Readers of this blog will know that I’ve been doing quite a bit of mountain-biking recently and armed with my trusty Forerunner GPSr have of course been recording where I’ve been. Many of the routes have been along properly way-marked trails at trail centres, other have been in more remote areas so I thought I would share some of my favourites routes with you here.
First up is ‘Anglers and Artists’, a nice remote route around various lakes in Mid Wales. It also passes close to some of the geocaches I’ve hidden in the area. The total route is 20km long and starts off relatively high, has a steady, undulating start followed by a nice descent into Artists Valley and then a long climb back to the car.
The best place to park is just over the top of the hill on...
I’ve been wanting to ride at Llandegla for a while now so on our way back from Wrexham we stopped off at Llandegla and I finally had my chance.
As we pulled into the car park it looked really busy, people and bikes everywhere but I guess that was to be expected on a bank holiday weekend.
After a quick look around the shop and visitor centre we walked back up to the car in the overflow car park and got ready. I had planned to do the full red route and black route whilst Anna and Morgan were going around the 3 mile long Green route. Anna was going to walk with Morgan on his little balance bike.
We set off together and once on the trail it wasn’t nearly as busy as it looked I did pass quite a few people and there were often people stood around at the beginnings of certain...
OK, OK, don’t get too excited you won’t be seeing us on the TV!
After our recent trip to the Isle of Man I was contacted by someone at the BBC on the island to write a little article about our experiences geocaching on the Isle of Man.
I did, and it is now live on the BBC Isle of Man website. You can see the article here:......
I couldn’t resist another day out on my bike in the sunny weather, so after tidying up some loose ends as far as work was concerned I headed off on my bike and I hid a new geocache while I was out there. I won’t give too much away about its location but it provides lovely views over the Dyfi Estuary and hopefully the cache itself will prove just a little tricky for some people
It was inspired by the Assume Nothing series of Geocaches that we had fun with on our recent trip to the Isle of Man. It isn’t too tricky but may fix a few people if they don’t pay attention to the description. Lets just say the container is well camouflaged! Click here for the Assume Nothing Wales #1 (Bark) geoacache description.
We have a few more planned to make this into a little series...
Happy Humphrey, a prolific geocache hider on the Isle of Man certainly kept us busy on our recent trip to the Island, especially with a few attempts on his ‘Assume Nothing IOM’ series.
We should have started at the beginning really as we DNF’d (Did not Find) our first attempts on number 2 and number 6 in the series. However, on the last day of our trip we headed for the first in the series and found it without too many problems. So we then went back to Number 2 with the right frame of mind and also found it within seconds. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to go to any of the others but next time we are on the island we shall be in search of them again.
Inspired by the series we will hopefully be hiding some similar ‘Assume Nothing’ caches in Wales in...
We’ve just got back from a trip to the Isle of Man and as we flew over rather than going on the boat I didn’t have any windsurfing kit with me so we did lots of geocaching instead.
The Assume Nothing series by Happy Humphrey kept us busy as did a few other caches. El Presidente involved a lovely walk from the sound to a nice big cache with some gorgeous sea views. The Long Way Round was a nice multi-stage cache with the final hiding place giving me a nice coastal walk in the sunshine.
I spent a few hours walking from one side of the island to the other (Douglas to Peel) along the Heritage Trail and found all 15 caches of the Heritage Trail Series in the process, and despite getting a little wet at one stage had an enjoyable time finding the caches and walking the trail. We...
The first stage of the aber-cachers travel bug race ended yesterday. The idea was to see how far the travel bugs could travel by moving from geocache to geocache over the course of a year. Here are the final results:
The Little Welsh Cache 11907.9 Miles
Skateboarding Sarah Miles11744.2
Jennie.m’s AberCachers race TB 11158.5 Miles
Forces-of-Nature Al - Travel Bug Race 6174.6 Miles
~*Tinkerbell*~ 2792.8 Miles
Snowboarding Dave 2340.6 Miles
Samurai Vanya - Travel Bug Race 1759.1 Miles
Samurai Dan - Travel Bug Race 1046.8 Miles
Forces-of-Nature Morgan - Travel Bug Race 570.9 Miles
Tortoiseshell’s Aberystwyth race travelbug 550.1 Miles
Red Kites Abercachers Racer Bug 111.9 Miles
The second stage of the race now begins… A race back to a geocache in...
I had a meeting with some potential web design clients today, so drove all the way to Llandysul. Unfortunately when I got there I discovered they had been trying to phone me as the person I was supposed to have the meeting with was off sick so the meeting was canceled.
Frustrating as traveling to such meetings eats into any profit I make from such a project, but if I want to get the project then I shall have to make the trip again sometime soon.
