there is little actual evidence that the valley was formed by anything from the evil realms. It is a common human trait to assign responsibility to the Devil for anything that’s a bit quirky. Personally, I look at it and think to myself that if I was religiously minded, surely you would assign such beauty to your God rather than pass it off as evil. The Downs are really lovely, and this is one of the best bits I’ve been to.
A Bit of Walking
There’s a National Trust car park on the top of the hill, and it was pretty much full by the time we arrived at around midday. Shows what can happen when the sun comes out. It was really quite warm. The Gardner parking karma worked as usual, and we found ourselves in a nice parking spot from which, had we been older and more infirm, we could quite happily have sat there all afternoon enjoying the view. It’s a big hill. With steep sides.
We felt sort of obliged to go for a walk down into the Devil’s Dyke itself, so after a bit of farting about we headed off in a generally downhill direction, following a broad bridleway and stopping occasionally to grab a geocache. Most of the ones down here were multis and needed information to be collected in the field. The ones that weren’t multis were field puzzles. Some of them were field puzzles in a box which, when solved, told you where the real box was. So the caching was a bit slow. They were entertaining and challenging, and quite well put together, but we weren’t exactly getting around the loop very quickly.
A Bit of Geocaching
Back at the plot, when we got to the very bottom of the hill, the girls decided they’d had enough of the caching. Izzy needed feeding and I don’t think Kas wanted to expend too much energy before the following day’s race. So they decided to walk back up the valley to the pub and/or ice cream van at the car park, while I continued on around the bottom to do the rest of the caches.
To be honest, once I left them the remaining ones of the series turned into relatively easy traditional caches with no field puzzle, and I started finding them more quickly, apart form the ones I couldn’t find at all. So I met the girls back at the top of the hill after 90 minutes or so, having walked back up the mother of all steep hills to get to the top. Whoever decided to call these hills “Downs” obviously started at the top, not the bottom. The Downs are chalk uplands. Which makes lots of sense, really. Not!
Anyway, we reunited and had a swift drink in the accompanying pub before retiring back to Lewes for an evening meal at a local Italian.
The caches I found on the day were:
Sunday Morning
Kas had to be up and about for the half marathon quite early, leaving us with no time really to have breakfast in the hotel. We had to drive around the north side of Brighton to find our car park for the event. On our previous visits here we’ve always been able to park on the racecourse but this year we were due to park along a very long stretch of road that had been closed off to allow parkers. There was a massive queue to get in. When we did eventually get parked we then had a significant walk back along the road to find a bus.
The bus took us pretty much back the way we’d come. We went back to just one junction before we’d joined from Lewes and were then taken over the Downs and past the racecourse down to the seafront at the eastern end. This is the right end of the promenade for runners but definitely the wrong end for non-runners.
Me and the girls have been to such things before and, at a busy event like this, we’ve more or less given up on being able to spot our significant runner at the start. We mooched around for a while and waited at the start but didn’t see Kas go past. As we’d missed the hotel breakfast we therefore rocked off to get breakfast in a local cafe. We found a very nice one. Not a chain, but a one-off local job. The coffee was good and we found enough things to eat to keep us happy.
After the Event
We spent over an hour in the cafe, so decided it was time to go and join the proverbial throng on the side of the main road and wait for Kas to come back. We were there for about 15 minutes before she arrived, I think. Anyway, Kas had passed us, so we then fought through the crowds to get to our assigned meeting point under the pier. It’s a big-enough event that there’s no point in trying to find people in the finish area, so we waited for Kas to come to us. She took a while. I think there may have been some coffee and massage involved.
Once she did reach us we had no particular desire to hang around in Brighton any longer, so we grabbed some chips and sat on the end of the pier before retiring to a bus and making our way back to the car park. It was already mid-afternoon by the time we got back to the car so we weren’t going to be home very early anyway.
The house was more or less where we left it, as usual.
by Kevin | Feb 3, 2019
What’s that all about?
