Yesterday evening we went a long to our second Freedom Festival event. Earlier this week we went along to The Print Shop in preparation for the weekends events.
The opening of the Museum of the Moon in the Hull Minster was Thursday evening and so we thought going along to beat some of the crowd at the weekend would make it more special. It was worth it!
The moon is made with real NASA imagery and 1cm of this moon represents 5km of the real moon itself. I think that in itself drew us to look at the detail. Photos are hard to capture because it looks like a 2D moon but it is a sphere.
The three children were in awe of it and wanted plenty of photographs with the moon.
Even we couldn’t resist it…
We are planning to come back and see the moon lit up at night as well. If you are local to Hull then we recommend you stopping by to see this installation for the festival. Over the weekend you can go along to see the moon from 12pm until 10pm. The moon is staying a little longer then the festival, FreedomKj1964 informs me it’s the 15th September.
The Freedom Festival is on now until late Sunday 2nd September. This is our third year of attendance and our first year planning out what we go to see rather than walking around and bumping into everything.
Bank holiday weekend just gone we were busy bee’s. Not only did we go along to The Print Shop but we also went to check out Flemingate in Beverley, its a new(ish) shopping complex with multi-storey car park. We also wanted to do some Geocaching and now that the car park is open it makes it a little more accessible.
We came across this delightful sand sculpture of the Beverley Minster. We were happy we could get a couple of photo’s like this but if you went along you would see it is surrounded by metal fencing, you can kind of see it in the background. We understand why the fencing is there, Rob and I remarked at what a shame it was as it was beautiful and we would have loved to have gotten a photo with the children next to it.
I was delighted to come across the Creative Lab shop as it had been mentioned to us on many occasion but we hadn’t had chance to have a snoop around until today. The Creative Lab is full of different artisans and there is certainly unusual, unique and something you would want to take home with you.
We loved the Vampire Travel Kits, they were so cute and made us smile. There were different sizes available and also other unusual wizarding items like potions and fairy wands.
For local Geocachers, check out this Ammo Can up-cylced lamp. We couldn’t resist sharing this with you all.
So what did we buy? Well, we know we need to come back as there were so many different things that took our fancy; especially the unique furniture. Today we went for something small and something we couldn’t refuse.
Nawww what a cute fox! If you didn’t know already, we have lots of fox things in our home and we always like to add to the collection when we see an opportunity like this.
As for Geocaching, we found three caches whilst we were out and about. GC1GAMC was our first cache ‘Beverley’s Friary’s Badge Box’, we had around a 5 minute search for this one and Sophie was the proud finder. We wouldn’t have discovered this location if it wasn’t for Geocaching, it was a beautiful place to find a cache.
We also went onto find GC55V0X Diamond Jubilee, this was a quick find in a little public garden by the corner of the road. Finally we went onto find a multi cache GC699YC A Fine Pair # 455 – Beverley, here was the log entry for this find…
Nice and easy to photograph the fine pair. Getting the clues, easy, converting on the spot with three children resulted us head in the wrong direction. Once we had stopped and checked the coordinates we realised we did a digit wrong and finally turned around. I left a book in the telephone box for #IBeliveinBookFairies weekend of hiding – for someone to find, read and re-hide.
Finding the cache also took a while and I managed to bump my head, I have an egg now. But daddy came to the rescue and found the cache. Signed and that ended our trip out. Home to get some medicine for ones head. Ouch. TFTC
It was a fun few hours out the house which cost us the petrol, parking and a foxy treat.
Hope you had a great bank holiday weekend as well.
Today we went along to The Print Shop in Hull City Centre, a part of the Freedom Festival which begins on Thursday 30th August.
More about the print shop:
PRINT YOUR SLOGAN T-SHIRT
RISE (up) and express yourself at Freedom Festival 2018 with your own personally designed slogan t-shirt created at ‘The Print Shop’ in Whitefriargate
Opening on the 25 August – 2 September
Ahead of Freedom Festival 2018 and in readiness for presenting RISE! we are launching a temporary pop up art studio, The Print Shop, to encourage a collective expression of Freedom.
