January 20 : Trackable : Sharing a cup of tea trying to get to Canada

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Sharing a cup of tea trying to get to Canada – not the snappiest title but very descriptive on the mission for this trackable:

Sharing a cup of tea trying to get to Canada

… “As I have a friend going to Thailand for a caching trip, she offered to take any trackables that were looking to go that way.  This is one of mine that I made to send with her. It would love to tour Thailand and area collecting lots of pictures along the way before eventually trying to get back to Hamilton, Ontario, Canada to me by the end of 2023. ”…

The story so far: setting off from Canada in October 2022, the trackable was duly taken to Asia, visiting Singapore and Indonesia, before being dropped off in January 2023 in a cache close to the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.   There it sat for some months, being discovered several times, but not picked up.   Finally, in November 2023, the trackable was picked up by TAROTHRUM, a geocacher from Singapore.   After another gap of two months, the trackable emerged in Weybridge, England, where we found it.   (I looked at TAROTHRUM‘s geocaching activity to see where they might have taken the trackable, but with few conclusions: he/she/they have only found about 200 caches in 10 years, but dotted all over the world – Singapore, the United States, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Malaysia, Portugal, Greece, and Indonesia.  I wonder if they are a pilot, or cabin crew, to fit in all that globetrotting?)

The trackable is now well on its way back to Canada, even if it is a little late for its target arrival date of the end of 2023.   We’ll move it on soon, when we find a cache where it will fit!

November 26 : Trackable – Sloth Bauble Race!

During our caching trip to Eversley we found a trackable – Sloth Bauble Race.

As the name suggest, the trackable is a Christmas Bauble, with a sloth wrapped around it !

The trackable was released with 3 other trackables into a cache “Santa’s Reindeer, Rudolph” just before Christmas 2021. The four trackables are in a race, to see which trackable can travel the furthest by Christmas 2022.

At the time we discovered the Sloth trackable it had spent most of the time in the UK, mainly in Southern England or the Midlands. It had a short sortie to British Columbia, Canada, USA where is accrued many of its 10,600 miles. But is this trackable going to win the trackable race ?

The other trackables in the race are :

Nutcracker which has travelled 5660 miles and its locations have included the UK, Holland and Gaudelope.

Unicorn has travelled about 5980 miles but only visited 10 different caches. It is currently in Colorado, USA.

But the winner is Dog which has amassed over 40,000 miles! It has visited the Western Coast of America, much of Belgium, Holland and Germany as well as Italy and France.

Well done Dog ! Here are Nutcracker, Unicorn and Dog before their journey started.

December 31 : Trackable : Herisson voyageur / Traveling Hedgehog

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Herisson voyageur / Traveling Hedgehog

Now, here’s a trackable with a story:  its owners are from Quebec, Canada, where, incidentally, there are no native hedgehogs.   But – however it got there – it started its journey in July 2018 on the other side of North America in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California.  After looking round the city for a couple of days, it was off east to Denver, Colorado, then to near Detroit, Michigan, where it travelled around until about the end of the year.   After visiting several travel bug hotels, it reached Miami in August 2019.  

There’s a bit of a gap after that – a pandemic lockdown and travel ban, maybe? – but by May 2020 it had crossed the Atlantic and reached, Kent, England.   It stayed there briefly, went to Sussex, also briefly, and then went north to Lincolnshire where it seems to have visited nearly every geocache in the county!  This took it until May 2021, when it moved south a few miles, changed cachers and set off around Norfolk for the summer.

It went quiet for a bit after that, but in October 2021 it set off south again to arrive in Fleet, Hampshire in November 2021, finally making its way to a cacher’s flash mob in nearby Aldershot on New Year’s Eve.

That is a varied 15,000 mile journey, well fulfilling its mission of:
… “This hedgehog is very curious. He wants to travel around the world and see amazing scenery. One day he will return to Quebec.” ...

Good luck, little hedgehog, and we’ll find some hedgie/herisson-related places for you to visit before we move you on.

May 22 : Fearless Traveler !

During our second visit to Chester we discovered this delightful trackable ‘Fearless Traveler! ‘

Fearless Traveler!

As you may guess from the title, it emanates from America. It started its journey in Illinois back in April 2015 and quickly galloped to the Western side of Canada based in and around Vancouver. It also visited caches not too far from the American border, before heading to Ottawa where it pranced for some time from cache to cache. Interestingly the trackable never made it back into America, but instead headed for the UK.

The first British cache it was placed in, was one we had found back in March 2015 when we walked the Thames Path. It had been placed in a cache called ‘Mosaic Trail – Fishes’ at Newbridge. (Interestingly the cache, if our memory is correct, is a 35mm film canister..so how the horse got into its British Stable, we are not sure).

Thereafter its British journey headed North West to the Chester area where we found it!

We will release it when we find a suitably large cache for it to enjoy the British Countryside!