Geocaching in Durham Forest

Since I didn’t complete my geocaching week as the Cottage Life Show came around and I was busy with our booth, I wanted to finish up with describing a day out I had this week with my son, his wife and their dogs.  They are real geocaching enthusiasts and usually get out on a couple of days each week exploring the countryside, giving the dogs their exercise, and hunting caches of course.

We went to Durham Forest which is a wonderful area for walking, mountain biking and horse riding. What I like most about geocaching is that it gives a walk a real purpose – you have a destination, and no matter how long it takes, there is a motivation to get there. Which was a good thing on Thursday since the GPS showed it would be a 2 kilometre walk to the cache we had identified, and it turned out to be over 4km on a winding trail. But it was a beautiful day with light snow replaced with brilliant sunshine and the views from the higher parts of the trail were spectacular right across to Lake Ontario. 

The cache was fairly easy to find once the GPS had got us within 7 metres. We usually take a few minutes to survey the area and can often identify where a good place would be to hide a cache. A hollowed out tree stump; a fallen log, or a thick bush, all make good hiding places. This one was just between a log and a tree, carefully hidden by fallen leaves.

Before we had set out, Mike had downloaded the co-ordinates of the cache from www.geocaching.com and had printed off the cache listing. This told us there were several Travel Bugs  in the cache. Each one had a mission –“travel to Fiji”, “see the world”, “visit as many countries as possible”, so Mike decided to take just one whose mission was to simply “travel from cache to cache” as he was planning on another geocaching outing at the weekend, and could drop it off.

So, having located the cache and picked out the Travel Bug he was looking for, he put in a little model of a firefighter he’d found in a cache earlier in the day, and wrote a few notes in the logbook giving the date, weather conditions and saying what he had taken and what he had left behind.

Back at home, Mike went back onto Geocaching.com, and recorded the serial number of the Travel Bug, and wrote a few more notes about the find on the cache listing.

The great thing about the Travel Bugs is that you can follow them around the world. I left a TB in a cache in California in 2006. It is now in New Zealand, having visited a few more US states before making the long voyage down under.

To find out more about geocaching while you are staying at an Ontario vacation rental, visit CottageLINK Rental Management. Many of the cottages featured there have special geocaching packages for beginners, and you can even rent a GPS unit if you haven’t one of your own.

Have fun and happy hunting!