Blue belt!

Well it has taken a while but I've at long last earned my BadgeGen blue belt in Geocaching! If GSAK is a geocacher's stat heaven, then BadgeGen is their raison d'etre. It's just a very colourful checklist and every new badge earned feels like a little victory to simple people like myself! Here is our checklist/trophy room.

So with the publication of my 20th cache hide, I have now met the requirements for the blue belt in geocaching: 1000+ finds, 20+ hides, 3+ events attended.

These belts grade in the same way karate/judo belts do (white, yellow, orange, green, blue, purple, red, brown, black) minus the purple and red. To go up another level and get my brown belt, I will first of all need to find 2000 caches, so perhaps I won't be earning this for a few months yet!

Growing fungi

Thank you Lil and Fay - my fungi are growing in number and look excellent by my bed. :D

Seven snails sleeping

I think most geocachers have come across a cache with a snail asleep on it, but imagine my surprise when I found a film canister with seven snoozing peacefully. Well technically there were only four on the cache, and the other three were on top of those four!

The quintessential toadstool

I remember when I thought that toadstools that were bright red with white spots were just fabrication invented for children's illustrations and cartoons. Then I discovered the highly toxic fly agaric. I seem to see it all the time now (well, it's very conspicuous!) but it's amazing just how many different types of fungi we walk past all the time, even if we don't go traipsing through strange woodlands on a regular basis.

Stonehenge / Woodhenge

I decided to pay a visit to the internationally famous Stonehenge in Wiltshire today and get a virtual cache there while I was at it. Now loads of people have heard of Stonehenge, but how much do you know about Woodhenge? If you're like me, the answer will be "very little"! There was a virtual cache there too though so I decided to learn about that site as well. Obviously the wood has had years to rot away (4000 approximately - some of it even pre-dates Stonehenge) but the site has been rebuilt with concrete posts instead. It's not quite as jaw-dropping as Stonehenge, but it's still worth a visit.

The cache listing for Woodhenge tells us a little about the history of this place: "Unlike Stonehenge, there was no central [altar] stone although this particular circle had a much more macabre centrepiece. One and a half metres from the actual centre, the skeleton of a child of about three years of age was exhumed from the chalk, its skull cleaved open in what was almost [certainly] a predetermined act. This, according to experts, is one of the very few pieces of evidence of human sacrifice in prehistoric Britain."

To make the visit more atmospheric, I saw both Stonehenge and Woodhenge in quite thick fog.