Aladar123 plays geocaching

Who likes puppets? How about a museum full with them? somewhere in Taipei ... Unfortunately at the time I could go and search for the geocache the museum was already closed. Hanging out there While geocaching in Taiwan I learned a few things, one of them is that there are not too many geocachers in Taiwan, and even less who hides geocaches. Another important thing is that most people do not care that you are searching, not a single muggle ever asked or looked longer than a second to see what I'm after, not even when we were searching close to the police station, they also did not look like they know what we are up to. Most muggles are just minding their own business. What a cap color and still safe when hidden As you can see the cap is that bright color, and still it was in place and did not go missing. When I was searching for it there was a bus paking alomg the road but the driver did not even look at me. I felt a bit strange I was expecting more interest from the pe...

Earlier I was blogging about some geocaches which could use a changing difficulty or terrain settings. This is also one of those geocaches. The geocache taken out of its hiding place... Yeah I know if you take a look at the geocache itself why would I say it is one of those geocaches which are hard to pick up on some days and no problem on other? So in the autumn, winter there is not a single muggle in the area, but in the summer I am sure they are all over the place. Parking is not a problem at this geocache ... ... not a problem at this time of the year, a huge parking lot and not a single car, but I'm sure there is hard to find a slot in the summer on a sunny day. Why, why? you might ask ... Ok, there is a beach right next to it with all the fun for kids and adults. A picture of the strand taken from the car while driving away ... Just imagine how busy it is in the summer, back when I was a kid there were no such place anywhere close to where I grew up, lucky f...

If you travel the same route long enough to get bored with it, there is nothing better than changing the stops or adding some at least once in a while. I regularly need to drive from the airport at Budapest to Tiszaújváros and so far most of the geocaches along this route (M3) is represented as a smiley on my geocaching map. A magnetic PET preform This geocache is a bit off my regular route. So this is how it happened, while driving there is this huge intersection where you need to exit towards M0 and the airport. I was driving then there was this huge traffic jam where I was just driving with the speed I could have walked. Then I was so concentrated on the traffic jam that when it ended I forgot to take the exit, so I kept on driving towards the city center of Budapest. Yes, it is hiding there... Missing the exit is usually coming with some extra miles and time but as I was not in any hurry I did not really mind it, so I pulled down to the filling station. Then the lights ...

Some cities have a border trail, they are a kind of trails where they place the geocaches around a city's border. Now that itself is interesting, when you have a bigger city, but how about around a capital of a country. Now that is something, but believe or not it is well maintained after 6 years out in the wild. The trail has hundreds of geocaches along all different areas. Relax, I won't share each and every piece of them I find as that could be boring after a few finds, but I will show some of the hides in my blogposts. Geocache in the tree... As many of the European trails this one also have a lots of pet preforms. I also use them to hide, but I prefer to enhance them a bit not just put them out there. Some of the geocaches are mistery hides with easier like add this and that to the coord and you have the final and some with more difficult ways to get the final coords. They are placed on the map to follow the border of Budapest, but on areas where placing out the ge...

I had some extra minutes during my weekend and I decided to use the new duck tape I just brought back from Memphis. Camouflaged for the woods I saw this duck tape used on many geocaches in the USA, so I was sure it is something easy to buy, but I could not find it any stores. On my last trip to Memphis I decided I will look into many different and cheap stores as well. After three days searching I finally found one and only one roll in a dollar store. Now I have the brand, it is  duckbrand.com . I visited their site and could not find this pattern anywhere, so I'll have to keep on finding this in dollar stores I guess. If you know any better source do not hesitate let me know. So here is what I used for the above two geocaches: Materials used The tape itself is not the best glued one, but with some help it sticks perfectly. What I did was to put that wire around the neck of the containers then cover both fully with the duck tape starting at the top and bottom and then...