All was not lost though as I had my GPSr with me and there were geocaches nearby that I had yet to find so I decided to do some geocaching in the time I had spare.. The first was a short walk from the canceled meeting so I set off on a pleasant walk along the banks of the river Teifi. This part of the river is used by canoeists and there were lots...
We’ve just got back from a ‘proper’ family holiday in Slovenia. We stayed in Kranjska Gora in the NW of the country. It is a small resort town, aimed at snowsports in the winter and wlaking and biking in the summer. We were there at the end of the winter season so the snow wasn’t great whilst we were there, but we did manage to snowboard every day, and then on the last day it snowed properly so at least we got to see it in ‘Winter Wonderland’ guise.
Overall we had a great time. Morgan enjoyed the kids club and the swimming as well as playing in the snow. Anna and I had fun snowboarding, although Anna ended up with a few more injuries than I did! The hotel was nice, the locals friendly and we made friends with some other holiday makers there. I managed...
I haven’t long got back from an outdoor weekend in Wales.
First I drove to Liverpool and Anna, Morgan and I stayed in a Travel lodge for the night so that I could drop Anna and Morgan off at the airport early in the morning so that they couldget the plane to the Isle of Man. I then drove to Dinas Dinlle near Caernarfon where I met Steve so that we could go windsurfing. The wind was pretty strong and in the end we went out at Foryd Bay for some shelter, but even there the wind was too much so we headed off to the Snowdon Ranger Youth Hostel instead.
We then went for a nice walk around Llyn Cwellyn and found a few geocaches before signing into the Youth Hostel. here I realised I had lost y credit card so after a few frantci phone calls I had cancelled the card and made sure no...
Ever since starting geocaching I have wanted to dispense with the paper cache description and find a streamlined way of paperless geocaching. As yet there isn’t a GPSr that allows you to simply visit the geocaching.com website, do a search for parituclar caches and then upload all of their details to the GPS device. As far as I’m concerned it is about time that Garmin and Groundspeak teamed up to produce such a device as it would make things so much easier. Of course, I’m sure they will, but no doubt it will be too expensive for me and Mac support probably won’t be great.
However, now that I have a new GPSr things have improved a little. My previous experiences were time-consuming to say the least and not ideal. I had a Garmin eTrex, but no cable to connect it to...
The weather yesterday was perfect for mountain-biking, gorgeous sunshine very little wind and cool, so Harvey and I headed off to Pendam for a ride and some exploring.
From Pendam car park we cycled out past Llyn Syfydrin and along the track towards Nant-y-Moch. We saw Dave on the way so said our hello’s and then headed out along the road besides Nant-y-Moch and all the way to the top of the mountain road. We then followed the forest track to Anglers Retreat with a small diversion down a rocky, muddy trail and through a little bog. We stopped at Angler’s Retreat to check on one of my geocaches and then continued on past Llyn Penrhaeadr.
I have another geocache hidden on the shores of Llyn Penrhaeder so we decided to stop and check on this one as well. There are no obvious...
I seem to be becoming GPS enabled in all walks of life these days. It started with a Garmin eTrex that I originally bought to see how fast I could go whilst windsurfing and then started using for geocaching.
I had a TomTom One XL for my birthday which has been working well and is good fun in the car and now I’ve recently ordered a Garmin Forerunner 305.
Well, as usual at this time of year loads of people decide it is time to get fit and shed some of that Xmas excess, and I’m one of them so I have started running and mountain-biking in an attempt to regain some of my fitness. I thought if I splashed out on a GPS enabled heart-rate monitor to track my progress then I would have to keep at it in order to justify the expense.
It hasn’t arrived yet, but I shall write a...
After James and Donna’s wedding on Saturday we all had a nice breakfast at the castle and then said our goodbyes and set off on our own separate ways.
As part of the wedding arrangements and our accommodation for the weekend we had access to the various attractions at the castle so decided to have a wander around. The owl sanctuary was nice and Morgan enjoyed looking at the owls there. He also had a play on the playground. We had a nice walk around some of the gardens and admired the views from the castle itself then entered the ‘Meadowvole Maze’ which is a little walk through a giant field encountering threats to meadow voles. Morgan was actually a little scared in here. Overall Muncaster Castle looks like a really nice place to visit and given a little more time we...
We’ve not long been back from a busy long-weekend in the lake District. Lots to Blog about so I shall post individual entires for each of the main topics, but overall James and Donna’s wedding went well and we had a great time, The location was perfect, the ceremony spot on and the reception etc brilliant.
Morgan’s chicken pox got infected and he went downhill quickly so we had an emergency visit to the doctors in Seascale. We did some geocaching, played with my new gadget, drove around the Lakes and spent a night in Ambleside. All good and a nice weekend away even with the worries about Morgan, and james and Donna are now a married couple so everything was a......
