Visiting in France

[+geobarons]

I will be visiting Brest for three weeks soon. My husband and I recently took up geocaching. We got our first find on Friday. Yea!! Now we are all excited about geocaching on our upcoming trip but don't even know how to start. What maps to we need? Will we be able to read the hints when we pull up caches in geocaching.com? Any tips will be appreciated. Geobarons

[Thore]

Hi geobarons.

A quick list of hints on 'how to' in France. As you are already premium members I would suggest to start with a (pocket querie) PQ of the area that you travel to. Limit it to traditional caches as Multis and "?" require more language skills. If you have a GPS in the car, find a way to covnert the PQ into a format of 'points of interest' (POI) that the car GPS understands (for example *.ovi for TomTom). That allows you to use it to navigate close to the cache or parking coordinates on the road.

If you rely on a rental car with its own GPS, some of them have the option to program coords directly (check the format of the coords) that would help, too.

 

For the caches themselves... I am living in the south of France and my experiences are based on the local ones, so the north might be different.

In general cache listings are in french, only. Same for hints. So having a phone or an internet connection and a good translater (or a dictionary, if you are 'old school' ;-) )will help (especially for hints). In preparation you could make a list of words for common places to hide and get the french translation (like tree, wall, rock, under, inside, behind, ...) including a few synonyms. Spoilers (photos of the cache's hiding place) are common in the listing, but I would recommend to check the individual listings and have the spoilers (printout) ready if needed. Just check out some of the listings in the area you visit and see for yourself.

 

Generally, once leaving cities, Caching is not too popular in France and a lot of pepole haven't heard about it. Most caches are well placed and worth a visit. Hides are not much different from the US, so experience there will help here.

For the local wildlife any precaution that you would take in Florida, take here as well adn you will be safe ;-)

 

Finally for practice purposes, find a few more near home to get a bit of a routine. More questions, don't hesitate.

 

Thore