The last week has been full of exam preparation, the actual exam, bad weather and idiotic holidays but today I was finally able to get out and go find some more caches. I still have some left to finish in Lillehammer so I decided to do a few of those.

I got a lift to Birkebeiner ski stadium where I got off and went to find the two caches that are hidden there. One of them was pretty cleverly hidden- not difficult, just interesting. The Oregon 450 complained about low battery from the beginning and even though I had spares I just left it on for those hours I was caching without it actually going dry. After the ski stadium caches I followed the road down towards the next couple of caches at the top of the LysgÃ¥rd hills, which is the ski jump facility in Lillehammer. I decided to try to follow a tractor road/foot path into the forest to save time and while it got me there it wasn’t what you might call “dry”, but I managed. The view form the top of the ski jump facility was awesome and I download an app for the iPhone called AutoStitch which lets you create panoramas from images taken with the phone. These along with the rest of the pics from today are of course up on my Flickr page and also on the flash viewer on the geocaching main page of this site. While the picture quality from a normal camera is way better than that of the iPhone, there’s a lot to be said from being able to create a panorama and upload it to Flickr directly from the phone. Some cameras have panorama modes and can stitch photos together, but mine doesn’t and you still can’t upload from the middle of nowhere. SInce these pics are just for fun I was shooting in 2 Mpix mode on my standalone camera too, so picture quality wasn’t as important as being able to create a panorama.

After avoiding some muggles and finding the cache as the top of the ski jump I managed to navigate back to the main road and followed it down to another cache that confused me as it referred to (in description and name) and had a picture of a bridge that I couldn’t for the life of me find. MaybeI was just blind or it was actually taken down, I don’t know. Either way I found the actual cache and continued on the path to the next, sixth and final cache of the day. I managed to not read the description properly and ended up on the wrong side of a river and had to backtrack to find a river crossing. It involved balancing on a wooden plank across a river that was larger than normal due to rain and melted snow and with $2500 worth of electronics on me I was a bit unsure about trying it but there was no problem. I managed to find the hiding place for the cache further up the river in yet another interesting but obvious hiding place; a hollow tree. I looked at the GPS and figured I’d try a nearby multicache, but when I got to a point where the path crosses a small stream (which now wasn’t small at all) and the planks put out for crossing it were shake at best I decided to call it a day and head down. It’s about a 3KM walk from up there and down to the city and there wasn’t many people out but I got to see a lot of interesting places along the river where I’d never been. That’s what’s great about geocaching; you get to see interesting places you’d otherwise never see because caches are normally places near interesting locations, so you don’t need to know the area yourself to find the places that deserve a visit.

On the way down I also came across a small natural hole in a tree that would have been perfect for a cache but I’d left my stack of ready-to-go caches at home as I though I wouldn’t need them. Last time I do that. I also thought a nano cache was already in there as I saw a small cylinder, but it turned out to be an AA battery someone had put in there for reasons they themselves probably aren’t aware of.

All in all I got all six of the caches I actually tried finding and that increased my total to 6. There are still a lot of caches near where I live that I haven’t found so I’m trying to get as many as I can before I move in the fall.