UK visit 5 - Geocaching in the New Forest

After a few days with friends on the way down we arrived for the Bank Holiday weekend at James and Jane's in Bransgore.  The boys, Josh and Jake were lively as ever.

Out Travelbug

On a walk in the New Forest (actually "New" in the 11th century when it was a royal hunting reserve) we were introduced to Geocaching.  For those who are not familiar with this it involves using GPS to visit exact locations and searching for either a cache, containing a logbook and things left by previous finders, or a clue to the next location in a route that eventually leads to a cache.  In our case we had three smartphones between us, all giving slightly different directions. We discovered that, as our phones do not have compasses they can only accurately show the direction to the next coordinate when the phone is moving, so it can detect the direction of travel from the GPS change - same as a chartplotter on a boat or GPS unit in a car.

Despite this we followed the route to the cache, where we acquired  a much travelled "travelbug" which we took to deliver to a cache in Phuket on its way hopefully to New Zealand.