WauloK’s BangRocks Blog

Last weekend, Sienna wanted to go swimming with me after swimming school.  So, after school we came back home and I got my swimmers on and headed off to the local pool.  We swam around there for about two hours. Just as we were leaving they pumped up a big floating device taking up a lot of a couple of lanes of the pool. Unfortunately we had to go. We came home then went to the shops to get some groceries then back home again.  We headed to bed and I slept for three hours!

On Sunday Sienna wanted to have a picnic on our back verandah we share with other neighbours.  I thought that’d not be much fun so I suggested we go Geocaching first (or as Sienna calls it ‘Treasure Hunting’).  We drove off to Mt Ommaney and looked for the first Geocache.  After looking around for about half an hour and watching others walking through the area as it’s a shortcut under the motorway we found the cache. It was only a mini one so it had no treasure for Sienna. Oh well. We went back up the stairs nearby and sat under a tree and ate the sandwiches I made for our picnic and had our drinks.  We watched some ants becoming interested in our crumbs while we ate and bundled back into the car.

This time we drove to Jindalee and I searched around there for another Geocache. After about 10 minutes searching I found another mini cache. I signed it and we drove off again.  We stopped at a nearby park not far from home and had some fun on the swings and things for about 15 minutes or so.  We came home and Sienna had another nap.

Caches found:

The 7 Dwarfs - Bashful

Centenary Highway

On Monday we did a little Geocaching. We drove to Catherine’s home and picked her up and went to Ipswich in a park to find a Geocache called “Just chilling in the Cribb“. Lisa and Sienna went off to the playground to have fun and Catherine and I did a search. So far, Catherine and I have looked for 2 Geocaches together and found nothing. She said she must be jinxed since we never find anything. Well, within about 5 minutes I found the Geocache! I think I’ve restored her faith in Geocaching. There wasn’t much in it, so I signed the log book but my neat little pen ran out of ink so it’s only half-legible. Oh well. I dropped off a water-saver timer Sienna found on the train once. It’s a very small Geocache so not much would fit in it. After that, we went to see where Sienna and Lisa had got to. They were down on the jetty looking at kids doing some fishing.

I found a sign on the jetty which seems to request “No mooning passing boats“…

It was getting hot and Catherine suggested I ring the “Hog’s Breath” cafe to see what time they were closing after lunch. It was 1:00pm already. I phoned and they were closing at 2:30pm so we decided to call it a day and drove there for a lovely meal. I had my usual surf n turf type meal and Sienna had chicken nuggets and chips (as usual). From there, we dropped Catherine off home again and had a drink while there. Then we headed back to my place to get Sienna and Lisa’s bags. We dropped Lisa off at the airport and I dropped Sienna home (after going there then back to my place to get her school shoes which I forgot and back to her mum’s place again) and then off to Catherine’s for the night.

Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens, Two Turtle Doves and a Partridge in a Pear Tree!

Today, Lil Dwarfette and I found FIVE caches! We sure had a fun day out.

The caches we found are:

The Outlaw’s Hideaway by Team Rhino

Name that cache! by Steve & Family

The Kiss That Missed by happyharries

The 7 Dwarfs – Grumpy by Steve & Family

The 7 Dwarfs – Sneezy by Steve & Family

They were all in roughly the same area. The first one we found rather quickly. In fact, Lil Dwarfette pointed out where she thought it might be. I looked but didn’t find it there, then searched around for another 5 or so minutes before looking in the same original spot at a different angle.. There it was! She picked out a small blue and white chequered ribbon (looks like a police one heh). We dropped off a compass thermometer and went to play on the nearby swings and other kid stuff. After that, we jumped into the car and drove off again to the next one.

We stopped near the next one and hopped out of the car and walked down the hill. Another car pulled up and another family (of four) got out and walked down a path past where we were standing near the cache. They wandered off into the bush so we grabbed out the cache and did our swap, this time dropping off a poker chip keyring with builtin LED light. We hid the cache away and the other family came straight back, walked up the hill and drove off. Very strange?! Lil Dwarfette had picked up a half-empty little bottle of kids nail polish with sparkles, so she was very happy with that find.

