Lydford Locators

Fantastic news Wendy, many congratulations.

Yes - our coin arrived today - will try to get it dropped off in the North Wiltshire area this weekend.

Gadzooks - 1000 caches! Verily has your status in geocaching society increased upon the success of your latest quest. Perchance you and your good lady celebrated the occasion with a veritable feast and flagons of foaming ale? (well, something from the chippy!)

We've got lots of fond memories of your very sneaky hides - those cachers down under don't realise what they're in for. Glad we eventually got to meet you at Taunton. Goodbye and good luck. xx

We'd like to nominate ourselves for the biggest whoops this year: Grandma Locator was feeling a bit miserable having been stuck indoors for several months caring for Grandpa who'd been suffering with a long illness. We thought it would be nice to take her out for a little bit of simple geocaching to blow away the cobwebs. However at GC10T8K The Big Brookwood Tree with a terrain of 2 there was a sudden thump - Grandma Locator had taken a tumble! Upon inspection it became apparent that she'd broken her leg!! (The bone sticking out was a bit of a giveaway) With GPS co-ords and mobile phone we thought it should be quite easy to get help, but no - apparently the ambulance crew couldn't use our co-ords. Mrs Locator had to abandon Grandma and the kids in the woods, and go off to find the nearest road to try to find where she was, wait for the ambulance and paramedic to find her and then they all processed back into the woods to find Grandma again. It took a while to try to explain what Grandma was doing inside a huge rhododendron bush, but they spotted the cache in it's hiding place and guessed we were geocachers. Extracting Grandma was a major affair and it took over 2 hours to get her out and safely off to the nearest hospital. 72 year old Grandma had a 4 hour operation to mend the 6 breaks in her right leg with pins and pegs. After spending 6 weeks in hospital she was allowed home, but she's now confined to a wheelchair and will probably not be walking well for at least another year! Whoops!!

Found our 1 th cache this week and no sign of us slowing down (yet).

Exactly what we look for when planning our caching day, particularly now they're going to be in muddy wellies, wet coats, etc. Our 7 & 8 year old don't mind a walk of up to 7 miles but they need decent sized boxes along the way to keep the motivation going.

Well done Jon, BIG respect from us.

We can definately top that worse cache experience ... On 3 September we went to GC10T8K and whilst in the middle of the woods in a very inaccessible place, the 72 year old member of our team broke their leg in 6 places. It took paramedics quite some time to find us and then over 2 hours to extracate her. She needed a 4 hour operation to repair the multiple breaks and insert a load of metal into her leg. 5 weeks on and she's still in hospital! It was a lovely little cache that could have been so easy, however we do wish we'd just stayed at home that day.

We highly recommend the Walmart boxes. Several of our caches have survived many weeks completely submerged in the recent floods and we are pleased to say that the seal on the Walmart box did its job and the contents stayed safe and dry.

Well we're not back yet!!

Well if HazelS can sing her own praises, so will we ... Congrats to everyone who achieved a milestone at the Shrops event - including us, we made our 900th!

Although we can't help you, we had an idea .. There may be an attendee for "Shropshire 2007 - The Philosopher's Stone" Event GC13AJ2 able to retrieve the TB and take with them to the event. The Cotswold venue would then be a good place to find another cacher to take it nearer it's goal. We don't have anyone in mind, but there is quite a large number of cachers due to attend. Only downside to this brainwave is that the event is tomorrow!

A good way to fool FTFers is to publish caches, not only one at a time so they go out for one but miss the others, but mid to late morning at the weekend when the keen cachers have already set out on their caching day and the less addicted cachers may still at home.

We've just got back from a week in the New Forest with our 7 & 8 year olds and had a fantastic time. We weren't camping this time, but we've previously stayed at the Holmsley camp site which is well positioned for the forest. We did our favourite ever cache when we did Pirates Surprise GC12N18, so would definately recommend that if you get a chance - but make sure you read the instruction before you attempt it though as it's not always available. An area we went to upon another cacher's recommendation was to the west of Bournemouth, which instead of being urban caches as expected, were infact amongst lovely wooded chines and were very handy for the beach too! All in all we highly recommend all the caches we tried, but we did manage to pick up a tick so do watch out. Hope you have a good time.

We like Wetherspoon pubs - you get 30 minutes internet access for every drink you buy!

This sounds excellent - we would have gladly helped you out, and it's local to us, but unfortunately we are not free on the day - arghhh!

I'll be camping at The Trout Inn the first weekend in August.... assuming that their camping field isn't still somewhere under the River Thames... for a small folk festival. Now I get 'folked out' after a couple of hours and was looking forward to finding your caches when I get an hour or two to sneak off on my own. Hope they've survived.... Your nearest cache will be GCYN7G and we've managed to see it in the distance safe and dry (although at present unreachable) - can't say the same for the caravans in the site, with the water level half way up their doors! We fear that many of the other nearby Thames caches will be submerged, if not lost, but we'll do our best to do maintenance visits ASAP after the floods subside.

We have a series of Thames Path caches running from source to St John's Lock near Lechlade - an area that's severely flooded. Our attempts to carry out cache maintenance was abandoned at the weekend as the floods were too deep for our cachemobile. Luckily most of our hides were in elevated positions so hopefully will have survived, but some were not so elevated as they were on higher ground - however we now suspect it may have not been high enough! We've got our fingers crossed that the caches survive - with just some drying out required, but at this stage all we can do is sit and wait for the water to subside.

Thanks everyone for all your kind messages, it was great to see you all at the event at the weekend. Hopefully we will manage to join the elite millennium club by the end of this year ... watch this space!

We saw the coin at Burrington Coombe Event (didn't log it then as we lost the code number), but then saw it again at the Dreaming Spires Cache Bash 2007. We've subsequently set a wheelchair friendly urban multi called Historic Cricklade GC11K3K. Hope you manage to get all your data back, keep up the good work.

Added some more for our area.

We can certainly tell that you are not over here in the UK! Nettles are probably the worse part of caching this side of the pond - for more than half the year they take over almost every hedgerow and large expanses of field edges. Most cachers we know wear long trousers and sleeves even in the hottest weather, and carry sting spray at the top of their caching bag because it's almost impossible to reach the majority of caches without the liklihood of getting stung by the little devils.

Congratulations JollyJax, it was great to meet you at last and feel proud that this impressive milestone was reached at OUR event!

Here's the junior Lydford Locators with their first Diabetes TB demonstrating that geocaching can be fun for all the family! http://img.geocaching.com/track/log/b068d2...ea0f629a4f0.jpg