Sunday, January 16, 2011

Some geocaching fun

We've actually had some nice weather arrive after weeks and weeks of rain. The girls are both on school break and have been going stir crazy at home so I decided to take advantage of the break in the weather and take them out geocaching on Sunday morning.

Our first stop was the Giwadha cache located along the Giwadha Track in Chermside Hills Reserve.


This was a nice walk along a track that passed through fairly thick vegetation consisting of heath, grasses and shrubs. Particularly impressive were the number of grass trees with their long flowering spikes.

These grass trees were important to the Aboriginal people who lived here in the past. The long spikes make perfect fishing spears and, when soaked in water, the nectar from the flowers make a sweet tasting drink.

I was using the GPS from my phone along with a free geocaching app. This usually gets me to within 3m (10') of the location of a hidden cache. We searched for about five minutes before finding it hidden beneath leaves at the base of a burnt out stump.


Our next stop was the Arlington Triangle - Arlington Park cache. This was located in Arlington Park at Arana Hills. This is a nice little park with some playground equipment that the girls had fun playing on. The cache in this instance was a microcache with a magnet for attaching on to metal structures. The clue on the website helped and Maddie found it in the place I suggested she look.

The last cache of the morning, Bridge over Cabbage, was found a short walk away in William Scott Park, just where the path crosses Cabbage Tree Creek.


I was a bit concerned about our chances of finding this cache. The bridge had been completely inundated in the recent rains and there was still vegetation debris covering it in places. We knew it was a microcache we were looking for so I suspected another magnetic one. After a bit of searching Maddie found the container still securely in place.


We were very pleased that we went out to search for three caches and had a 100% success rate. It was also nice getting out of the house into the outdoors and in some fine weather for a change.

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