Our first cache has been found!

So excited.  We’re the proud owners of a plastic jar containing christmas cracker tat, hidden half way up a hill in France.  Not only that, but it’s been found within a week of hiding it and then again the week after! Yipee.

The kids were itching to hide their own stash (can’t remember whether I encouraged it or not ) so we thought we’d find a holiday location that meant something to us and led finders to spectacular views.  It didn’t take long to agree that Parc de Merlet in Les Houches would be ideal.  We’ve located it on the Petit Balcon Sud, close to the park, about an hours walk from Chamonix centre.

As you may have seen from our pervious post, this game Geocahing is refife in Chamonix.  It also seems to be growing quickly, particularly with our help   We hope others enjoy finding this cache too.

Tha cache is a Eurohike round grey container of medium size and was placed containing all sorts of wonders such as
note-book, purple gel pen, bubbles, stampers and a bead set.  Should be interesting to see how the contents have changed when we next visit it.  We’ve already been swapped ‘Lingettes rafraîchissantes’ for our ‘Tampons Encreurs’. Hum.

The coordiantes are N 45° 54.588 E 006° 49.333 and you can find more details at the Geocahing site.

Unfortunately it was rather damp when we stashed it so I don’t have photos of the exact view, but the photo below from inside the park itself gives you an idea of what it’s like. There are lovely views of both the Bossons and Toconnaz glaciers and Les Houches in the valley below.

Fortunately it looks as though our first finder was happy and this is what they said:

Premier FTF ! Faut dire qu’on a eu du bol de le chercher seulement une semaine apres qu’il a été posté. L’endroit est super sympa, avec une tres belle vue et on peut ensuite visite le parc animalier, tres agreable en fin d’apres-midi l’été.

We look forward to reading your logs too.

Our new addiction, Geocaching

Fortunately a GPS device isn’t just for tracking how quick or able you are, it also enters you into a great big treasure hunt game: Geocaching.

It seems it was a concept only developed 10 years ago when the US government ‘removed selective availability’ so you can now swap GPS coordinates of what ever you want.  With sat navs such as Garmins, coordinates of little plastic containers can be downloaded and we can now swap Christmas cracker tat with complete strangers to our hearts content, after a good old forage in the countryside.

More than 4 million people geocache in nearly every country on Earth. Geocachers are families with children, retired individuals and grandparents, hikers, explorers, and outdoors-people.  As we seem to fit into most of the ‘younger’ categories we thought we’d give it ago.

Having registered on the official Geocaching site we thought we’d try locally before hitting it full force on holiday.  We were amazed with how many there were in Kent and bagged 6 on out first day. Registering and joining is free and it has the added benefit of encouraging kids to walk for miles.

Coming to Chamonix we’ve identified 16 within 2 miles of the flat. The hunting has already kept us busy for parts of our first few days, but we’ve learnt lots:

• Check out the finding clues for each cache before you set out, photos and hints can be invaluable.  In the UK you can google them on a smartphone of course, but this gets rather expensive when overseas…
• Have a GPX foot path map of the local area if possible, not just road maps, as something that looks close when flying as a crow can be surprisingly far/dangerous if not on proper paths.
• Don’t get fooled by ‘earthcaches’ unless you are prepared to do all the forfeits and answer daft questions.  We down loaded the coordinates for everything local and wasted quite some time on the way to the Bossons Glacier looking for an earthcache which wasn’t a box in situ but instead expected you to answer questions, take photos and email photos before you could ‘claim it’.  Of course we only realised this when we got home…
• Don’t forget to take a pen and write a little note in the box just to say thanks.
• Go armed with plenty of small swappable items like badges, key rings, go go crazy bones, small figurines etc..  We’ve seen/picked up necklaces, packs of playing cards, packs of felt tip pens, marbles etc.
• Avoid leaving food items that animals might eat the box for.
• Look out for the trackable geocoins.  This is a proper old fashioned chain letter type of thing and you can see which countries it has travelled and decide where to take it to next.
• Don’t feel that your pleasant walk/hike has failed because you haven’t found every Tupperware box indicated on the GPX!!

We’ve had great fun so far and done many a scramble to find a little plastic box which contributes to the little bits at the bottom of the kids ‘toy box.  The views have also been rather spectacular.

Here is a picture of our first French find in Les Gaillands, La belle et la bete.

We’re team name Barratscham so please say hi when you pass us.

Electronic breadcrumbs in Chamonix

A few weeks ago I was amused by slonie’s blog that introduced the world to electronic bread crumbs.  For the uninitiated these are maps of the route you’ve taken while using your GPS. He being a cyclocross rider offered some interesting pictures.

The challenge was then set to see how these route patterns look on a ski run.  Both he and my husband have a  Garmin Edge 705, so the match seemed fair.

Well here is our first attempt.  I must admit the visibility was hopeless this morning so I wasn’t in the mood for either going off piste or traveling far, but as it was our first day in resort we had a potter.

Original picture:

And here are some artistic versions of the same: water colour

Glowing edges:

Grand Montets Glowing edges

And finally neon

So could this catch on as a new art form?