Last Cache in Austria

J and M tried to find a few other caches in Austria but there were a few that there just wasn't time for. So in a last ditch effort as it started to get dark J, M, J's sister and Boyfriend went on a mission. After all there were Travel Bugs that had not found a new home yet.
They took a short drive to some castle ruins that are located near the house they were staying in. Based in the map on their GPS they thought the cache was located in the castle or on the edge of it. But upon reaching the castle and wandering through the ruins and visiting the stage it was clear that the cache was actually located well below the castle. They did not have Topographical maps of the area. Since the castle was way up on a hill they did not know that they could not get to the cache from there. Based on the picture above you actually could just barely make out the location of the cache. It was in the field below. it was located on the other side of a fence just about in the exact middle of this picture. They almost gave up when with a little bit of patience and sharp eyes in the fast approaching darkness they located pile of sticks on the other side of a fence. They had found their cache.
There was just barely enough room for all of the Travel bugs that they wanted to place but finally the PWD_vicarious Vacation I, PR bear, and Marty the party animal had a new home. On the way out of the field this was the view they had of the castle. If J had been given more time to take the shot it would have been even more clear but the other three were trying to get back to the car as it got very dark out.
We wish we could have been there to run around in the field. Maybe we even could have cashed on cows.
Thanks for reading. When we come back it will be about finding caches in England with the Beals. It turns out Mr. Beals is really good at finding micro caches.

Quick Vienna Micro.

Parlament (vormals:Euro 08 - Fanmeile Wien)
J and M were still in Vienna after watching a film performance of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra at Rathaus Platz. They could have been finding the bus to get to J's sisters flat for the night but they knew that a cache was near. It was very well camouflaged. And because there were a bunch of Muggles around J had to try to look inconspicuous. He noticed the lid to this cache. This Pic will give you a hint.
The parliment building across the street from this cache is an impressive building. There is lots of info about the parliment building at the geocaching site for this cache. Click on the picture to visit.
TFTC Glist and the family that orginally placed it.

Last Day of summer...Time for Hybernation.

No we don't let summer ending end our out door fun. But J does go back to school and that means less time to wander and adventure. This post will be about two caches. The second foreign cache found in Vienna and the recent cache Hybernation. I know the Hybernation is spelled wrong it wasn't me that is what the person called it.
J had his first day of work for the 2008-2009 school year on Monday and felt guilty about leaving us inside all day so thought he would come home and bring us out for one easy cache. Hybernation was a nice walk along the Blue and Orange trails on the westside of the Vernon Rails to Trails Near Valley falls park. We found this trail about a year ago in the winter and when we saw all of the mountain laurels we thought we need to make sure we come back in the spring when the Mountain Laurels are in bloom. We still havent been there for that but will need to go back in Spring of 2009.

The Cache certainly would be deceiving if you were to try to get to it from the Vernon Rail to Trails directly. The steep climb is what turned us off when we walked by before. The Blue Trail is the way to go. We wandered a little and didn't find any water; there were a couple of places that were almost caves! Here we are in-front of the "cave" that held this cache:Cora was hoping for some treats

Caching in Vienna!
Oh if we could have been in Europe... J, M and J's sister took the train into Vienna front Villach near where the stayed. The Cool thing about Austria is they love dogs almost as much as England. It seems that Europe in general loves their dogs. We actually could have riden the train with them. No restrictions saying dogs over 10 pounds have to be in crates. Here is a pictures the collie was waiting to get on the train...
and Jand M tell us that there was a dog "loose" on the train. They finally got into Vienna after a 4 hour ride through the Austrian countryside. Unfortunately they did not see many dogs in Vienna and we probably wouldn't have been allowed in the art museums or Opera Houses.
But J and M did find a cache next too this statue on the outside of Burg Theatre.
We learned that this cache disapeared less than a week after we found it. Oh well. There will be more stories to come.
Thanks for reading.

First Foreign Cache

We couldn't be there ":-( except in spirit as J and his sister found our first foreign cache. It was actually a really easy find. J's sister knew what wooden bridge was being referred to and led J and M right too it.
Here is J's sister at the cache. Even though it was a micro we managed to leave a couple calling cards. Hope someone out there is reading about our adventures!
After finding the cache they went on a 16 mile bike ride. It was exhausting because there were two choice up or downhill. The down was fine but everytime they went down they had to come back up. The bike ride was a good way to take in the Austrian countryside but not a good way to take pics though.
Enjoy and TFTC Rockmountain! We will be updating in the future with our other foreign caches.

