Day 243: 1000 Finds!

OK, now I can stop wittering on about the countdown to 1000 finds, since the day has come to grab it. Here’s the log about the cache.

We can’t quite recall when we first learnt about this cache, but it was a fair old while ago. 890 days ago, on 25th March 2011, we discovered West, found in a cache local to Grubbly’s old house (Beavers’ Lodge, GC1VPNF) which we had found before but made a return trip to grab the required information. North came next, on 18th April 2011, found in the Harbourside Quest multi-cache (GC1BNY0) – a happy coincidence as we weren’t actually going to hunt for this but were going on a trip to Scarborough anyway, we just made this a priority. Shortly after this, on 25th April 2011, South was placed back into the wild. We made a trip to just outside Sheffield to a little tranquil area to grab Adams Treasure (GC2A6AK), exactly the sort of place a cache should be, for the information. This just left East. Again though, it was placed in a cache rather than being held by someone for once – this was on the 27th April 2011. This time, a visit to Crowle near Scunthorpe was in order to grab Creeping Round Crowle – In A Rut? (GC19492, apparently in North Lincolnshire). However, since we’d only gone there for that cache we didn’t move it on. It took just 33 days to grab all four trackables, so it’s a bit of a disgrace that so much time has passed, 857 days in fact!

Putting all that to one side, the drive to the final location was a lovely one, the roads very quiet for a Saturday morning. Once at the location, the walk to the cache was interrupted only by a jogger wanting to pass us and a ‘morning’ from one other gentlemen. The views are stunning here, somewhere neither of us had ever been before, and we thoroughly enjoyed getting to this cache. We have some tremendous photos of the surroundings which we won’t add to maintain the mystery! The box contained a little water, which we emptied out, but it is in remarkably good order given where it is and how little it is found. We wish more could be said of the sheep we found nearby, whose remains were sadly laying near the cache site.

The cache itself fills a number of stats for us: it fills a calendar gap, meaning that August is now full, becoming our 5th full month; it helps extend our finds streak to 53 days (from 10/07/2013); and it’s our 1000th cache find and our 100th puzzle cache find. It has taken 1087 days to reach the 1000 find mark.

I’m deliberately not saying where this cache was – although my Facebook friends will already know where I’ve been today! – as it was a particularly interesting puzzle which has only been found 32 times now in 5 years.

Here are some photos from today’s walk.

As well as this, we attended an event this evening – a chance to discuss our hobby with like minded people – and found three more caches too, putting our tally up to 1004 finds.

August has been one heck of a month for geocaching:

159 caches found
it has helped us towards our longest streak of finds, currently 53 days in a row
it has given us our 5th full month of finds
it has given us 31 new souvenirs