Welcome to my first attempt at a Wherigo cartridge and
the first Wherigo in the Shoalhaven.
Your task will be to follow the fictional story of some 19th
century 'locals' which will lead you to a long lost package
containing 'medicine' that could have saved a life...
But first a little background about Wherigo for those of you who
are not familiar with this cache type.
What is a Wherigo Geocache? Wherigo is a fairly
new way of utilizing GPS technology to play games, take tours and,
of course, find geocaches. Visit Wherigo.com to learn more.
Do I need special equipment? Yes! To find this
cache the proper way and to truly experience the hunt the way it
was meant to be experienced, you will need two things:
- The Wherigo Player. The Wherigo Player comes pre-installed on
the Garmin Colorado and Oregon series GPSr. A version of the player
is available for download for use by GPS enabled Pocket PC devices.
See the Wherigo site for more details.
- The "Talking to Ghosts" Wherigo Cartridge, which you can
download here.
The Experience: This Wherigo experience is
pretty straight forward and should be completed with relative ease.
I wrote it after playing around with the Wherigo Builder program
for a while. I soon realised that the only way to learn how to do
this was to make an actual cartridge. The decision to publish it as
an actual cache came later. I hope I've made a good decision.
To complete the cartridge and find the cache you will need to
complete some simple tasks. The tasks are completed by visiting
several areas ("zones" in the Wherigo lingo). When you visit each
zone - the Wherigo software recognises you are there and gives you
further tasks and instructions. After you have completed each task
the final cache zone will be revealed. Simply walk to that zone
where you will hopefully find the cache and sign the logbook.
Is logging my result any different for this
cache? Logging your results here on geocaching.com is no
different than any other cache; so no changes there.
Logging the cartridge on Whereigo.com is not required, but it
would be greatly appreciated. At this stage I'm not worrying about
Unlock codes or completion codes (because I don't really understand
how to use them yet!)
Don't have the hardware, but still want to experience
this? In the interest of helping more people experience a
wherigo cache (and meeting some of the locaI cachers) I will try to
make myself (and my Garmin Oregon) as available as possible to
anyone or any group that would like to experience what this is
like. Contact me through my profile and we can try to setup a
meeting time and we can run through this thing together.
Feedback is a good thing! Because this is a new
thing for me (and maybe you) I would greatly appreciate any
feedback you can offer (good or bad). Your feedback will help me
determine whether or not I should continue to pursue creating more
of these types of caches.
It is rated a Difficulty 3 because of the unfamiliarity of the
cache type, the hardware requirements, the fact that the
development software is still in alpha (and buggy and hard to use)
and you may experience issues with it. My knowledge of the
development software and how to set up an effective Wherigo cache
also leaves potential for disaster. The cartridge has been tested
in the field (on an Oregon) and worked well, but time will
tell!
Geo-pooches are welcome on a lead, but make sure they don't dig
up any bones. Cache-kiddies should love it, but be aware that the
story/cache takes place in a cemetery, so if you think this might
scare the young-ones....
The real challenge here is in the cache swaps. At the time the
cache was placed it contained no plastic swaps. It will be
interesting to see if we can keep it that way.
While in the area continue on a little further for two other
caches: Tuena's Weiry
and a multi, The
Glade.