M comes too and other adventure plans

We have been wanting M to come along with us for a while and she finally went out on a long walk. J was a little crazy though. The weather was hot and as it turns out the walk to this Cache was a lot longer than expected.
We started out with a short drive to Glastonbury and found the access trail into the land preserve. There are lots of great trails back here we are going to have to come back sometime when the weather is a little better for wandering.
We first tried to find the Yorah Tree spirit cache but after long search it was a DNF. We have since learned that it was moved a little and burried under duff. Thank You TofuTeam, we will have to go back for this one. The tree is really neat.
Back to the Cache. We were on the hunt for the Ruby Ridge Cache. I wish that we had brought a Geologist with us since the description says we could see rubies in the rocks, we didn't see any :-( It seemed that however far we walked the cache was always 500+ meters away. We seemed to be circling this cache. We did get to trapse through some streams though.
The cache could almost be seen in this picture except that we are in the way.Thanks for the Cache O2agrv8u. We had fun but you can tell by how far our tongues are hanging out it was a hot day. We almost had to pull M home as her boots were giving her blisters and she was very tired.

Bigger Adventures:
M and J were going to be heading over sees but not without bringing a little bit of us with them. We had been hunting around with J for over a month now finding caches and we wanted some foreign action. Before we left we assembled some Travel bugs to bring with us. Here they are:

First is our travel bug. The Caching_PWDs Vicarious Vacation. We want to see the world but it isn't so easy for us to travel over seas. This Travel bug has a simple mission and a more complex one. First see the world. But who doesn't want to do that. Second since SASE is from Sweden. Visit her home! The next two travel bugs are ones taht we picked up along our previous journeys.The PR bear is a little teddy bear with the Puerto Rican Flag on it. It was especially cute since a little girl placed it and wants it to travel the world and send plenty of pictures. (We need to send her some more!). We new that this oversea journey was going to happen so we thought we should help this Travel Bug on it's way for the Young girl.Marty the Party Animal was our first Travel bug find we snatched it up fast and held onto it for way to long before we sent it on it's way. Marty has already been on quite a journey after it started in New Zealand.

We are going to update our foreign caches soon even though we could only be there in spirit. Thanks for Reading and if you want to learn more about the M and J's overseas trip check the Experiment Gone Awry Blog.

More Days of Caching...Computer in the Shop

The computer had to go into the shop for a few days this is why we didn't update sooner after our caching adventures! This will get you all up to speed on what we have been doing when not at home and helping with the vegetable garden. We didn't let no computer get in the way of our caching adventures. The only thing that has slowed us down in the weather. Mostly heat and humidity. (We have long hair don't blame us we look good in it.) Not to be put off we had already downloaded some extra caches to find before the computer went into the shop.

Cache 1: James
This was a really nice walk on a trail that we had never been on before. Here we are at the Trail head. What is that bright red dot on the tree. We are going to have to go look at that again.The trail followed the Hockanum river but we weren't allowed to go in because the bottom was mucky in all of the slow moving sections. We are not sure that we will go back to this section of trail in the summer again because we found 3 ticks on us when we returned. How many does that mean we didn't find?
Beware this next picture is a Spoiler if you can't find the cache from this one than you don't have your eyes open.
Here we are right next to the cache. The rock pile hint should have been a give away but because of the bounce that we have experienced in the past we were looking at every pile of rocks that were between any trees no matter how far apart. We did eventually find our prize.Time for the trip home. We did see a deer in the woods but started barking at it instead of taking a picture. Oh well. Thanks for the Cache Katydid and Miles Stone.

Cache 2: Tim and Pete's Excellent Adventure Part 2
We have always liked the Vernon rails to trails they are a nice easy walk and because they have nice shady trees over them they are cooler in the summer. If you haven't read past blogs look back at the previous post "A long walk with a sidetrack and surprise" posted on Monday July 7th. Again thanks Tim and Pete for what you did.
We totally missed taking a picture of the first post on the Manchester Branch of the trail because we didn't see it. We were looking at the road and the garden we didn't see the trail post. When we came back there were too many Muggles around and we thought it would be weird to take a picture of a post with them around.

Here we are a little less than 2 miles into the walk at the end post. Time to go home !

Cache 3: Cache Across America Connecticut Our First Multi Cache?
We couldn't stop there. We came back to the Depot trail pavillion and thought why not take another shot at the Cache Across America Multi that was supposed to start here. We took a little side track off of the main trail. It almost looked like a trail.

We looked around a whole bunch because we weren't sure what we were looking for at stage one of this multi. There were lots of rocks in the area to look around, behind and under. We found it this picture should be a pretty good indicator of the location. What a good picture this is! We look great! Tongues hangin out and all!
We wondered if this is really what all multi-caches are like. We were expecting only to find the first clue today and then come back another day to finish off this adventure. But we were pleasently surprised to finished this Cache when we did!

