Juneathon Day 25: Run & Cache

I used to geocache quite a lot. Back in 2005, when I discovered the handheld GPS device, I was sort of addicted to puzzling the waypoints and crawling in mud under narrow bridges…. Then after finding and logging 700+ geocaches, the excitement washed away. The Garmin went to a large box at the attic named “Old hobbies” and it stayed there until last week. In France, I started combining running and geocaching. Searching for the waypoints while running through new places breaks the boredom and these days, for me it works better than the mp3 player.

For tonight (the last Juneathon week) I planned a 8 km run with 2-3 cache retrieve attempts. It was the first time that I actually used my Garmin Forerunner 310XT to navigate to the caches (have Garmin GPSmap 60CS as well but thought it was too ‘heavy duty’ for my gentle run). The first one took a while as I was disturbed by this cute baby that looked scared to death as I was looking for the micro container:

The second one was a breeze (except the 3 km d-tour) but the third one, the third one is definitely worth showing to you (Geocachers in Leiden, please don’t look as this one is a spoiler). In the default stage, it looked like an ordinary bird house:But that only lasted until I pulled the chimney:

No, I did not break it – it gently opened itself and after retrieving the geocaching box and logging my visit, I could bring it back to its original shape so it is ready for whoever comes after me. Brilliant!

Run total: 12.8 km

Caches found: 3

Bird houses opened: 1