Kas had arranged with some of our friends from North West Leicestershire/South Derbyshire to go on a jaunt to the west of London to have a go at the original parkrun. The original is the one in Bushy Park, close to Teddington. It is famous for normally having between 1,500 and 2,000 runners. And it’s famous for being the first, obviously. It’s also right next to Hampton Court Palace, which the girls had never been to.
The friends in question are all members of South Derbyshire Road Runners, and we knew many of them as a result of meeting them at our parkrunning second home – Conkers parkrun.
I’m not quite sure how we got an invite, probably Kas spends a lot more time conversing with other runners than me, so it was probably something to do with that, however the invitation was most welcome and offered the opportunity to go and have a weekend down The Smoke.
Driving Down
We’d booked ourselves into the Travelodge in Teddington for two nights and drove ourselves down there after work on Friday night through a fairly normal level of Friday night traffic. We set off from home not long after the girls got back from school. Having stopped on the way down for dinner, we eventually arrived before 7 pm.
We weren’t down there early enough to get a spot in their ground-floor car park though, which meant we were stuck with the very unappetising option of driving up the ramp to the upstairs car park. I say “unappetising” because it was a pretty sharp angle upwards and the ramp itself was quite narrow. It was surrounded on both sides by 1m high concrete walls. Having only had my new car for about 6 weeks I was not at all happy with the idea, but there wasn’t really another option. It was possible to park on the road outside but I’d have to be constantly going back to check the acceptable hours, and anyway I really don’t like parking overnight on the side of a busy road.
Driving Up
I managed to get up the ramp without incident, despite the sharp slope and the very tight turn at the top, and was greeted by a virtually empty parking area. I’d sort-of decided the car was staying there all weekend until we were ready to leave, and one look at the base of the ramp out confirmed that would be sensible. At this point I managed to find my source of panic for the weekend. The ramp dropped a couple of inches down onto the path at the bottom, and I was concerned I’d ground the front end of the car coming down.
This thought stayed with me right through until we actually moved the car, and contributed to me enjoying the couple of days much less than I should have done. I hate having a sense of impending doom like that. It might have been better, on reflection, to try moving the car earlier in the weekend as soon as a downstairs bay was empty, but there was no guarantee that there’d ever be one free. At least if I’d tried that I would either have been able to stop worrying, or I’d have converted the worry into one about how much the repair was going to cost. Anyway, more of that on Sunday morning. For now, I decided to leave the car where it was, and then worried about it all weekend.
We’d arranged to meet a few of the “crew” in the hotel bar. We’d stopped on the way down for an evening meal ( at the sign of the big golden “M” ), so once we’d got settled in to the room we were able to retire to the hotel bar to see who had arrived and who hadn’t. We were first to the bar.
Saturday is parkrun day
After all, it’s why we were here.
We’d established the evening before that the hotel kept its breakfast room open late enough to do parkrun first and then come back for breakfast. This is much my preferred option. I can never get my head around having a big breakfast and then going for a run straight after.
So we met up in the hotel reception at about 8:15 and began the fairly long walk over to Bushy Park. It was quite a decent walk out to the start of the parkrun, so we didn’t want to be too late. Thankfully the weather wasn’t too bad. Because parkruns tend not to have anywhere to leave things, some of us (me included) had opted to stray out in our running kit with nothing over the top. That could have made for some very cold walking and a generally bad experience. We’d established that there was no point in trying to take the car – it was a circuitous route to get there and the car parks are invariably stacked to the gunwales.
Actual Running
We got there well before the start, though, and the more keen among us proceeded to do their pre-parkrun warmup runs. The rest of us mooched about getting impressed by the number of people turning up. There were loads. Also, two of them were wearing “500” t-shirts. I hadn’t even got my “250” shirt at the time, and had never previously seen a “500” – that’s optimistically every Saturday for 10 years, or more realistically every available Saturday for 11-12 years, I’d think. It takes some dedication anyway.
At one point, somebody spotted Mr. Parkrun himself and encouraged him to have his photo taken with us. He seemed quite reluctant, but then I guess because Bushy is a magnet for parkrun tourists and he’s the man who started it all, he probably gets his photo taken quite a lot when he’s there.