This Cache got us thinking about our next great adventure. This summer we are going to vicariously travel to Europe. We won't be welcome on the plane and it would be difficult to get us there for only 2 weeks! But we have been promised to be well represented by Josh and Marika while they are away.
But NEXT SUMMER! We thought that we could start on a big push to find all of the Cache Across America caches. We figure that it could take a few years but we better get on it if we want to find them all. From looking at the Geocaching site no one has found them all or found the Series Final. We thought we could get a big start and get 16 in one summer by driving across country and then up to Alaska! It would be our own Excellent Adventure. We could make a couple of summers out of it. Nice long road trips seeing new places smelling new smells! It would be Excellent. We are going to have to keep on working on Marika to make it happen. At Anyrate thanks for placing the Cache Across America so close to us in Vernon. TFTC Heckle and Daddy's Girl.

Cache 4: Tennis Enyone? (TE)
We thought on this hot day that it would be good to take a walk up the hill to where Josh works! We loved the name of this cache and figured that it would be a quick find.
The day was a little hotter than we planned on but the Cache was a quick, and fun one. There really was limited chance of exposure to students for two reasons. First it is summer there aren't many around anyways but The cache is also more located in the Orchard.

Here we are under the peach tree that marks the easiest place to find this cache. We wondered if we should take a peach they looked so good. They probably aren't ripe yet and we don't know who is responsible for this orchard.TFTC Jaspercacher.
This is the first cache we got to leave our calling card in! They just arrived in the mail!

Too all that have found this site and the loyal followers please come back to follow all of the adventure of these two parti girls. Happy Huntin' Maybe we will start finding some good dog treats in these caches!

A long walk with a sidetrack and a suprise!

As promised we would put a picture of the starting point for our recent adventures. This really is a great spot to start a walk. They are only missing one thing that two crazy water dogs want... Some water.
We start our journey today planing to accomplish one cache. But we did better than that.

Tim and Pete's Excellent Adventure Virtual Cache:
This Rail Depot pavilion pictured above was built as an Eagle Scout project. That is really awesome. Our owner is an Eagle Scout it really is an achievement to be proud of. This Cache was named after two Eagle Scouts. First Tim mentioned above and next is Pete who put up mile marker posts along the Rails to Trails. This is another great Eagle Scout Project. The benefit to the public is great. Awesome job Pete and Tim!
Pictured here is the beginning of today's journey. This is the first of Pete's mile marker poles on the Rail Trail leading to Bolton. We were on a mission to see how many there were and we decided to start on the longest trail leading to Bolton. We meant to take another picture of the post right before the last one but there were lots of muggles out walking the trail and thought they would think it strange to see us stopping to take pictures all the time.
Here we are the Beginning of the End of our journey. We have reached the ironically named End Pole. Why do we think this pole is ironically labeled? The trail quite clearly continues on for many more miles beyond this post. There should be a road marker stating the distance to points in each direction traveling along this trail. This was only the beginning of the end because we now have to walk back to the start approximately 3.5 miles more to go. And we now planned to find some more caches that we scoped out along the way.
We thought about the Box hill Jeep Trail cache and Hybernation. But these both looked like more work than we wanted to do today but we scoped out our approach for the future.

We ended up finding the
VF series -Warm up - the Braille trail Micro Cache:
Here we are on a break after finding our cache this was on the way home from the end of Tim and Pete's Excellent Adventure. We took a little side track to enter into Valley Falls. We made one mistake on our way in and took the left trail which resulted in a little bit of a stream crossing. Our owner stayed dry but we got to get wet! We thought that we had made a mistake after crossing the stream because of the bounce we experienced. But using the hint to guide us we found our first Micro Cache under our resting spot! We are getting much better at this, it only took us a few minutes to find this cache. We were happy since our walk to the end of the Rail trail made us tired.

Heavy Metal Micro Cache (or should we say Nano Cache):
Since this cache was on our way home and didn't involve any more sidetracks we thought we would give it another try. We had looked for this Cache before and had no luck finding it. This time with almost no difficulty the cache jumped right out at us. There was some heavy metal on the site but what we were looking for was much lighter and only about the size of an eraser cap. This is the first time we have been able to find a Nano Cache.
It was a successful day we are going to go home, rest and drink plenty of water. Thanks for the caches snowboardersean, j.rages, and Natureboy56. This was another day of firsts for us since it was our first Vitual Cache, First Micro Cache and First Nano Cache. Our advice carry water when caching, either that or plan a swimming hole along the way!