The Print Shop is equipped with print technology, placards, banners, t-shirts and all sorts of crafty and creative materials providing you with a fully accessible expression centre to develop your voice and make it heard.
Taken from Freedom Festivals website, find out more here.
Here’s inside The Print Shop and other people’s slogans. The gentleman who helped us was very friendly and walked us through everything we needed to do. We spent quite a lot of time finding our slogan and started with words that meant a lot to us. I will explain our slogans below, in the order we are photographed.
Rob (AKA Daddy): ‘HOPELESS‘ Rob has reminded me of one of his favourite quotes in the years I have known him ‘Even the word hopeless has the word hope in it’. It really does make a difference to our thinking and its an important one to share, you may not see very well on his shirt but LESS is set in red.
Riley: ‘HELP PEOPLE OUT’ Last year Riley was a school councillor at his primary school and he took his role very seriously, his school also introduced the school buddy system and they are other pupils that help others out in times of need. Riley’s slogan has come from this thought process and he is proud to wear his shirt.
Sophie: ‘CLEAN WORLD FOR ALL’ Sophie is very passionate about the world she lives in and has certainly learnt a lot through her achievement of Senior Wilderness Explorer. It started with recycling, animals, environment and resulted in her four worded slogan.
Jenny/me (AKA Mummy): ‘TOGETHER WE ARE LOUDER’ I have cheated a little as I had formed this slogan a month or so ago with the help of my street team and linking to what I do with my work. Together we are louder meaning one voice can be heard but a group of people saying the same thing will be listened to and potentially resulting in actioning the message.
Robyn: LOVE/CHANGE Believe it or not, this came from the words Frozen and Pink. It formed into ‘Change is possible with love’ but this was a bit long for a small shirt and with the volunteers help we formed the two words. If you think of the Disney movie Frozen its quite a message that has come from a movie.
The next step was to hunt for the letters in the tubs and put our shirts together to go to print. The children found this very exciting and couldn’t wait to put them on and show off.
They even got to peel the paper, to reveal their final piece of work.
This is a free activity but I believe they accept donations.
We will be wearing our shirts around the Freedom Festival this year, to be a part of the art. The main time to wear these is for the Rise Up Friday night event and we can’t wait to read everyone else’s shirts and be a part of the community in a visual way.
Yesterday we did something different, similar but different. Before I tell you about what we’ve been up to I better reassure you that we will be posting about Geocaching in the USA, so don’t worry.
Yesterdays journey was on public transport as Rob was in work and it’s still the summer holidays for the kids. Robyn is becoming a big girl and wanting to do everything her big brother and sister want to do, so naturally she sat with them on the back row.
We ventured into Hull City Centre and got our phone out, switched on the app Munzee. If you haven’t heard of Munzee then it’s a bit like Geocaching but you are looking for QR codes where it’s pinned on the map. We had played it last summer but didn’t really get into it as it didn’t seem like there were many Munzee’s around, we decided to pay for the premium this year and give it another go. There are more Munzee’s around if you pay premium and so we had a day filled with finding them.
Here’s Sophie with a Munzee she discovered, tiny right? Thinking you may have seen one before? Or wondering why you never noticed?
So here is one for you which you can screenshot or scan on the app right away!
It kept the kids entertained all afternoon and cost us the bus fair and the premium for the year (cheaper then going to the cinema or play area). Our GeoKids are enjoying a little Munzee and don’t seem to mind the difference too much.
The Gilmour’s are back from our holiday, we had a fantastic time in America and of course we Geocached. We visited Anna Maria Island for a week and this is a place where my husband has spent many family holidays growing up, it was lovely to be able to finally share in those memories with him and his family. The second week we spent at Disney World which was an experience in itself. It was the children’s first time on an aeroplane and my first time outside of Europe.
We will be sharing our out of the country caching experience with you all soon but for now I wanted to share another hunt we did, the quest to become a senior Wilderness Explorer. For those who don’t know what that is, it is based on the movie ‘UP’. Collect all the badges by completing the activities and learning about the wilderness at each station around Animal Kingdom, there are over 30 to collect.