We had another nice family day out on Saturday. I ‘needed’ some new technical clothing so we thought a trip up to Betws y Coed and the outdoor shops there would be good. I was after lots of things as usual, a really nice waterproof jacket for walking, a lightweight, waterproof for cycling, some waterproof trousers that could be used for both, and some windstopper type tops, oh and if funds permitted some base layer stuff and some waterproof socks for cycling too.
First stop of the day was at Coed y Brenin where we couldn’t quite believe how busy it was. I knew mountain biking was popular here but I didn’t expect quite so many people. We had a look in the bike shop where they had some nice cycling jackets and then had a cup of tea in the cafe, before heading north....
Sorry, but I haven’t had time to write proper reports on our trip to the Isle of Man, so here are some of the photos instead....
Hopefully Anna will add here perspective on our holiday to the isle of Man, and over the coming days I shall be adding some details of each day, but for now here is the overview.
We are all back safe and sound, although I wouldn’t say rested… As usual when on holiday with a 2 year old, we feel as though we need a holiday to recover, especially as the ferry crossing home was so rough! Mind you, if we had sat around resting all holiday then we wouldn’t have done much and there’s little point in that.
I did lots of driving, but we managed the whole trip on one tank of fuel (just). I did lots of windsurfing. There was wind every day and I got out every day but one. Sunday was really windy with gusts to 48 knots and I even attempted a forward loop (first one outside of...
We’ve just had a good weekend visiting family in Gloucestershire. Saturday was spent at Prinknash Abbey Park, feeding ducks and various other birds, fish, goats and deer. Morgan seemed to love it there, but unfortunately the battery in my camera ran out half way round so we don’t have that many photos of him feeding the animals.
He also enjoyed playing with Kia and Shaun which is nice. We stopped off briefly to find a couple of gecoaches, but were unsuccessful with both of them. The second one ‘A Gnarled Giant’ was near to a huge Chestnut tree known as the Tortworth chestnut which was apparently mentioned as being ‘notable’ in the 12th century, which probably makes it over 1000 years old. The plaque near to the tree suggested that it is only around...
I had a busy day on Friday. After a 5am start in order to do a couple of hours work, I took Anna to work and Morgan to nursery and then drove up to Llyn Pendam to meet Steve. We then had an enjoyable Mountain Bike ride around a combination of the Summit Trail and the Pendam Trail. We started from Pendam rather than Nant-yr-Arian.
When we finished we couldn’t quite resist a swim in the lake so after dropping off a travel bug in my nearby geocache we jumped in and had a short but very invigorating swim in the Llyn Pendam. It actually wasn;t that bad, it certainly wasn’t warm, but it wasn’t too cold either and felt quite nice.
The I had to rush home, drop off my bike, go to work for a few hours, fill up with diesel, collect Morgan from nursery, collect Anna from work and...
Saturday looked a little grey and as it was Anna’s birthday weekend a nice family day out (rather than one where I go off and do something and leave Anna with Morgan) was on the cards. A nice drive around some of the lakes of North Wales whilst stopping off to do some of the ‘Famous Five’ series of caches was the plan.
We left the house relatively early and were soon on our way up to Trawsfynydd. After a while Morgan fell asleep which gave us a break from tractor and digger spotting for a while and before we knew it we were on the shores of Lake Trawsfynydd.
All of thr Famous Five caches are multi-caches where the co-ordinates given on the website are those for a micro-cache. the micro-cache then contains the co-ordinates and a small clue for a larger cache. There are...
Jay, Jennie, Megan, Harry, Charlie, Jack and Millie the dog had survivied their first night in a tent in Borth, and as they all geocache we decided to head of into the hills with them to find the Watery Wales 1 geocaches that I had hidden… Although the wouldn’t be new cache finds for me it would give me a chance to do a maintenance visit on them, and maybe hide a fifth bonus cache for the series.
We drove up to Pendam and did the first cache whilst Morgan and Jack slept in the car. A nice easy find. The weather was lovely, the lake looked quite inviting and the cache was in good condition.
We then took a short drive to Llyn Balenmeindwr where we parked on the shores of the lake and did the cache there and walked up to Llyn Rhosgoch. We had a picnic here whilst Jay looked for...
We’ve just had another action packed weekend here in Wales. On Saturday Steve and I headed off to the Arenig hills for some geocaching while Anna looked after Morgan and took him to a birthday party in Aberystwyth.
Steve and I met up in Bala and then headed North on a little road to the south of Llyn Celyn. From there we set off towards the summit of Arenig Fawr. There was a geocache at the summit, but I also noticed whilst researching the local caches that the final cache of the famous five puzzle series was located near to the shores of Llyn Arenig that we would be passing on the way to the summit. Of course having not previously done the famous five series we wouldn’t have the final coordinates for this cache.