A really busy day at work and around the house. A bit tired, but let's finish the day with some geocaches. This one was the first I picked to go after, not far from home, so a short drive and we can start searching. Ducks don't sit in trees and bushes As in many cases we take the longer more fun way to go close to the geocaches, this is exactly how we did it with this one. There was some footprints going one way and I followed it. It was full with nettle and guess what I was wearing, of course shorts, it was good weather. Good weather in the Netherlands in general doesn't mean some would not wear layers, many of them. The duck in the bush Of course the way I was coming was on the other side of this bush, so I could not see the duck from that side. I once, and only once saw these ducks on sale in a cheap store in Germany and since then I regret not buying them. I since got some crows which are in progress, I need to find some perfect location for them to hide, bu...

Not all under the bridge hides are difficulty and/or terrain five. Some are really a park and grab type, but some are nicer made than other, just like this one. The geocache It is no more than a typical petling, but hidden in a piece of wooden plank and that was hidden under the bridge. Really well done, muggle safe solution. Hiding under the bridge The only thing that quickly gave this hide away was the fact that so many geocachers found it in the recent period that they left a clear footpath behind. I'm not sure if this is a benefit or a disadvantage that this game is so popular in the Netherlands. On one hand, as it is popular, there are many geocachers reached the point that they start hiding as their close area is smiling all over. On the other hand most geocaches are found at least weekly but many each day multiple times, and that leads to easy finds at many locations. The bridge Nope, not all bridge needs to be big, and hard to find a geocache under it. T...

Let me see, what did I have this morning. Was it a hide at a high voltage location or a high stress? It all started when I decided to fill up the 366 days find matrix. I still have a lots of missing dates there, but if I do not try it will never be filled. I had to travel for my work and the day of the travel was missing, so I told my colleague that we need to stop along the highway to find a geocache. He used to geocache with me before so he was into it, he even convinced me to stop at more geocaches. Two out of three was that day, so that was fun. The geocache in the grass under some construction ... If you look at the hide above it does not look any like stress or high voltage at all. What caused the stress then? The week passed by and did not have much time to find more geocaches but that was ok, I only had today missing, so I was looking at the map, two candidates in reach. One along the highway and one in the neighboring village, looking at the possibilities if I pick the...

In bushes and forests it is a typical way of covering up the geocache with branches and crust, this hide is one of those. The geocache uncovered. In the Netherlands it is common to have series with a bonus container at the end. You need to find all or some of the containers and they will contain some bonus information which you need to note and when you have all needed information you can figure out the coordinates of the bonus cache. This geocache is part of such a serie, but what happened when we were doing the others this one was muggled for the nth time, so missing, it had one number needed to get the bonus coordinates, so what we did was checking on the map all the possible (10) coordinates and there were only a few that was not overlapping with any other geocaches in the area and only one that was not under water (in the lake). Based on the terrain level not too high the only one we had to check was close to the last geocache from the serie (also a hint), so we found that a...

When it comes to PET preforms, I always prefer to add some to them to make the hide a bit more fun to find. Here is my implementation of the sempervivum. The sempervivum on top of the cap. All you need to make this geocache is: a PET preform (petling) a plastic sempervivum (you can find it in local dollar stores, action stores, look at the decoration departments, if you are luck they might have ones broken for like 10 cents, but they are the best for this) a green cap for the petling, I prefer a dark one but you can pick any color a drill to drill a hole through the cap to put the sempervivum in it. some glue to properly glue the sempervivum to the cap, in and outside (that helps to maintain waterproofness)   Inside the cap As you can see above the glue is not only keeping the sempervivum in place but also makes sure that the cap will still be waterproof. I see many petlings while geocaching that has a screw holding some objects on top of the cap, but that'...

Sunny day in Pécs, and I mean seriously a sunny one, at the end of the day I had a headache and burn on my head. But I won't remember that in a week from now, all that I will is how many geocaches we found, and that in Baranya county different geocachers started to place geocaches next to roadside crosses, just like this one. The geocache taken out of its hiding place. Some of the main roads in Baranya have many of these roadside crosses, just like 58, so we decided to put some smiley on this road today and then getting inspired by the effort by the others we went for a different hunt, we started driving around to see if we can find more of these roadside crosses and if we do and it is easy we'll place a geocache next to it. I had help, my daughter who did some videos and pictures and my nephew who enjoys geocaching but his parents are not taking him to have some fun. My daughter took a few pictures and videos, and laughed at us in case we did anything unneeded. The ...