As fans of Geocaching, anything similar to this setting we are good to go and couldn’t leave without completing. We spent two days to complete this although if we had planned it out better or where only going for the badges you could complete this in one day.
The children were very excited about hunting for the badge locations and to be honest I think Rob and I felt as excited as Sophie, Riley and Robyn.
To get the booklet they had to recite the Wilderness Explorer promise and do the special handshake.
Some stations we learnt about animals or creatures in the wilderness and other stations we could be learning about the environment and how we can help the wilderness. The children were always asked questions to guess or respond with answers and I was really proud of how much they knew and if they weren’t sure they still gave a guess and weren’t afraid of letting the leader know.
Once we had finally achieved all the badges we went back to where we started to receive our final badge and again another Wilderness Explorer promise was to be read in order to become a senior. The leader announced to the public that our three children had achieved this ranking and they received their certification and final sticker/badges.
We couldn’t not have a Disney photo taken to mark the occasion and my husband treated me to an official Wilderness Explorer hat, yes I know, I am a geek and I don’t mind one bit.
If you are Geocachers and are heading to Disney World, we would all highly recommend the Wilderness Explorer badge collection. We had so much fun and we all learnt something new from the experience, the education behind each station and even in the booklet is very informative and interactive.
We are coming to you today with some different news. We have been patreon’s of The Geocaching Vlogger for some time now but we recently lifted our monthly to a little higher to get more benefits. I want to share our thoughts…
When we first started Geocaching we were pretty rubbish at it, we had a lot of DNF’s (Did not find) as I am sure many do when you begin. The kids were VERY excited about caching and there was only so much we could do in a day and with Robyn who was just 1 at the time. We discovered The Geocaching Vlogger on YouTube and this gave us some entertainment at home, we soon realised that American caches are a whole other level and we also learnt to follow the favourite points if we wanted the more unusual caches.
Joshua has some catching phrases and even a Cache Pants Song to which the kids sing when we are about to go through nettles, or on this occasion once we found a cache.
Joshua’s following is quite something with over 45k subscribers on YouTube. We soon got through plenty of his videos and after a couple of months found out about his exclusive club on patreon, thats our own view on it. Subscribe for as little as $3 you can watch video’s that aren’t on YouTube and see videos before subscribers as well. There are some additional benefits like receiving mail from Joshua personally.
Here are the kids with their pin badges and funky patch. We also had a hand written note, business card and an exclusive trackable, keep scrolling down.
How awesome is this trackable? It is all set up and ready to go!
Oh and I forgot to say, the pic on top of this blog post is the photo Joshua shared over social media to let everyone know about our support, a nice thought.
Check out Joshua’s video’s on his YouTube channel The Geocaching Vlogger and see what they are like. I can imagine you could get hooked in like us.
One other thing before we go, Joshua responds to almost every comment and is contactable via social media. Its quite nice as some other channels I follow don’t respond to you personally, not even a hint of life. I think this makes a difference especially as Sophie asks me to comment on Joshua’s videos or send him a link to her latest video.
A couple of weekends ago we were super excited to try out our new tool for Geocaching. We had ordered it back in May and it had arrived in all of its glory a week or so ago and we have been itching to give it a go!
Our very own stamp with our Geocaching username in place. It’s actually for a letterbox hybrid Geocache.
Geocaches have different types as follows:
You can find out more about the different types of Geocaches here.
We didn’t go and find a letterbox hybrid this weekend though but that didn’t stop us from using it. We went on a small section of a larger trail and decided to log our finds with it.
This is the loop we did without the multi as it wasn’t part of the trail. Multi’s we have to plan when we have the children especially if there are a lot of stages to go and find clues so we will have to come back for that one.
We had a lovely time and the kids enjoyed it. The stamp came out to play and it is going to be well used in the future. Thank you to NE Geocaching Supplies.
Sometimes Geocaching comes with planning and funnily enough the planning comes down to me, which I enjoy!
