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Danube Cruise GeoTrail


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This depends where the boat docks. On a river cruise I would mainly get off and go for a walk to cache rather than go on the tour. Many of the local caches gave information about the area, so like being on a tour, without making me feel I was a dog on a leash as organised tours made me feel. I would get such 'itchy' feet. When is this tour ending; when is this tour ending...? I want to do my thing...cache; take nice photographs, often of things not shown on tours. Graffiti, alley ways, etc. Such as attached photograph - NOT taken on a tour, but me exploring and caching.

There are many caches available. You should have no trouble finding at least one cache in every country. I found more than that. I list the number of caches I found in each country to give you an idea how easy it is to find caches.

Hungary 32 (start of cruise, so I arrived a couple of days earlier to look around and cache)

Austria 11

Germany 44 (some of these were found earlier, but still many found on the cruise)

Slovakia 8

Netherlands 26 (end of cruise, so found during and after the cruise)

I loaded my GPS with caches and mainly used that. I preloaded caches onto my laptop as a back up, but loaded a fresh load onto the GPS. The back up was only if I was unable to load the latest query. My river cruise boat included wi-fi, but I also bought a local European simcard, that worked in all the countries on my trip, except (for some strange reason) Austria, which wasn't included in the countries list. But I had my GPS.

 

Passau 9.jpg  (I was told how to make this smaller, but can't remember how.)

Edited by Goldenwattle
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12 hours ago, Goldenwattle said:

This depends where the boat docks. On a river cruise I would mainly get off and go for a walk to cache rather than go on the tour. Many of the local caches gave information about the area, so like being on a tour, without making me feel I was a dog on a leash as organised tours made me feel. I would get such 'itchy' feet. When is this tour ending; when is this tour ending...? I want to do my thing...cache; take nice photographs, often of things not shown on tours. Graffiti, alley ways, etc. Such as attached photograph - NOT taken on a tour, but me exploring and caching.

There are many caches available. You should have no trouble finding at least one cache in every country. I found more than that. I list the number of caches I found in each country to give you an idea how easy it is to find caches.

Hungary 32 (start of cruise, so I arrived a couple of days earlier to look around and cache)

Austria 11

Germany 44 (some of these were found earlier, but still many found on the cruise)

Slovakia 8

Netherlands 26 (end of cruise, so found during and after the cruise)

I loaded my GPS with caches and mainly used that. I preloaded caches onto my laptop as a back up, but loaded a fresh load onto the GPS. The back up was only if I was unable to load the latest query. My river cruise boat included wi-fi, but I also bought a local European simcard, that worked in all the countries on my trip, except (for some strange reason) Austria, which wasn't included in the countries list. But I had my GPS.

 

Passau 9.jpg  (I was told how to make this smaller, but can't remember how.)

 

Huh. I pictured you somewhat older.

Well, you really never know online!

  • Funny 4
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8 hours ago, TeamRabbitRun said:

Huh. I pictured you somewhat older.

Well, you really never know online!

:laughing: Not blonde either, despite my name.

 

Now, if I had been in a tour group I doubt the child would have posed so naturally. And likely others on tour would have got in the way of the photograph. I was about to photograph the coloured paths, when the child walked out from the right and stood there. Lucky moment, as she improved the photograph. Her parents were close behind.

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On our Danube/Main/Rhine cruise in 2018 I just loaded PQs for each city stop. We joined the (included) cruise tours which were all very interesting and mostly done before lunch. This left the afternoon free to do other stuff including geocaching which took us to not so familiar tourist spots which were still very intersting. We didn't feel like we had to find them all and, looking back, there were a lots of things in the tours of historical interest - to us. We could also pick up a few quick finds along the way.

One thing I noticed were a lot of Virtuals however many were time consuming with many stages . We gave those a miss (it's all about the numbers init :P).

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Thanks for the responses! Kind of what I figured is to load some up once the boat lands or that we know where we are going to on the excursion. If I'm lucky the tour guides will know where some are near to the tours.

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3 hours ago, LordJeff said:

Thanks for the responses! Kind of what I figured is to load some up once the boat lands or that we know where we are going to on the excursion. If I'm lucky the tour guides will know where some are near to the tours.

My experience of the tours was that they left very little time for caching. I was continuously running to catch up.

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On 8/27/2024 at 12:22 PM, Goldenwattle said:

My experience of the tours was that they left very little time for caching. I was continuously running to catch up.

This was also my experience however I found I had, mostly, plenty of free time time after tours ended.

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I would scroll along your route on the map on the website and look for earthcaches or virtuals in the river.   
Cache hiders tend to be pretty savvy about where tourist are going to be and place caches that are easy to get.

Just doing a quick scan of the Danube - it seems like caches like GC9P4WF, GC9P7Y3, GC9P8DH, GC89ZV4, GC8913D, etc are set up to be found from river cruise boats.     

 

Edited by schmittfamily
added another GC
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On 8/30/2024 at 1:47 PM, colleda said:

This was also my experience however I found I had, mostly, plenty of free time time after tours ended.

Some tours might have allowed that, but many tours did not. It depended. Sometimes the boat was moored where you could walk to the town and ignore the tours (then I walked for many kms), but other times it was moored kms away and you were bused to town. If I didn't need to I would usually avoid going on the tours, but sometimes I had no choice, as the boat was moored kms from town, and I had to take the tour to get to town. If the tour started and finished at the same spot, I could take a WP where to meet and go off by myself, but return in time to get the bus back. However, many tours didn't do that. Start and finish were not the same place, and I was forced 😢😠 to take the tour, so as to catch the bus back. This frustrated and annoyed me greatly, as I rarely enjoyed being dragged along and herded on a tour. Probably partly, because when younger, I did a lot of travelling by myself, with no set plan, aside from arriving and leaving. I went where I liked and was never herded and organised. And still rarely take well to this. There was an advantage once though being moored 6kms away. By chance we were moored 300m from a rare Webcam (which I never expected to find; it being 6km from town), so when I got back from the tour in the bus, I went straight to the Webcam. The reason we were moored so far away was because of water levels. More complicated than that, but that's the simple reason.

 

We were usually given an hour at the end of the tour in the town before being bused back. An hour is NOTHING, and not uncommonly the hour was among shops so we (I quote) could buy some souvenirs. %&^*# shops!!! I had zero, zilch, no interest in shops! Not a shopper. Then I would see fascinating things; interesting architecture, storm water channels with great art (graffiti) along them, gardens, etc that I would love to have explored, etc on the way back. But no, we were dumped for our free hour in a shopping centre.

 

There were faults with river cruises, but they are far superior and less rushed than cruise ships. Also many less people which made them better than large cruise ships. The crew was wonderful. The cruise director for some reason took a liking to me, and would go out of his way to try to assist me. That got a tad embarrassing :laughing:. Wanting to carry my suitcase, etc. (I was more able bodied than many on the ship.) Likely because I was showing him photographs I took, and he wanted to see them

 

On 8/31/2024 at 5:11 AM, schmittfamily said:

Just doing a quick scan of the Danube - it seems like caches like GC9P4WF, GC9P7Y3, GC9P8DH, GC89ZV4, GC8913D, etc are set up to be found from river cruise boats. 

For interest I checked, but found none of those on my river cruise. One of those GC89ZV4 is in Japan.

 

 

 

Edited by Goldenwattle
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