Ambitious Geocaching

Life at N60 degrees: The sun going down already after 3pm.

On Sunday afternoon we decided to team up with TPjr to try our first La Petite Trotte à Jon, as I decided to call it. The temperature outside was pleasant -10°C, so off we went. We didn't bother to carry any nutrition, as there were plenty of cafes to enjoy a quick hot drink along the way.

Suunto Ambit GPS navigation works well for geocaching!

Long before this we had registered at geocaching.com. We had selected seven interesting caches in our neighborhood and loaded their coordinates into our Suunto Ambit GPS - a watch made in our neighborhood! (Here's some great advice on how to use Ambit for geocaching.)

With -10C it's not a good idea to get your feet wet! That couldn't stop us though :-)

The first geocache was on a hill with ruins of a century old fortress and we knew the place well. However the geocache proved to be tricky to find and challenging to open in the freezing conditions. Finally we managed to fill in the log book inside and put it back where it belongs.

No map, just an arrow and distance in meters. But that's all we needed really.

The second cache was by a familiar stream and was a quick easy find. Just when we thought we are getting good at this, the third one at a cemetery took us a lot of searching. It had such a clever camouflage that we didn't recognise it as a cache although it was right in front of us all the time.

Navigation in the winter forest with fallen trees around can be challenging.

The next three ones were close to each other in the forest. They weren't too easy and we gave up on the last one. It was getting dark and despite me eagerly testing my new Silva Trail Runner 2 headtorch, we couldn't find it this time. We'll be back though! [Edit: The cache was found later.]

We couldn't find this one, despite my Silva Trail Runner 2 headtorch.

On our way home we found our sixth cache of the day by the local church. It was skilfully hidden and we had a good laugh when we discovered where it was, because we had went right past it so many times without suspecting anything.

Geocaching with Ambit was easy and fun, even in freezing cold!

What a great training day. Who knows, we might do the real La Petite Trotte à Léon some day! :-)