Hiding real treasure...argh me hearties!

As a youngster I spent about five years entering every competition in my favourite music mags, ‘Look-In’ and ‘Fast Forward’. I won all sorts of things from a ‘Hello Colour Penguin’, which changed colour in the bath, to a book about horses and a cassette tape single of Kim Appleby’s hit ‘Don’t Worry’. 

These days I rarely enter competitions as they usually involve calling an expensive phone line or a commitment to receiving endless mountains of junk mail for the rest of your life. But that said I have taken a keen interest in Geocaching HQs TB promotions and always wondered how other cachers find out about these exclusive little Travel Bug competitions so quickly to get one. I’m usually way too late.

However, I just happened to click on the promotions page a few weeks ago and saw a new one had been launched - Treasure X. I quickly went on and gave my details to enter the draw, but really wasn’t holding out much hope. With thousands of cachers around the world and just 3,000 up for grabs I knew my chances of winning were pretty slim. 

Roll on a few weeks later and to my great surprise, I received an email to say I was the lucky recipient of a Treasure X TB! I had won! I was over the moon.  

   

This week it arrived in the post, and I was delighted to see out of the four available I had been sent the green Pharaoh Loot Loot TB. The package also contained a bundle of Treasure X green stickers, so after logging on and registering him, I decided to share the excitement of the promotion by creating a brand new cache ‘Treasure X cache (Green)’.  

Located at a great cache and dash spot, on a little road between Icklingham and Mildenhall, the small Tupperware box was the ideal place to leave the stickers so that the first 25 cachers could each take one. The five remaining have already been divided up between our own geocaching memorabilia collections and those of friends. 

I was delighted that just a few days after publication the cache had already received 12 visits, making it one of our most popular caches in the first week of publication.   

I’ve yet to set the Pharaoh free, but his mission includes visiting some of the worlds greatest hidden treasure spots from the pirate shores of Cornwall to the hidden treasure tombs of Egypt. Only time will tell as to whether he even makes it out of the county!  

  

The other big excitement this week was of course International Geocaching Day. Celebrated by millions of cachers all over the world, I joined in the fun grabbing a local cache on Saturday morning. Moments after logging up popped the souvenir on my profile, joining the 2016 and 2017 souvenirs. 

This week’s other highlights included solving the much anticipated new FF puzzle ‘It’s Gone Again’. 

On the first night of publication I got nowhere. By lunchtime the next day the Puzzle Queen Chick had grabbed first to find and gave away rather a lot of detail in her log, including the potential trail it was located on and a couple of hints to solve the puzzle. Another night was spent mulling it all over and still not getting any sensible co-ordinates. 

Roll on the next evening and I was in no mood for caching or puzzle solving!  A rather unfortunate incident with a mug of coffee and the work laptop, had wiped out almost two and a half years of files and destroyed several hundred pounds worth of tech.   

I was on the brink of despair wondering how on earth I was going to take the dripping, broken Laptop into the IT department the following day and admit what I had done! But after a couple of hours of moaning and sulking, I decided to try and take my mind off the whole sorry affair, and look at the puzzle again. 

   

Somehow in the midst of catastrophe Ms Chick’s first hint finally made sense. A couple of taps later and a bit of zooming and the co-ordinates were in hand! Overjoyed (and all my IT woes momentarily gone) I dashed down the stairs, grabbing my equipment filled rucksack and headed out the door to GZ. To my huge surprise I was second to find! I could hardly believe it, it was crafty, but so simple.   

Cheered by my success, I also decided to pick up the new Chippenham Fine Pair multi cache and do a little bit of maintenance on one of my own. 

The following day, after more than a few tears rolled in the IT department as I relived coffee-gate, I had planned to just head home after work and sleep. However, I was thwarted by heavy traffic on all the major roads, so I ended up on a rather long detour across country. However, every cloud and all that...it proved to be a great opportunity to grab a couple of unfound caches. 

The first was at Chilford Hall, which was a nice quick find. It was then onto Burrough Green to grab the church micro multi. It took slightly longer to find the numbers and final cache, but I got there in the end and now completely re-energised I headed home arriving just in time to go to a friend’s birthday party.

The final caches of the week were two long sought after local caches, which have been starring at me on the map for years amongst the sea of yellow smilies.  

First up, Elfozzo69’s ‘Fear the Reaper’ Mystery near Kennett. I’ve starred at this puzzle on and off since it was published over two years ago, but just couldn’t get past those tricky barcodes. I’d downloaded just about every scanner app available in the Apple Store and still nothing would read them. In the end a begging email was sent to a lovely Shady lady and she duly came back with a rather big shove in the right direction.  

More cryptic stages were soon solved and eventually the co-ordinates were in hand. A slightly smelly, dusty walk to GZ, but once there the cache was found safe and sound in the rotting tree stump.  

Second up was the four stage multi ‘Ecole Pour Les Chevaux’ on Newmarket Heath. Knowing it hadn’t been found in over 2 years, I half suspected that at least one or more of the stages might be long gone, but as I’d already solved stage one 2 years ago, I just had to give it a whirl.  

It was a lovely walk across the heath to stage two. Upon arriving I noticed something horsey related straight away, but it was a further 10 minutes before I realised that was a big clue in locating the stage 3 co-ordinates. 

Buoyed by the fact they were so well persevered I headed off to stage 3, but after a 40 minute search of all the surrounding fences, gates and a suspicious looking gate hook post, which definitely had no co-ordinates on it, I was stuck. A quick message to two little bird cachers, who managed to miraculously remember the stage so many years after they were there, I was soon pulling out the brilliantly hidden stage four co-ordinates, pressed into a now very rusty bolt. 

The final proved even more tricky. Incredibly overgrown, with dense thorns and brambles, there was no obvious way in. In the end I had to just go for it, ripping skin and tangling hair, I just managed to get far enough to spot a very green algae covered bag. Inside to my very great relief was a very well preserved, decent sized blue container, with a lovely dry logbook. 

I was ecstatic! Definitely the best resus cache I’ve found in terms of how long it’s been since it was last found. 

That’s it for this week. I be seein ye!