The run itself used a slightly modified start (due to the wet underfoot conditions) and was very busy. It’s pretty much of a flat amble around a beautiful public park. All four of us ran it. We were kind of impressed by the way they handled so many people at the finish too. I guess they are used to it. They were very regimented in having multiple lanes for finishers and a cunning system involving white noticeboards given to occasional finishers to identify when the token handers should swap from one lane to another. Brilliant.
We went round at a sensible plodding speed of just over 30 minutes and then ambled around for a while trying to spot others from our group. Everyone seemed to enjoy it.
Breakfast O’Clock
At some point we decided to break ranks, because after running and having no overclothes we were starting to get cold and stiff. So off we pootled back to the hotel. We decided to do no more than grab jumpers and then go straight in for breakfast. We were hungry and the breakfast room was still very busy, partly with our group and partly with a bunch of rugby fans who were there for an afternoon match at Twickenham. Knowing how my brother supports rugby, they’d actually gone for a weekend of heavy drinking that happened to be punctuated by a game of rugby on Saturday afternoon.
Anyway, the kitchen staff were doing a great job of not being able to cook things quickly enough. Everyone else was doing a great job of immediately devouring anything that made its way out of the kitchen. Breakfast took a while.
Saturday Afternoon
We hadn’t really planned what to do on Saturday afternoon, but the girls are always up for a trip into central London for a bit of shopping, especially if they’re shopping for M&Ms at the dedicated store near Leicester Square. There’s a lego store nearby too. So we grabbed a train from Teddington Station and settled in for most of an hour’s worth of trundling through south-west London’s suburbs before arriving at Waterloo Station. We walked from there up into the city rather than mucking about with the Underground. It’s really not very far and the weather was acceptably nice.
I don’t remember much about the afternoon other than visiting the Lego and M&Ms stores, and possibly Hamleys. I seem to remember I didn’t feel great for much of the afternoon either.
The train home was equally uninspiring and we had the chance to grab a few ZZZZZs before going out for the evening. We’d arranged with a group of the others to meet at a nearby grilled-chicken restaurant. You know which one I mean. They were running a bit late, which made it a bit of a challenge with them not taking bookings. We eventually got sat down and had ourselves a selection of grilled chicken products.
It had been quite a long and tiring day. We were all glad to get to bed instead of going to a pub afterwards.
Easy Like Sunday Morning
Sunday morning greeted us with bright sunshine and another substantial breakfast.
We were in no hurry to get home, so we planned to go and spend a few hours at Hampton Court Palace. At last you can see why I chose the name of this post. The palace is literally the other side of Bushy Park from the hotel but involves a bit of a roundabout route when driving.
We decided to move the car around rather than walk and then have to walk back again. This, of course, meant I had to face the demon of getting the car out of the car park. Picture this. You have to execute a 90o turn to get yourself lined up with a very narrow ramp that has 1m high concrete walls on both sides. In my car I can’t see over the bonnet, because it’s rather long. I wouldn’t have been able to see the ramp anyway because, of course, it drops away from you rather sharply.
Squeaky Bum Time
I was somewhat concerned about my ability to get around the corner at the top. Everyone else got out of the car to stand on the metal fire escape. They were letting me know how far away from the concrete walls my front wing was. I had to do a bit of shuffling backwards and forwards to get lined up correctly. The front needed to miss one wall while the back missed another. Whilst on the ramp there was maybe just 15-20cm of space on either side. Certainly not enough to get out of the car, and certainly not enough to be confident with backing up again if I had a problem. Once you’re going down, you’re going down.
At the bottom of the ramp, as mentioned earlier, there was a significant drop off their kerb onto the pathway. I was very concerned I’d scrape the front. My car has suspension which can be set at differing ride heights. Over the weekend I’d googled it and discovered I was already on the highest ride height. So would the car get off that kerb without grounding the front? I employed the girls once again to watch out. Not that it would have helped because I was kind of committed by this point. So under their guidance, I rolled off the kerb at the slowest possible speed. I was very relieved not to hear any scraping noises. I apparently had a good 2-3 cm to spare at the front. So all the worry over the weekend was wasted. I was fine, albeit the drive out was still quite stressful.
