The Rabbit Clan: TL/DR - I'm not round Ormskirk enough to properly maintain this series. Feel free to retrieve the box if you get there before I do. Thanks to all who've visited over the years.
Just over ten years ago, I found a geocache for the first time. A nerdy 11 year old entered this world of hidden treasure which was very exciting at the time. This was before smartphones became the norm: I certainly didn't get one until 2016 and so after a short while making do with an OS map, Google Earth and the like, I saved up enough to buy myself a GPS - the faithful yellow Garmin Etrex H. This was revolutionary and I went out and found three caches that evening. Huge. The numbers I found slowly increased: and I saw some really cool hides.
Time passed, I wore the rubber on the buttons on my GPS down from manually entering the coordinates of geocaches into it (well I wasn't going to fork out £25 for a cable!) and I had made the printing out of D/T/Size/Hint into an art form in Word. As Tony Capstick once said - "they don't know they're born today".
A few months in, I decide to hide some caches over the summer holidays: this wee series. Fears rose when another series was potentially being hidden at the same time but this was a false alarm and the series got hidden, on some paths I'd walked on numerous occasions - this wee series here.
I still enjoyed geocaching and the thrall of paperless caching became too big and I got myself a replacement GPS with a colour display and everything. This led onto mapping and OpenStreetMap - a hobby I still dabble in today, updating OSM when there's some paths missing - I highly encourage folk to edit OSM as many map products are based on data from OpenStreetMap. I got Premium Membership round this time and finally got to see what these Premium Member Only geocaches were like - something that I don't particularly like morality wise - however each to their own - even more so the Geocaching app restricting some users to perceived "easier" hides only.
So this continued for some years and my geeky hobby followed me to uni and I still dabbled on trips with the hiking club there. My interest in caching has waned since then, mostly because I've found other things to do with my time (fell running (poorly) and mountaineering (even more poorly)). Both are terrific fun and I would urge anyone who's vaguely interested to give either a go. That said, what geocaching has taught me - puzzle solving; writing HTML (my HTML skills have not improved since I hid this cache, you'll be pleased to hear); coordinate datums and how to use a GPS have been of some use to me in life - the GPS in my rucksack on a long winter's day on Ben Nevis (classic Tower Ridge punterism) helped us navigate off the summit plateau in the dark and onto the zigzags with little faff.
So I was tempted to let this series limp over the line to its 10th birthday but, no, that's unfair on the folk who want to hide some well maintained (hopefully free for all to access) and quality geocaches to last Ormskirk into the future. Thanks to everyone who visited over the years and I'm very sorry if I haven't replied to your emails in recent days/weeks/months/years.
My geocaching days aren't necessarily over yet (three years of a maths degree has resulted in some pretty nifty puzzle ideas) but certainly my passions lie elsewhere.
Thank you, and goodnight.