January 20 : Trackable : Community Volunteer Tag

During our caching trip around Weybridge, we found two trackables. Finding one trackable is quite rare, finding two very rare indeed. Also, trackables tend to be found in rural caches, rather than the urban ones in Weybridge.

Community Volunteer Trackable Tag

The first trackable was a Community Volunteer Tag. We have found at least one of these tags before – we believe they are given to noteworthy cachers on an ad hoc basis. This tag started in Poland in March 2022 and in less than 2 years has had a varied journey.

Not surprisingly its first few caches were in Poland/Germany/central Europe. It quickly arrived in the UK. Here it was taken to some iconic London landmarks, including Big Ben and Kew Gardens. It travelled to Australia (via the Philippines) and has been pictured outside the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne Cricket Ground!

Returning to Europe, it toured France, Italy and Portugal, before another trip to Australia, before returning to the UK, and was placed in the Weybridge cache on Christmas Day 2023.

A well travelled trackable – good luck on your future adventures!

October 21 : Trackable : RH & DR Railway

The trackable is in the form of a pseudo-ticket for the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. The steam railway runs for 13.5 miles along the Kent coastline to Dungeness. The locomotives and carriages are 1/3 actual size… so its a bit of a squeeze! We travelled on the railway in June 2010 (in our pre-geocaching days).

Back in 2018, a German geocacher was so impressed by the railway, they purchased the pseudo-ticket (from presumably a gift shop), attached it to a trackable tag and sent it on its way. In reality the gecoacher placed it in a cache near Dungeness Power Station, retrieved it seconds later and took the tag to Germany.

For the next 5 years it visited many caches in a narrow-ish band between Eastern France, Belgium, Germany and Austria. It had brief visits to Finland and America, but primarily stayed in Europe.

Its mission was to return to the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway and in late August 2023 the trackable finally arrived back in UK. After a month or two it was placed in one of the Binfield caches, where we picked it up. We will move it closer to Kent in a few weeks. Thank you trackable – you brought happy memories of our visit to the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway!

March 25 : Trackable : makiHN’s & Nikolausi_1’s Wandermulti Coin

When is coin not a coin ? When it is a plastic insect !

During our geocaching trip on the Hog’s Back near Guildford we discovered makiHN’s and Nikolausi_1’s Wandermulti Coin. A trackable geocoin which set off on its travels in Germany way back in February 2012. The coin should have looked like this :

But, somewhen after February 2019, the coin became detached from its plastic wallet and lost. However, the coin got replaced by a plastic insect and continued its travels !

Surprisingly for a trackable/geocoin over 11 years old, it hasn’t really travelled that far. Mainly in Europe, extensively in Germany and Poland, but not Italy. Spain, France and Portugal have been visited often, but no visits yet to Scandinavia. The geocoin insect only arrived in the UK 6 months ago and was placed in the cache in which we found it. In those 6 months there had only been 2 other finders (in fairness the cache was well protected by brambles – which acts as a great deterrent).

We will move the insect on soon so that it can explore the UK more widely.

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.