Geocaching Flashmob Event

We attended Bendigo's first flashmob event  held at the Bendigo Mall.  Don't know what a flashmob event is? - neither did we.    At exactly 1pm, a geocacher will appear at the specified co-ordinates with a geocaching container.   Geocachers will have exactly 15 mins to grab a piece of paper, sign their name, and place the sheet of paper back into the container.     Before 1pm, all Geocachers must act like normal shoppers, looking in shop windows and walking around the mall. After the 15 minutes the cache owner  will leave and people must then depart and return to the activities they were doing before.

It was so funny to watch the other people in the mall who were wondering what the crowd had gathered for.  Was there free stuff?  is someone injured?  what are you protesting about? I had to giggle at the number of people who were drawn to join the crowd without really knowing why.  And by the time people in the Mall worked out something was going on, the crowd started wandering away. 

The Bendigo Advertiser took a couple of photos and the geocachers met up later at a local hotel for a cool refreshment!

Happy Australia Day

Happy Australia Day - what did you do for Australia Day 2010?

We had a day of geocaching - we walked around Bendigo with our GPS and solved puzzles to search for hidden treasures.  We discovered some interesting places that we didn't know existed and we have been living here for 20 years!   Then, when we were exhausted,  we came home to some traditional Aussie burgers on the barbie.  How about you - do you celebrate Australia Day?

Geocaching - Hiding our first treasures

We have been geocaching for about six months and really enjoy the challenge of working out the cryptic puzzles and finding ourselves in new and interesting places.  This week, we have started to hide our own geocaches and have released two out there.  We have been working on them for  a couple of weeks, and researched the locations around the caches. It was fun and turned out to be very interesting. 

We have one called Woodvale Railway Hotel and  this cache is hidden across the road from the site of the Woodvale Railway Station Hotel - every town has a Railway Hotel, but this one was special. It was established during the gold rush, and the railway line was extended to Woodvale in 1882. It was originally called the Baden Baden Hotel (based on the German bathing / spa town) and the name was anglicised before World War 1.   In the gay 1920s, the world had seen the end of the war and the local soldiers were home from London and Paris. A Saturday night dance at the school hall was tame indeed, and many men travelled to the Railway Hotel on a Saturday night where nude table top dancing was the fashion. One local scandal involved a police raid and a well-known respectable Bendigo patriarch bolting naked from the Hotel.

Another is hidden near the site of the old  Woodvale Railway Station. The railway line was extended to Woodvale in 1882 and it provided a new opportunity to receive goods from Melbourne in only a few hours, rather than several days. Originally, this area was called Sydney Flat Railway station and was adjacent to the crossing which is a little south of here, opposite the Railway Station Hotel. In 1912, the Railway Station was moved north and is now just near Nuggety Creek. A large mound of dirt, bordered with Sugar Gums marks the site of the old platform. A violent windstorm blew the station down and it was rebuilt, before being closed and removed in 1931.

It's been fun and we have learned so much about the history of the town we have lived in for the past 15 years.

Geocaching - Huh?

We have been geocachers for just a few short weeks, but we are addicted. It is so much fun and a great way to get outside and smell the fresh air. Sometimes, it also involves crawling around on your hands and knees, in the rain, looking under rocks, bridges and trees to find tiny containers hidden with treasure. We are slowly working out the technology and working towards finding a way to be geocachers without printing out reams of paper each time, and if you have any tips or suggestions we would love to hear from you.

When family and friends ask what we have been doing we try to explain geocaching, but I think most of them think we are going crazy. How do you explain it to people? Today, we were searching for a geocache under a bridge near the police station (I know it sounds suspicious, but there really was one hidden there and we eventually found it), when a group of teenagers wandered past and wanted to know what we were doing (interesting because it's normally the adults who are wondering what the teenagers are up to!) anyway, we tried to look like we were taking the dog for a walk, but we spent the rest of the afternoon giggling about the excuses that we could come up with - our favourite is 'tightening the screws on the bridge - they are loose so you better get out of the way'. How do you explain what you are doing if you are surprised by a muggle when searching for the cache? Any ideas or suggestions are welcome.

Geocaching - an exciting new adventure

Over the weekend Jim and I had our first experience of Geocaching. For all you muggles out there (muggles are what we Geocachers call the non-believers), Geocaching is a treasure hunting game that is played all around the world by adventurers who use a GPS to locate hidden containers (called geocaches) then you go online and share the experience of the search with other Geocachers. It is a fun, outdoor activity that the whole family can enjoy and people of all ages can participate in.

With my friend Ellen, we headed out Saturday to look for the first cache hidden in the Whipstick forest not far from where we live. We had no luck and realised that the GPS that finds the streets was pretty much useless. We had a dodgy old handheld GPS and this was very handy. We had a trip home to get the GPS instruction book, then back out but still no luck and eventually we ran out of daylight. Home for tea and more strategy discussions, then we were out bright and early on Sunday morning. This time, our homework paid off and we found three caches in around an hour. Now we are hooked and searching the website for our next adventure. Have you tried geocaching? What do you do for fun on the weekend?

Helen and Jim