Our A-Z of 2021 Caching Tales

With the dawn of a new year, it’s time to take a quick look back at 2021...and what a year it’s been! 

Whilst we could have spent it getting thoroughly depressed by the many impacts the pandemic has continued to have on our lives, we didn’t! Instead, we got out and about geocaching, on countless fun adventures, creating new memories and experiencing the very best of the great outdoors.

Here’s a quick trip down memory lane...our A-Z of some of the best bits of our 2021 Caching Tales! 

A is for Adventure Labs. With many new labs popping up on the map again in 2021, we’ve clocked up a fair few AL finds, including ‘Historic Hawkshead’ and ‘War Memorial American Cemetery’ - where we found ourselves in the middle of the US Memorial Day celebrations!

B is for Birds…Game Birds to be exact. A brilliant geoart mystery cache series set by Jane Chick, in Drymere, Norfolk. Its many fantastic puzzles like ‘Snow Blindness’ and custom caches like ‘PHIlsophical Pheasants’, kept us busy for hours. We also picked up the very clever ‘Trigtastic Shingham Heath’ letterbox cache too.

C is all about Challenge caches and we’ve completed a few this year, including ‘Lynford 1000 unknown caches’ and 

‘Size matters’.

D is for Dog - hound dog - and we saw an awful lot of them whilst doing the 70 plus puzzles in Thallams’ giant ‘Geo Hound’ series. Set around the pretty Grafham Water reservoir, we had a lovely time collecting the caches on a 12 mile walk with DannyJGB.

E is for Earthcache. We’ve done so many brilliant ones this year, the most memorable included, The Needles, Wookey Hole, The Longstone and The Stag & the Mermaid.

F is for Fort and the brilliant ‘Brean Fort Wherigo’ located at the far end of the huge down in Sommerset, famous for being the test site of the bouncing bomb! 

G is for Gate Lodge Loop one of the best series of the year. Set by Lord and Lady it featured so many brilliant custom caches including a huge hand crank tube, a giant roller blind log, an ammo can with more keys than a locksmith and the jumping match box spider.

H is for Hevingham Woodland Wander. We visited this series on my birthday and enjoyed collecting some great custom caches, including a micro in fungi. However, it was a little chilly. Despite being April, it snowed throughout our walk!

I is for ‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel a legend of the man who built Britain’. The virtual cache was set high up on Brunel’s fantastic suspension bridge in Bristol and we enjoyed walking across it to collect the info required.  

J is for ‘John Kettley is a weatherman’, one of the trickiest puzzles I’ve solved for quite some time…and this one did take quite some time. I’ve been staring at it on and off since I started geocaching in 2015!

K is for Knott, the Great Knott Trail in the Lake District to be exact and the location of one of the best and sneakiest caches we’ve found this year. 

L is for Lakenheath Fen, the RSPB nature reserve located on the doorstep of where my gran used to live and home to some brilliant caches including ammo cans, a giant snail and the sneaky bird hide sign. 

M is for milestone! We finished this year just 55 caches short of hitting 10,000, but we were overjoyed to hit 9,000 caches back in the summer, when we picked up GCZ team’s ‘Searching high and low - an elevation challenge’ cache.

N is for ‘No cheese, Gromit’, RYO62’s giant geoart series in Hertfordshire. DannyJGB helped us to solve the puzzles and we enjoyed several days out completing it. We also did the COs other great geoart series this year ‘D’OH’, which is based on the The Simpsons. 

O is for Old Man. This year we climbed (crawled) up the Old Man of Coniston and found the great cache of the same name at the very top! 

P stands for Police box, and Shadyone44’s great ‘Tenant on holiday’ cache. Themed on Dr Who, the custom container was a fantastic miniature version of the Dr’s Tardis. 

Q is for Quirky and that’s exactly the type of brilliant caches we found on Campan51’s ‘Shimpling Church & Back’ and ‘Five villages in Suffolk’ trails this year. So many unique custom caches including a blue snake, a Buddha and a petrol fuel cap! 

R is for Rushbrooke, SusieandMaisie’s fantastic circular series in Suffolk. It had so many innovative custom caches, we were dishing out FPs all over the place. We particularly loved the egg-tastic number 7!

S is for ‘Simon Says (Dalham Fun & Games)’ the best cache we have found this year - we had great fun completing the electronic field puzzle! The rest of the series also featured some other really well designed custom caches. 

T is for ‘The Bakers Dozen’ a great new series in Thetford forest based on the theme of cooking. Every single cache was a well thought out custom container made from cooking implements. There was even a rolling pin and a cheese grater!

U is for under and up! Whilst exploring beautiful Buttermere in the Lake District, we came across the old cache, ‘Light at the end of the tunnel’. It was hidden in a long tunnel under the foothills, high up in the rafters. It was a great find and filled an empty spot on our Jasmer grid.

V is for voltage and The Rolph’s brilliant ‘High Voltage’ multi cache on their ‘The Warrener & his Coney’s’ trail. Set in the woods near Mildenhall, the series features so many brilliant custom caches, but we loved this particular multi, with its cleverly hidden coordinates at stage 1 and large custom cache at stage 2.

W is for Webcam. In 2021 we found our first ever webcam cache, the excellent ‘South Lakes Webcam’ in Cumbria. It was great fun getting our photo snapped on the camera and we’re really looking forward to doing more of this cache type in the future. 

X is for Xtra Xtra long, which is the only way to describe Munsterrr’s huge ‘EHB series’. During the year we picked up a good number of caches in this mega series, and although my last visit ended in disaster - when I hit a pot hole and ripped open my tyre - I’m really looking forward to finding more in the series in 2022.

Y is for Yarmouth - Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast. This year we finally found the illusive ‘Itacwbgh (Fruits De Mer)’ cache! We have looked for it every time we have visited, but without success. Finally, in September, I got my hands on this tiny difficulty 5 cache! A very happy dance followed! 

Z is for zero, ground zero to be precise, and all the fantastic GZs we’ve visited throughout 2021!

That’s it! A very big thank you, to all of the COs who created and set the many great caches and series’ that we found throughout 2021. We thoroughly enjoyed finding them all.

A very happy new year to you all! 

Let’s hope 2022 is as fun filled as the last year and that we can start to travel further afield again, on lots of new geocaching adventures.