Exmoor geocaching

What the heck is geocaching. Well obviously it is squirreling away geos :). It is a sport where people hide caches of stuff around the world and then post the coordinates up on a web page (www.geocaching.com) for other people to use GPS or other means to try and find the cache.

When a cache is found the person leaves a note in the box and perhaps adds something new and may take something away or may do nothing at all! Generally they will post comments back on the website about their find.

Anyway, I decided to go have a look for one that is only a couple of miles from here. I took my boy and that turned out to be a bit of mistake for this site. Since the site was in some woods, the GPS became unreliable for the last few metres and we had to search by the good old fashioned way. The area is quite steep and slippery in places and I was distracted looking for this cache and I assumed my boy wouldn't do anything silly. Well I was pretty wrong about that one. I turned round just in time to see him fall about 10 feet off a small cliff into stream bed eroded from solid rock. Luckily, he only had some minor cuts, bruises and grazes. Needless to say we gave up at that point.

I was near the vicinity again today and decided to have a quick look again and I found it really quickly. Just goes to show how distracted you can become when you have an impatient 10 year old trying to help you find it! Still he wants to give it another go sometime.