Yesterday we had planned to go on a trail that a fellow Geocacher we had met had created. We’ve been meaning to do it for a while but it was obvious with three children we weren’t going to be able to do it all in one go as the whole trail is around 7.5 miles long. Walking along could take us around 3-4 hours (considering Robyn’s tiny legs at times), if we were caching this could potentially double it.
For this outing I printed out the map so I could decipher what the cacher was explaining on his description at the first GC. If you read the description you can see what I mean.
See the first cache at GC4Z0J0 if you want to check it out.
This time I had informed my mum in law (2000SamJack) of our whereabouts in case for any reason we are in an emergency situation. Sometimes you can be out in the countryside without anyone else to see. I’m sure other walkers do this and so we have now implemented it into our caching days out. We also now have a travel first aid kit in our caching bag.
We decided to do the 3 mile segment as the weather wasn’t sunny and wasn’t raining and we could decide if it was going to rain. We also thought it would be a good amount for the children. We had set out at 10.30am and didn’t get home until 2pm so we did spend a while caching. Some were sneaky, we didn’t find them all- but that’s ok as we will return.
When approaching a cache I always sound out ‘100 meter warning’ so everyone knows we are getting close, followed by the hint for that cache we are approaching. If we can’t find it straight away I will re read the hint and on struggling caches we will go through the activity feed to see if a previous cacher has left another clue. I seem to manage and the rest find although sometimes I like to pretend it’s somewhere else and run to the correct location to be a first to find between us, nothing like a little competition.
We had a lovely walk and bumped into a few other walkers (not cachers) along the way. We often giggle because I’m sure people passing us are surprised we are out for a walk as a modern family and often stop and chat to us.
The kids even wore their Geocaching name badges, I love how they are so into our hobby.
Thank you to Washknight- Geocaching blind for inviting us to answer your interview questions and showcasing us on your Geocaching blogroll. We hope you all enjoy reading our answers, feel free to ask any questions by commenting below at the end of the blog post.
When and how did you first get into geocaching?
We have just celebrated our first Cachiversary – last month- Our friend of many years entered into a conversation about litter picking near our home and so I asked questions to find out it was a CITO event. As soon as we found out we had to download the app and find out what it was all about – Thank you TreeTop1974
2. Do you remember your first find?
Yes very well, we had gone to Beverley which is a short trip up the road from us. It was a nice spring day and we thought we could take it easy and do town caches as our youngest was just 1 and a half, so we thought we would stick to the pavement with the pram. We were useless and couldn’t find them, no idea on where to look and the first one we found was after four failed attempts on others. We had spent fifteen minutes on our first find and just before we gave up we found it! We were very excited as well and the children cheered. Here’s our first cache find (GC21VWJ).
3. What device(s) do you use for locating caches?
We just use our phones, iPhones to be specific. Although I usually plan a day out on my laptop so we can plan parking and look at everything around the area- just in case. Always better to be prepared.
4. Where do you live and what is your local area like for geocaching? (density / quality / setting etc)
We live in Hull, East Yorkshire and in the UK. Its all urban caches around us so we have tried to make our caches more unique in the urban setting. The multi’s are quite good and with us receiving the Capital of Culture last year there are some fab historically descriptive caches around in the Hull Culture Cache Trail first one at GC7035W. Here’s a fantastic multi and you could spend all day doing this one as it does take you around the city centre, GC2FNJX. I have also got to recommend this multi as this was an easy multi and I could work out the coords there and then with little time, usually we have to come back to complete multi’s so I can sit and work out coords, GC717D5.
5. What has been your most memorable geocache to date, and why?
Oh gosh… it has to be a cache in Shropshire when we went to stay for a night or two. It took us sooooo long to find and then once we found it we had to figure out how on earth to get in to it. On field puzzle cache. I have to say that cache was a cache we spent a LONG time on and we cheered the most. The kids were completely bored and fed up as once we opened it we had to put it together again!
Don’t watch this YouTube video if you don’t want to spoil it for yourself…
6. List 3 essential things you take on a geocaching adventure excluding GPS, pen and swaps.
*Our unique GilmourFamily coins that Rob prints in house with his printing business (OuTFox).
