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In 2016 I had a brief dalliance with geocaching and then after getting the app, and a premium membership forgot about it. It was only on 29 February 2020 that the app flashed up about a souvenirsouvenir A souvenir is a badge/sticker that you receive from the geocaching app for finding a certain type of cache, or a cache in a certain year or country or region. Active cachers get quite competitive over them. for logging a cache on the leap day that I gave it another go. That was just two weeks before the first lockdown in Vienna.
Geocaching was a great hobby for during lockdown – the “homework” for the mystery caches could be done at home, and then the caches logged accordingly. There were a few local caches that I could get within a short walk from home, which I used to combine with exercise during the first lockdown.
When lockdown was over, I continued my geocaching. In the summer months, I used to go out after the children were asleep and often did 10km walks around town, rediscovering the city of the Vienna, which has been my home for over 20 years. When we went on holiday to Passau and the Salzkammergut, I was able to geocache there, and also there were some geocaches by work, so I would often pop out and get a cache in my lunchbreak or on the way home from work.
As summer turned into autumn, I started going out for caching walks either Saturday or Sunday, and felt with regular exercise that it was improving my fitness and offsetting my sedentary lifestyle. When out in the car with the children, I would get my little son to help find the caches with me – he calls it “Daddy’s Treasure Hunt Game”. Clever boy thought he had rumbled me and he suggested that I wasn’t going to the office but was going out hunting treasures every day!
In Winter I use the walking time also as a walk to get out into the daylight, as otherwise I sometimes struggle to get out. In late October I also set my first cache, which I have to visit to do cache maintenance every two to three weeks (it is a premium cache, in a nano, so every 30ish logs I have to change the logbook).