3 in one day!

We obviously are new to this GeoCaching thing, because even in the written logs there are messages from people saying that they have found 5 or more caches that day. But we are Newbies and we are pleased that we found 3 in one day and it only took us about 2.5 hours. We loved the walking but started to get hot by the end of this adventure. We are going to rest well when we get home.
Here is the story of today's adventures.

Cache 1: Dobson Road Bridge Dam
We started out on a new trail that we have never explored before. It starts at a little dirt turn off on the left immediately after the bridge on Dobson street crosses 84. This is a really nice trail area. We will have to go back next time when we don't have a mission to find more caches and explore the rest of the trail. The Bounce was a little bit of trouble but not bad. We have learn to go with our instincts more and also to allow the GPS to settle on a direction and location.Here we are right next two our first cache of the day and our Third Cache overall. We don't look that tired yet but we were getting there. We had to pause for a few moments to bark at a passer by. We try not to show any muggles what we are doing but we sometimes can't help ourselves.
We found 2 travel bugs today the First is the PR Bear. Placed their by a 5 year old girl. SASE says sorry if there is a little drool on the Bear. She was kissing it good bye and wishing it well on it's journey. It turns out this Travel Bug had only been there a few days and that this was the beginning of it's journey. We might try to get this one back and bring it to Austria with us later because of the Cute little girls that left it here.
The second was called CritterBug
This travel bug was also there it has been around a while and started in Nevada. The travel bugs are a really cool idea. We are going to place some of our own in Austria and England this summer.
We were sad to leave this area without getting to go for a swim but we didn't want to get the car wet as we set off for our next cache.
Cache 2: Vernon Depot Rail Trail
Next we headed off on the Vernon Rails to Trails at the Church street parking area. This is a really nice place to walk we get really excited when we are brought here to explore. We are going to have to include a picture of this place sometime because we have started there twice now to find our caches.
This cache had a clue in the description we thought would make it really easy to find. But alas there was no bright orange marking on this rock that we could see. The cache was really easy to find and we were not the first ones that had paid it a visit today.
We are beginning to get hot and want some water but we will persevere. This picture not only gives you a big clue but also shows off our really cool leash that we walk on. We probably could wander free but... rules are rules. Vist Larzpetgear.com to learn more about our leash. Our owner really likes them and promised to pass the good word around for this little company out in California that makes a great custom product but has been working hard to keep their head above water.
But back to the caches.

Cache 3: Curious George
This cache was named by a person name G. I assume that this is the first initial of a little girl based on the description of the Cache. We walked right to this one but looked around a little before we found it.
Notice the tongues we are getting really steamy. If it wasn't for this long hair we would probably be fine. But we love our fancy haircuts.
Here we are still looking around. The obvious tree behind us should have been a really quick give away but we were in the middle of a forest.
We also got to see a neat little spring right near this cache. It was a little dirty though, so we didn't get to go swimming in this either.
This frog didn't see us comingThis one spotted us early and was watching us the whole time from a safe spot in the water.
We had a really great time geocaching today. TFTCs WideGlide, DigitalDiarist, and Westy13. A special thanks to the little girl who placed PR bear. If it is still around in a week we will go snatch and travel it to Austria with us. 257 Roberts the Critterbug is till traveling around.
Enjoy!

Our Second Cache

We headed off for a nice walk on the Vernon Rails to Trails. This is one of our favorite walks. The spread for several miles. Before we left we added several Caches, that we thought would be on the Vernon Rail to Trail, to our GPS. The first few we decided we didn't have time for as they were multi caches or involved a long walk to the "end" of the trail. Then we forgot to stop and look for one of them and decided to look on the way back.
We finally locked onto a Cache we thought would be a good one for our second trip out. This was located in Valley Falls along the Yellow trail. This was a great choice since we got to wade through a few streams. Once we finally located the very approximate location of the cache near one of the bridges on the yellow trail we started to narrow down the location of this cache. We had to use the hints and the log a bunch of times to see if that would really help us. They were helpful but the real challenge was the GPS bounce as a result of dense leaf cover and the fact that we were located in a Valley. We should have trusted the direction the GPS mostly wanted to send us in more. And that we had to cross not only one stream but two (the second one being really small). Then wander up a hill.
Here were are proudly sitting in front of our second Cache:
We also found a cache of a different sort. No GPS required just looking at what is going on around us. This is an Ornate Box Turtle. We scared it a little because we had to wait until he stuck his head back out of his shell to get the picture.
Thanks for the Cache Michaud Gang And a special thanks to Marty the Party Animal! We hope to place this travel bug someplace special since it was our first ever found.