The first day of 2005 and we chose today to go on our first ever geocaching expedition.

First we used the in-car tomtom go to get nearby, this led us slightly astray (using a list of caches we had downloaded from somewhere!) To be fair I think the cache was stored correctly in the tomtom go, but by trying to drive close we ended up around the back of an estate near barbed wire and no access to Crane park.

Once we found the proper park entrance and switched to using our new Garmin Geko handheld gps we were right on track. It didn't take too long (about 15 to 20 minutes) to get very close, and eventually found it!

We left two special pokemon waps (not available normally in the UK) and took a large marble.

The only problem was that in all the excitement, and despite our best efforts to keep secret and quiet about everything, suddenly a nature park ranger popped out of the blue just as the ammunition case was out and we were slightly off the path. Signs around nearby had read that sticking to the path was the rule.

The ranger asked us what we were doing. We decided honesty was the best policy and explained geocaching to him and did our best to persaude him that this did no harm, however, he was concerned (and he didn't seem unfriendly or unreasonable) that this being a nature reserve, having people tramping about looking for stuff may not be the best idea, especially later in the year around spring where birds may actually choose the kinds of places where this was hidden for nesting.

We agreed that this did sound like it could be a problem and that moving the cache to a different part of the park where it was just as wild and difficult to find but was not marked as a nature reserve would be a better idea. I think he thought we were going to move it, but we decided to double back and pop it back in its original spot preferring to leave it up to the cache owner to decide what is best to do next. I don't think the ranger knew exactly where the cache was but he may do and he may look again so it may not be so safe now.

Anyway, we all had an excellent time and caught the geocaching bug....