*Tweezers- because there is always that log you can’t remove from that super tiny cache.
*Baby wipes- because you know your hands get filthy when you are feeling around behind sign posts, under things and in hidey holes.
7. Other than geocaches and their contents, What is the weirdest thing you have discovered whilst out caching?
Not really a weird one BUT we discovered QR code stickers on a lamppost near a Geocache once… that’s when we learnt about Munzee. Although we’ve played Munzee we sway more to Geocaching. You can find out Munzee account with the same Geocaching name for us- GilmourFamily.
8. On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is I am obsessed by numbers and 10 is I am all about the experience and the quality of each individual cache. Where do you put yourself?
I would say we are around a 8 especially as we have the children the quality of cache for them is important on a walk or trip out. They get so excited and if you ask them which caches they remember it’s always a unique cache.
9. Describe one incident that best demonstrates the level of your geocaching obsession.
Starting a blog must be a way to show that we love Geocaching right? Or perhaps just this weekend we went to find a Geocache just before a committal/memorial service for a close family member, it may sound odd but Geocaching has actually given us time out from our personal lives and worries.
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10. Have you picked up any caching injuries along the way?
Lots of nettle stings! Countless of stings and that’s probably the most we have had. However we know injuries happen and we have invested in a travel first aid kit. Riley seems to be the one who suffers the most, check out this blog post (sometimes it doesn’t work out).
11. What annoys you most about other geocachers?
When others think there’s a better place to hide a cache and change the hiding spot! We always place exactly where found.
12. What is the dumbest thing you have done whilst out caching?
My geography is bad and my bearings. I’m usually the organiser, the one to sort out where to go next. But even with the zooming into the map I can end up going in completely the wrong direction as well as bringing everyone with me! Whooops! It is rather dumb I guess 😂
13. What do your non caching family and friends think of your hobby?
Most people we know haven’t heard about it,,, but as time has gone on and we have blogged more they have shown intrigue.
My mum in law (2000SamJack) has joined us on our Geocaching adventures, in fact she loves it as much as we do. We all think it’s great for the children and ourselves because it keeps them active but adds today’s technology with it and we get fit!
14. What is your default excuse you give to muggles who ask what you are up to or if you need help?
My hubby came up with a great one when we were in a high muggle area and couldn’t find the damn cache. —> she’s lost her ring!
I’m not sure this helps if we are looking in the cracks of the wall 😂
15. What is your current geocaching goal, if you have one?
We don’t have a goal at the moment but we are going to Florida this year and plan to go caching there. I think caching in other countries is going to be even more fun!
Later this year we plan to grab a tent and start camping next year. Geocaching has opened a whole new world of adventures for us.
16. Do you have a nemesis cache that despite multiple attempts you have been unable to find?
We have had a couple but we have now found them, we don’t have any outstanding caches that have the better of us at the moment.
17. What 3 words or phrases best sum up what geocaching means to you.
Adventure
Family time
Geocaching is our therapy
18. What prompted you to start blogging about geocaching?
We enjoyed it so much as a family that we wanted to share how much fun we had and also be able to look back and read some of our stories. Its hard to keep a record of all of them but it is certainly been fun. Sophie (who is our eldest at 8), likes to contribute to writing some blog posts.
19. Which of your own blog entries are you most proud of.
Actually probably one of our firsts when we managed to be showcased in UK Cache Mag UK Cache Mag very early into our Geocaching journey.
20. Which other geocaching blogs do you enjoy reading?
I haven’t come across many other Geocaching blogs apart from the HQ blog. We absolutely love to watch the Geocaching Vlogger– Sophie is a big fan and is always asking me to send him a message with an update. We are patrons and support his work, hours of entertainement provided to us.
A note from us…
This photo of us was taken around a year ago and on one of our first trails- The stick trail- see the first cache at GC4803N. We have used this photo on our coins as it was a memorable day of us enjoying our new hobby.
Thank you for reading…
Jennifer here filling this out on behalf of us as GilmourFamily.
This photo of us was taken around a year ago and on one of our first trails- The stick trail- see the first cache at