Geocaching with Betty & Tony

As financial planners, we understand the importance of planning for a secure and fulfilling retirement. For many, this extends beyond just financial security; it’s about having passions and hobbies to keep you engaged and excited later in life.

Meet Betty and Tony, wonderful clients of ours who have discovered a unique way to stay active and explore their surroundings: Geocaching! In this article, Tony and Betty, known in the geocaching world as “Gosditch,” share their story of how this modern-day treasure hunt has become a cherished part of their retirement.

We took up Geocaching as a hobby in August 2014 on the advice of our daughter, as a means of getting out and about, for exercise and interest.

Basically, it is a hide and seek activity, where you look for caches hidden by other geocachers. Information on each geocache can be found on the geocaching website [size, location coordinates, description, hints].

Once you have found a geocache, you sign the sheet inside with your user name and date, then hide again (as found) and record your find online (or DNF, did-not-find). All without allowing others to see your activity and location. Hint: choose a short user name as you will be writing it multiple times, and sometimes there is only a minute space available.

There are about 70,000 geocaches in the UK, over 10 in Cirencester [N 51o 43.035’ W 001o 58.082’], the home location of Abode Financial Planning, and over 100 within 20 km.

To locate a geocache you need the geocaching app on a smart phone or a hand-held GPS unit (Global Positioning System). The cache coordinates can be entered manually or electronically (as British Grid units or world coordinates, N/S and E/W). The system then guides you to the cache location.

The geocache container, when large enough, may contain swops (for children) and TBs (travel bugs). The latter will have a unique identity code. The geocaching website allows you to see how far each TB has travelled. We have a TB that we released in Inverness in November 2019. It has now travelled over 3800 km, from Scotland to the south of England and is now in Yorkshire.

Some geocachers have software that alerts them to new geocaches being released. They then race to be the First to Find (FTF). We have claimed 18 FTFs to date, without any special software.

Some geocaches are quite ingenious. One which we remember particularly was in a disused telephone kiosk being used as a book exchange. The cache container was hidden inside one of the thicker books that had been hollowed out to receive it. We had to visit that location several times before we found it.

There are several types of geocaches: simple, straight forward, single finds; multiples that require the collection of data from several locations in order to obtain the coordinates for the final cache location. For example, the ‘Church Micro’ series, which usually require the collection of certain numbers, e.g. dates from grave stones, and inserting these in coordinates that have some numbers missing. The final location in this series is never within the church/cemetery area.

In recent years one further development of geocaching is the type called an Adventure Lab (Ad Lab). With this type there is no cache container. It is all done through an app on a smart phone and requires answering a question at each of 5 or 10 locations, and is specific to each location. Once the correct answer has been inserted (letters, words, numbers), the app allows you to proceed to the next location.

What is most enjoyable about geocaching is that it persuades you to visit places that you would not otherwise visit, and it has given us some great experiences. You are also drawn to look at things more closely, especially tree roots. It has also kept us more active than we would be after retirement, although most of the caches we look for these days are within a few metres of the car. We have also concentrated more on Ad Labs (61 to date).

Happy Geocaching, Betty and Tony (Gosditch – our geocaching name)