Back in the car we followed my new Navman S50 to the location of the next cache. We stopped on a narrow road which doesn’t even look like a real road but is because it goes past homes further down. We got out and followed the Garmin eTrex Basic GPSr until I saw we had to go way down a very steep hill. We walked around for a bit to find a less steep trail which we carefully walked down while I held Lil Dwarfette’s hand. We got to the bottom and followed the GPSr until I saw something unusual. I took a photo of it and told her what it was and just as we were about to walk off, I decided to have a look inside it. Lo and behold the darn geocache was hiding inside it! I grabbed it out and it was a large one! Luckily we had a large-ish prize to put inside.. a combination lock and keyring light. We dropped it off and Lil Dwarfette grabbed out a pair of kids scissors which cut in zigzag lines. We wrote our note on the notepad inside and carefully put the cache back. Next we had to find our way back up to the top. We followed the track until the embankment became really steep. It was then I realised we missed a turn as the track had split into two. We walked back and I found the other part of the track which we turned up. Next, we had to find a way up that wasn’t so steep that Lil Dwarfette couldn’t climb. I held her hand and at times pushed her up the hill, but we made it safe and sound.

In the car, we ate some salt and vinegar chips. I had bought a pack of 20 packets of chips so I thought we should have something to munch on while we were hunting. I also had a couple of mini bottles of drink so we polished all that off and drove off following the ever-present Navman and the sweet dulcet tones of the lady’s voice guiding us. We parked near the next cache on the above list. It was a micro cache in a small film canister. We walked along the walkway and quickly discovered the cache. I wrote our note in it and got the clue to a bigger cache. This one and the next are a set of 7 caches which have clues. Each is named after one of the Seven Dwarfs. It sprinkled a little rain on us and LD was worried, but I didn’t think it’d really rain so we hopped in the car one more time and headed off to the last cache on the list I had printed out earlier.

We stopped near a very big parkland and followed the walkway. I had parked 300m away from the cache but figured a nice little stroll would do us the world of good. Unfortunately, it had become rather hot so I didn’t want to be out in that too long, particularly with a little 4yo LD. We took our time and enjoyed our walk. A few times we came across some bearded dragon lizards and got within about 10 feet of them before they scarpered off into the bushes. We passed some birds whom took to the skies.. well one actually just ran away from us. Silly thing, considering he has wings for that very reason. We walked over some bridges in the beautiful park and stopped at one to watch the wildlife. Even though there was a big sign saying “DON’T FEED THE ANIMALS AS THEY WILL GET SICK” the ducks, other birds, turtles etc came up to us obviously expecting some nosh. We didn’t have any so the birds flew off but we looked into the murky water at the turtles therein. One turtle had moss growing on his head, looking much like a green wig of hair on top of his head. Rather amusing! I will upload a photo of him and hopefully you can see him well enough. I lay down on the bridge to photograph him as close as I could get but the murky water didn’t show well in the light. After watching them for a while we got up and followed the GPSr again until we passed a playground and over another bridge. We soon found the other micro cache carefully hidden near a very big spider. Fortunately, the spider was quite dead so I flicked him out of the way with a twig and pulled the stones off the micro cache, intending to free it from it’s cavern. Just then I heard a noise and saw some sightseers coming near. I turned around and talked to Sienna to make it look like we had just stopped on our tour of the local natureland and we waited until they had passed. I turned back and grabbed the canister, quickly wrote a note and got the last clue of the day and carefully placed the cache back and hid it once again. We wandered back to the playground and LD had a quick play but the sun was beating down upon us and it was after 1:15pm and we had not had lunch as yet. I needed to go back to the car, but there was a large number of pathways to take. Fortunately, the GPSr records your every step and turn, so I followed our trail back to the car quite safely. We hopped in and told the Navman “There’s no place like HOME!” and it guided us back again. We stopped off at a bottle shop to get some alcohol for my visitors later in the week and popped into Coles to get some other supplies, then home for lunch and a nap.

A really good and fun day out for the both of us.

Yertle the green-haired turtle.

Curious George the bird.

Today Lil Dwarfette and I went to Crazy Clark’s and picked up some cheap shoes for her to wear so it doesn’t matter so much if they get dirty.

We hopped into the car and I typed the street name of the first cache into my Navman S50 GPS navigator and off we went. She was letting me know after every time the navigator told us to “turn left in 500 metres” etc hehe. We got near where we had to be then turned around and went back to a car park near a playground. We jumped out and I set the coordinates into my handheld GPSr (why don’t the Navman devices let you put in Longitude/Latitude?) *Sigh*

Off we walked following the little arrow. We walked along to a walkway which went up a bit of a slope. I thought the cache might be underneath it, due to the clues in the cache page, but it wasn’t. We did see a bluetongue lizard in the grass and then went back onto the pathway. When the GPSr said we only had about 2metres to go, I went hunting around while Lil Dwarfette stayed on the walkway. I found the cache rather easily and dropped in a snowman and took a little whistle for Lil Dwarfette. She was so excited. We headed off to the playground and she had fun with the kids for about half an hour.