Hampton Court
I was mightly relieved now, so was more than happy to continue on our way. We drove about 10 minutes to get to the main car park for Hampton Court and wandered off in search of the way in. It’s one of the Historic Royal Palaces, and as such can’t be entered free of charge by members of either the National Trust or English Heritage. I guess we’ll have to pay then.
Hampton Court Palace is a place I’d been to many moons ago, but had more or less forgotten what it was like, or even where it was. It’s essentially a bit of a journey through the excesses of the English and British monarchy down the ages. Some bits are older than others. The earliest bits are Tudor and the latest bits are very Baroque. Much of the Tudor was removed to make way for the Baroque, apparently.
Anyway, there was a guided walk starting a few minutes after we arrived, so we went for that. So a geezer in period costume talked to us about the history whilst showing us around the key features. We followed this all the way around, including a change from Tudor period dress to Stuart period dress at the appropriate time. It was a different person too. Anyway, I digress. Personally I found the Tudor part more interesting than the Stuart. That’s maybe because the Stuart was mainly indoors and we were dressed for the outdoors. I got far too hot. Anyway, I liked the Tudor kitchens best.
Amazement
After the guided walk we went for some lunch in the cafe before heading for the maze and the ornamental gardens. The kids didn’t find the maze especially taxing. In fact it was nearly as hard to find the maze as it was to find your way around it. The gardens looked pretty spectacular in the bright sunshine. It was a beautifully fresh February day.
Nuff-ski
We made it through to the mid-afternoon and then decided we’d had enough. The kids had school the following day, so we didn’t want to be too late getting home. The drive back was dull and uninteresting, as these things should be. The house was more or less where we’d left it, which is always good.
by Kevin | Dec 30, 2018
The Sketch
A massive new series had been released at Weston Underwood to the north of Olney. It was just begging for a visit, despite it being mid-winter. I solicited opinion on Facebook and agreed form an away team in Weston Underwood early in the morning. A different group of cachers were doing a different part of the same series and agreed to walk backwards for a bit to meet up with us.
I parked up in the village with a degree of caution. It was my first caching trip in the new cachemobile, and I was still being very careful where I parked it. Weston Underwood has a nice broad area of roadside parking at the right end for our walk. It has big bollards at the “back” end, which protect parked cars from approaching vehicles. That was as good as I was going to get.
One of my two intended caching partners for the day was late. I tried calling and apparently woke him up from his pit of depravity. This resulted in a decision to continue without him. So off we continued.
The Walking Bit
The first stretch of the walk was very familiar to me. In fact, it was all very familiar right up to the point where we met the other cachers. It ran along the previous route of my MK Boundary Walk Blue series. That was my least favourite bit of the Boundary Walk, partly because it’s a long way from home and partly because it goes through Killick Wood. Killick Wood was more boggy than a boggy thing every time I walked through. On this occasion, it wasn’t too bad, but then I remember we’d had a couple of dry winters. Maybe the soil had actually dried out pretty well. It wasn’t “up to the neck” territory anyway.
We walked all the way through to a path that comes south from Yardley Hastings (about 23-24 caches in) before meeting up with the others, who’d started a bit later from that village and walked around to meet us. Once we met up we continued round the circuit in an anti-clockwise direction.
With it being late in the year there isn’t a lot of daylight, and when we got halfway round I was starting to sense that we might not have enough time to finish. We were well past halfway through the daylight and were starting to get a bit tired. So we tried to accelerate a bit. Most of the caches were straightforward, but there were a lot of them to be heading for. We were still quite a way from Weston Underwood.
Enough is Enough
Eventually we decided we would give up on the caches belonging to the extra “little” series at the end of the walk. We were more or less out of daylight and had heard that they were a bit rubbish anyway, so I wasn’t too bothered. You can see a distinct gap on the map below – there were caches there, but we walked straight past.
By the end of the day I’d found 66 caches, which is good for a winter’s day. I evidently didn’t anticipate much excitement though, as I didn’t take a camera.
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