19 Jul 2011

Caching and the Name Revealed

Caching

816

A quiet week on the caching front. The bikes are in the car that is in for repairs at the moment, that's excuse one, but the real reason is that we have been really busy with work. A shame really that we haven't had time to do more as we have been from one end of the country to another over the last week.

We did get time to find a very popular TB hotel. The Manchester Airport TB and Coin Hotel http://coord.info/GC220CJ gets very frequent visitors. Cachers are very lucky to have this airport hotel as there is a strict exclusion zone around the airport, yet this is still fairly accessible from not too far away from the terminals, even for out of town visitors. I did virtually a full trackable swap the other day, 6 in and 5 out. This find came as a relief as we had tried to find one of the hotel owners other caches ~ Manchester Airport Orbital Cycle Route (08) http://coord.info/GC23KKG, this one has countless DNF's on it, but the owner reckons it is still there and even went to check again after our visit.

We just managed two others this week, both yesterday. Steve's Aviation Cache #1 Bruntingthorpe Vulcan http://coord.info/GC1KVBB is by local cachers fly2live2fly. We had to deliver a couple of cars to the auction here and it would have been rude not to do a caching friends cache.
This was the perfect place to drop one of the TB's that I picked up in the Manchester cache.  Airbug B-777 was a plane TB and can be found by looking at TB2TJA6. The final cache of the week was an old cache in a churchyard, placed way back in 2004, Lamins Of Shearsby http://coord.info/GCKNZ6 The good thing about a cache like this is that the locals all know about it, and it has lasted because of it.

Name Revealed

So what was the cryptic message about? I had an email from Northking yesterday morning and he had guessed correctly what I was on about.

A new form of geocaching has just begun. Not linked to the main game at all, but fun all the same. I can see this taking off especially in urban areas after all the furore over Wetherby. The game is called Munzee and is played using a smart phone and QR codes.

As it is not linked directly to caching, finding a Munzee won't add to your caching numbers, but you gain points by finding them and also putting them out. By Sunday they were hoping to have 1000 members worldwide. Wemnog and I are the first members in the East Midlands and have now put five out. They can be placed in caches and be played alongside the main game, or placed in totally different areas. We have done both.

I see this as a sideline to our main caching activities, not as a replacement, a bit of fun for no outlay if you already have a smart phone.
As we are doing this one as a joint venture we decided to do it under a different name and have called ourselves FenRum. More details can be found at http://www.munzee.com/ 

Have a look, you may become hooked. The game is at the very outset and I am sure that there will be teething problems. Having said that, the guys who have set it up are very quick to take comments on board and act on them and the Munzee forums are growing well. I have started a Facebook page, Munzee GB Let me know what you think.

Nottingham Race

The Nottingham to Nottingham TB race is hotting up. With 11 entries here in the UK and entries now being posted to Balrgn who is opening up the Nottingham TB Hotel in New Hampshire. The hotel caretaker over here in the UK, Antheia, unlocked the doors for me a couple of days ago so that I could escort the first UK entries to it. They will remain there now, under lock and key until race day.  If the race is fresh news to you, then details can be found at http://www.usuktbrace.blogspot.com/ and if you want to enter a trackable, get it to me as soon as you can. My own trackable for the race can be found by searching for TB4DGQG

A quick question for you. Do you read the forums? If so, which ones? Is it the main GC forum, GAGB, local ones or none at all. Let me know what you think of them in the comments box, are they good, bad or do you have any other comments about them. Don't worry, you can send your comments to me annonymously if you don't want to be indentified.

Next week I will tell you about a gang of German cachers who got their own back on a chap who was going out deliberately to destroy their caches, and share the link to their story. It makes interesting reading.

Have a good week..........................

No comments: