On Saturday 28th May 2005, Hi-5ers were travelling from their home in Bedfordshire to North Wales for a holiday in the May half term. We had heard about this thing called "geocaching" from some friends and had explored the possiblity of trying to find a cache whilst en route to our holiday house. We had no GPS receiver or smart phone, so any cache we could find had to be a "traditional" type (so we could look up the cache location in advance) and have a good enough clue to give us confidence that we could find it.
After a bit of research we came across GCJ602 Bikes and Bolshy Sheep Re-visited at the Horseshoe Pass in Denbighshire: a traditional cache with the detailed hint "6 feet from the road, beneath a small overhang, covered with slate". The cache page also said that it was near a cafe - a perfect stopping place for lunch and the first of many, many interesting places that we would never have found without geocaching. After reaching the cafe and having lunch, we set off on the short walk down the road to where we found a small rocky overhang, as in the hint. We had no real idea what we were looking for but after a little bit, we spotted a piece of slate and, moving it, there was a box! Our first geocaching find!
So, on 28th May 2025, we are celebrating the 20th anniversary of our first geocaching find. In that time we have found over 5000 caches, hidden over 100 caches and thoroughly enjoyed this hobby. Hi-5ers 3, 4 and 5 were aged 6, 4 and 2 when we started and geocaching has been a significant part of what we do together as a family - they are still finding caches themselves 20 years on.
We are setting up this cache to celebrate our 20 year geocaching anniversary. Back in 2005 it was not unusual for a multi-cache to be an offset, having an item hidden at the headline coordinates which contained the coordinates for the final cache itself. We have thus designed this cache as an offset in exactly this way.
Why choose Old Warden as the location for this special cache? After having found our first cache in Wales, and also having found three others in Wales whilst on holiday, we came home and our first cache in Bedfordshire was GCK6X5 Orange Tree - a multi-cache in Old Warden set up by Beds Clangers. Because we still did not have a GPS receiver (that would be bought a few weeks later) we had to use paper maps to work out where the first container was hidden and, once that gave us the final coordinates, we had to again use paper maps to figure out where that was.
We hope that people enjoy finding this cache and help us celebrate our 20 years.