Cache found: Oxley - Pamphlett by Crew 153 (GCQ6E7)

Next, we jumped back in the car and I typed in the next location into the Navman and off we drove again. This time we got there very easily and hopped out and followed the arrow. It was obvious where the cache would be — again from the clues — so we walked straight to it. I looked in all the obvious locations where it wasn’t until I was nearly frustrated and nearly kicked the damn cache! Oh! There it is. Easy as pie lol! We opened it and she took out a flowerly lei and we dropped in some Xmas gift tags, wrote in the book and drove off again to home to decorate our Christmas tree.

Cache found: Ashes to Ashes by happyharries (GCYN08)

A really great day out for both of us. Lil Dwarfette is tired out and having a nice sleep now.

The Red Dwarf team, consisting of myself Jason and my girlfriend Catherine, went on a trek to find the “Bridge out ahead” cache on Saturday 10th November 2007.

I used the Google Maps and an old Refidex to get us to a road close to where the cache lies and we set off on foot. There was a clue that we should head down a wide track and we found one and took it. We followed the arrow on the GPSr down some trails until the arrow pointed offtrack. The cache notes did say that it wasn’t exactly on the track and we would have to go offtrack at some stage so we went into the bush. We walked along until we came to an uncrossable creek. We walked up and down a bit to find a way across and eventually I saw something blue in the distance. We walked back up the trail and along until we found a big pipe across the creek. We tested our balance and walked across the pipe carefully, noting we are no longer as young as we used to be and should have been able at one stage to practically run across. Catherine suggested in her wilder younger years she probably would have tried to ride a pushbike across the pipe had she been dared to, even if it meant injuries hehe. We made it across and tried walking over a pile of dead grass which turned out to be a foot or so deep, so we went back and around. We saw we were on some park land which didn’t seem quite to be public land, but nobody was around. We followed the arrow back in the direction we were near before we had to find a way around and it pointed across another area of the creek. It appears just where we wanted to do our crossings the creek forked and the bit we wanted was again on the other side of the creek.

We decided to head back over the pipe and see if there was another way across further downstream. I suggested to Catherine that at times I’d done this before always following the arrow almost exactly only to later find a much easier way down a trail instead of bush bashing our way through. Catherine sat down for a rest while I scouted around the area along the creek much further in the other direction. Not too much further down I found a big rock in the creek bed which would allow us to walk across without even getting our feet wet, so I headed back and left some sticks pointing the directions as well as dragging my feet in the loose soil to mark another turn. I told Catherine about the rock crossing and we were off again.

We walked back down, following my arrows and crossed the creek to the middle section of the fork. We followed the arrow and found an area which had been set up as a bike play area where they’d constructed many mounds and a track going around the area, along with a couple of old tattered lounge chairs. We passed that and followed the arrow to the creek bed again, this time finding a way across some unstable rocks. We got across that okay and followed the arrow down the creek some more only to come to an area which was on a very large and wide track made for four wheel drive cars, which also happened to be only about 300 metres from a tarred road we could have driven right to. Unfortunately, this tarred road wasn’t marked as such on the Google maps, nor the old Refidex street directory.. with only some dashed lines depicting a road which may be created in the future. I laughed as I said “See, I told you there would be an easier way to get here” lol!

Catherine sat down again and I searched around. We’d been walking for over an hour and a half, so I looked all over to find the cache. After about another 45 mins of searching we’d still not found it and a large ute came down the dirt road and stopped next to us with a rather large black rottweiler dog in the back. It turned out to be the security guard whom watches over the nearby school sports ground and he’d seen us nearby and wondered if we were some graffiti kids hiding until he had gone. On seeing us up close he was satisfied we weren’t going to deface anything and drove off. I said to Catherine “Well, at least he could have offered us a lift back to the car!!” - he had seen the car over the other side of the bushland area and asked if it was ours. We gave up and walked back up the dirt road to the newly tarred one, turned left and headed back up the hill. Before we left I had marked the starting point so we could find our way back easily. Unfortunately, the GPSr had not locked onto any satellites yet so it thought the car was 25km away. We walked up the road we figured would be the way to go and at the top of the next hill Catherine asked which way we should go. I said “Well, the GPSr says we need to go another 25km into the town over there” and she said “I think it’s more likely down this hill to the left!”. I went across the road and looked down the hill and sure enough there was her car. We headed off down the hill and jumped into the car, feeling very tired and hot and sweaty and thirsty. We drove back home only stopping to pick up a bottle of Mt Pleasant red wine to drink in the bath at Catherine’s home.

