Y Safle

Now that I have an iPhone with built in GPS I thought I would try my hand at geocaching. Combining this with an afternoon trip with the girls up Constitution Hill in Aberystwyth, I located a geocache allegedly on the hill.

I can’t say that the experience was wholly successful. The notes said that we could exchange the items for something on the theme of Orange, so the girls hunted out an orange pen they were willing to give up, and I went armed with a pocket version of “A Clockwork Orange”. That part of the hunt, of course, took place at home.

We then went to Constitution hill, took the cliff railway to the summit and followed the GPS compass on my iPhone down a track through the gorse brush. The track was fairly easy going, but we had a couple of complaints from the girls from mild scrapes on bare legs. But when we were in the given location we could not find any plastic container. Worse, my iPhone settings had somehow reset themselves so that I could not access the website to check details.

A phonecall home later I had the iPhone set up right, only to find – posted in the notes at the bottom of the page – a note by someone that the cache had been “muggled” – i.e. found by a non player of the game who had wrecked it. There was an alternative cache but the co-ordinates were not in the iPhone format of degrees, minutes and seconds and in any case Hannah was loudly declaring “I quit”, so we went to the bouncy castle on the summit instead.

Still we will try this again as it was fun trying. Hoping we find a cache next time and the girls enjoy their secret treasure.