The walk to the lake was easy and once there we had a little...
Summer is at last back with us, so we had another family day out in the welsh hills. We took a nice drive up towards and around Nant-y-Moch in glorious sunshine. The weather really doesn’t get much better here in Wales than it was on Sunday. we then dropped down into Ponterwyd and off towards Ystumtuem where we parked up and as organ was asleep in the car I headed off across country to find a geocache.
The Bryn Bras geocache was pretty easy to find and I simply took a straight line following my GPSr right through bogs and blueberry bushes galore to the cache. The box itself was easy to find with the co-ordinates spot on. I left a geocoin and was intrigued by a small package in the ammo can that was sealed with a ote on the outside saying ‘FAO N. Gregory Sept 2007. I...
Sunday dawned wet and miserable, but I decided that I shouldn’t let such weather put me off going for a walk so headed off to the Cadair Idris an an attempt to get First to Find on some geocaches.
First stop was at Llyn Cau and by the time I got there I was drenched, I found the cache though and the log book was empty so that was FTF number one for the day under my belt. Next was an Earth cache looking at the glacial striations on a roche moutonee. All fairly basic glacial geomorphology, but nice to look at anyway and it will certainly make people without a geological background think about how the landscape in the part of Wales was formed.
I then made the long walk up the Minfford path and another FTF on a geocache at the top of Craig Amarch. From here I walked up to the summit of...
Another windless day here on Sunday so the windsurf demo day wasn’t likely to be much fun so we headed off for a family day out and some geocaching in Wales.
First stop was Llanrhystud for a walk along the beach to the interesting Craiglas Limekilns and the first cache of the day. Getting there took a little whioe due to Morgans insistence to climb over every stile himself, but the sun was shining so the walk along the coast was nice. The cache was easily found.
Cache number two was a quick cahce and dash by the side of the A487 on the way to Aberaeron. Once in Aberaeron we had a picnic near the river and I ran off to find two more caches in the woods. We then drove of for anothr cache and dash near to Llanaerchaeron, followed by what was supposed to be a fun little cache for Morgan...
We decided to give Anna a rest and a day off on her own at home yesterday. Morgan and I headed off complete with GPSr and picnic.
First stop was Machynlleth where we stopped to find the Penyrallt geocache. It was in a nice location overlooking Machynlleth and the Dyfi valley. getting to it was pretty easy, as we managed to park just 90m from it and then had a short walk around the hill on decent paths to find it. It was rated as a four star terrain cache, but is actually much easier than this. As usual once at Ground Zero it took a bit of searching to find it, but Morgan now knows what we are looking for and although not much of a help he wasn’t too much of a hindrance either! The views were nice and we even saw the train which Morgan was pleased about.
We then headed off to...
It was another hot sunny day here today so I headed off for a walk along the cliff path. I headed up onto the coast path from Borth, past the war memorial and then down into the small beach at Aberwennol before heading off onto the main section of coast path between Borth and Wallog, high up on the cliffs above the sea.
The sun was shining and it was hot work climbing to the top but the views were worth it. The sea was really clear and blue today so all the rocks and reefy areas could be clearly seen way below me. I then walked across the top and down into Wallog where I explored around the old kiln there and then walked back towards Borth along the rocks at the bottom of the cliffs.
I had intended to hide a geocache along the base of the cliffs here, hopefully somewhere around Harp Rock,...
We’ve just got back from a hot sticky day at Strata Florida. We took a detour on the way there to stop off at a geocache in Pontrhydygroes. The cache itself was easy to find and was just a short walk from the road but involved crossing the Miners Bridge which is pretty high and would have been too scary for Anna… Fortunate then that Morgan had fallen asleep so Anna and her Mum stayed in the car with him whilst I set off to retrieve the cache.
I used to spend quite a bit of time in this gorge, floating down the river and jumping off waterfalls etc so it was good to see it from a different (and much drier) vantage point. Click this link to see some photo of us gorge-walking in this Welsh valley.
Anna saw a lizard on the side of the road whilst they were waiting.
We then headed...
Well, the weekend dawned dry and windless so I planned to go geocaching. I woke at 5am on Saturday morning so headed off early which allowed me to do the bulk of the uphill section before things warmed up.
I drove to Dinas Mawwdwy and onto Cwm Cywarch where I parked up, put my boots on plugged in my iPod (listening to a Bill Bryson audio book) and started on the long slog up to the summit of Drysgol. From here I headed on up to the memorial at Drws Bach where I signed the log and claimed geocache number one for the day.
Next I continued on up to the summit of Aran Fawddwy and the highest point of the day at 905m. It was a lovely sunny day so the views where amazing. I was able to see Cadair Idris and the Mawddach estuary and out across the hills of Wales. there is a geocache on this...