We both agreed it was a nice day out walking which we should do more often, if only to get the exercise and get out of the house. We were going to take Sienna (Lil Dwarfette) out Geocaching yesterday, but it was raining all day and it’s also raining today, thus preventing me taking her out for a trip again. A pity, since she loves “Treasure hunting” and has been looking forward to it all weekend. Oh well, we shall see how next week goes.

Welcome to the new Red Dwarf geocaching blog.

Bear with me until I get a decent template. In the meantime this standard one will have to do.

Last Monday night I took Lil Dwarfette and we headed off to find some caches.

We drove to a nearby park and jumped out of the car and followed the arrow on my Garmin eTrex GPSr. At one point we walked past a guy and his kid who must have been about 1.5yo or so. Lil Dwarfette waved and said HI and the kid did the same. As we passed the kid started following us and his dad turned around and said “Hey! Where are you going???”. I laughed and Lil Dwarfette and I kept on walking as the guy picked his son up and pointed him in the right direction. It wasn’t too long before we found the cache hidden cleverly. It was almost camouflaged but I spotted it. Lil Dwarfette grabbed a party blower out of the cache and we signed it. Sorry.. we didn’t have anything to put in it as I had not done any Geocaching in such a long time I forgot about bringing things along. We headed back to the car while Lil Dwarfette enthusiastically blew her party blower as hard as she could at any passers by. Unfortunately, this resulted in breaking the blower.

We drove on and headed over the ferry to Moggill. We drove to the cemetery and started looking for the next cache. I introduced Lil Dwarfette to the concept of cemeteries but I don’t think she quite understood. I told her there were people under the ground and she wanted to see them. I also had to tell her to put back the flowers she had discovered in a vase nearby hehe. I searched around and the GPSr was having a weird day where I’d follow it until I was about 2 metres away from where it said the cache would be. I put the GPSr into my pocket and looked around for a bit. I didn’t find anything so took it back out again and it’d find the satellites again and tell me I was 36 metres away from it in another direction. *Sigh* I walked off to find it again and got closer to the cache. Next, I used some deduction to figure where it would likely be and soon found what I was looking for. Lil Dwarfette found a rubber bracelet thing in there and was very pleased. I dropped off a nice silver pen and signed the logbook and jumped back in the car.

This time, we headed down some streets near the shopping centre close by but could not find the cache. Eventually I worked out we were on the WRONG SIDE OF THE RIVER!!! This is no easy issue to resolve as we have to drive for about 45 minutes to get to the direct opposite side. We stopped in for some petrol for the car and some chips for us and got to the new site. We followed the GPSr and passed by a kids park full of swings and slides and things (and three boys about 3yo or so with their dad). Lil Dwarfette soon had the boys following her around to play with her. Particularly one boy dressed in a spiderman outfit. They slid down dirt hills made for BMX bikes and got quite dirty, but had great fun. After a while I decided we’d had enough and she reluctantly agreed. We drove off to find the next cache and found it down a bit of a concreted bike pathway. (That is, the pathway was concreted.. not the bikes). I found the film cannister sized cache and opened it.. then soon realised I had left my pen in the car. Microcaches do not have enough room in them for writing implements so I walked back to the car. It was only about 5 mins walk away but still annoying as I had to wait for bikes to ride past before I could get the cache out again. I signed the cache and left a $1 coin to make up for the cache earlier which I didn’t drop something off in. We jumped back in the car and headed off for the next cache. Unfortunately, I forgot to write down a special clue which was in this microcache, to go with other microcaches in the set. D’oh! Hopefully someone on the Geocaching.com website can help me out. We found the other two microcaches and got the clues from them.

We found one other lunch-box sized cache and Lil Dwarfette scored a pink balloon and was thrilled to bits, so it was a good day out for all concerned. I certainly got some exercise I normally would not have and got out and about in fresh air.

Caches found on this trip:

Pan Pac by Crew 153 (GCZE64)

Pioneers by wingaap (GCR98F)

The 7 Dwarfs - Doc by Steve & Family (GC10BX4)

The 7 Dwarfs - Dopey by Steve & Family (GC10BX8)

The 7 Dwarfs - Sleepy by NastySteve (GC10BXA)

The 7 Dwarfs - Happy by Steve & Family (GC10BXD)