I got my first Virtual Travel Bug: Virtual King Edgar Bug (Travel Bug Dog Tag). I ‘earned’ this bug by discovering the school King Edgar goes to. Read more…
Back home and still on holiday for the rest of the week, we decided to tackle another cache in the neighboorhoud: Wijds Lubbeek – Mystery GC1DJ5K. Actually it was my second try. The day we left for the WE at Landal, I decided to tackle this rather quickly. That was too optimistic. After the confusing about which of the two searches in Lubbeek to take as reference, the tree and the viapoint caused confusion. Read more…
Final day of my stay at Landal, Reuver, Netherlands and time to leave. Since we still had the rest of the afternoon, we decided to do an extra cache: Secret Garden GC1DMJ. It didn’t start that well: my friends bumped into my car with the towing hook of their car while they wanted to leave the ferry and it was hailing cats and dogs when we arrived at the starting point of the cache 
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Day 2 of my stay at Landal, Reuver, Netherlands. It seems that nobody wants to do a geocache hunt today. So I decided to discover two mystery caches by King Egdar: Happy Birthday Mr. Escher GCY82K and De Digitale Code GCXH56. I prepared these two caches earlier. I was alwasy fascinated by Escher’s art and I found the solution rahter smoothly. De Digitale Code was something else. Despite I solved the first part, I couldn’t ficure out what to do with it. A hint from Edgar has put me on the track again. Read more…
I’m staying a weekend at Landal, Reuver, Netherlands. An excellent way to explore some caches abroad. I convinced my friends to join me and so we selected Kasteel Hillenraad, Swalmen GC11992. It started rather nice with a beautiful castle. A pity we couldn’t visit it. I thought we would see others on the road, but I didn’t see any, which is a bot of a dispointment. Read more…
Every forthnight I vist my in-laws in Hasselt. This WE we decided to pay a visit to Jeneverfeesten (jenever feasts). After that and the traditional vlaai (pie), I decided to do this Mailbox ( Limburg ) GCYAB1 cache in the neighbourhood. Read more…
Today, an ex-colleague and I are going to a show by Nigel Williams, a Anglo-Belgian standup comedian. I asked Luc if he wasn’t interested in doing a cache in the neighbourhood and he agreed. I had choosen 2 caches and we choose De wereld van Jonas GCV8T1 to start with. Despite being nearly half october the weather was summer like and it showed. A lot of people were walking in this provincial domain, which is as such a difficulty when you are looking for something that ‘outsiders’ may not know about. The tags were easy to find and we had quickly figured out the end coordinates. Read more…
I didn’t lose heart and decide to do a children cache with the whole family. HBE: De Geelrode Indianen (Kindercache) GC19RGG seems to be perfect for this purpose. The concept is rather cool. This ‘play wood’ has indian as theme full of totems and wigwams. Some of them had a tag. This time I had a torch with me and which turned out to be very useful. After finding all the necesarry tags, the coordinates showed me a place I didn’t expect. I assumed that a very large totem would be the obvious place. Read more…
Today was my inauguration and I wanted to find my first cache on my own. My son went to the scouts, thus I took my wife and daughter with me to discover Groen Lubbeek – Laure’s geboortecache GC1B47T. The weather wasn’t promising but when we started, the sun popped up between the clouds. Read more…
It seems that the geocaching initiation during the team event exceeded my expectations so much that I got the ‘stash virus’. I told my family about it and under the excuse that it would finally help the kids to like strolling, I bought a GPS unit although this wasn’t without a struggle.
First thing I always do is search on internet for experiences, although I always take these experiences with a (large) grain of salt. It’s not the first time that these customer testimonials are fake or are biased. I had already bad experiences with car GPS units. That’s way I’m not so found on Garmin. Sometimes they don’t seem to understand in which country Belgium is located and don’t understand that Belgian roads aren’t divided in blocks.
Anyway, after some reading I thought I had found my ideal GPS unit in the form of a Garmin eTrex Venture® HC, which occured not to be too expensive and suitable for a beginner like me. Just when I was at the point to purchase it, I read somewhere that the proclaimed high-sensitivity isn’t like it should be since it hasn’t a classic SiRFstar III chipset. On top, the internal memory isn’t extensible and thus not a lot of topopgraphical maps – not even Belgium as a whole – can be installed on this device. Back to square one. Luckily I could rely on Pieter from GPS center, who gives some good advise averse from any sales pitch and sales figures goals and prefers happy customers instead. On top he’s has even better prices than most of the chain/internet stores with a lifetime warranty on top. Even despite the fact that his shop isn’t nearby home, it is worth while to consider this shop.
Btw I bought the Garmin GPSMAP® 60Cx. It doesn’t come cheap but it seems to be somewhat the de facto standard for geocaching. I also considered the Garmin GPSMAP® 60CSx, but I found the extra money for a electronic compass a bit overkill.
