One of the little problems that comes with age is that I am forever putting things down and then forgetting where I put them.

Normally this isn’t a problem as I trip over them sooner or later.  However, the odd time when I’m away from home, I forget where I put the car.  That can be tricky.

When I got the SatNav, I realised that all I had to do was bring the unit with me, and it would always tell me where the car was, and how to get back to it.  Roger is a clever little bastard.

Then someone [I think it was our K8], mentioned geocaching.

What the hell is geocaching [I asked]?

Apparently it’s like finding your car when someone else has parked it.  They tell you the number to put into your SatNav, and you toddle off to that location to see what they have parked.  Usually it’s not something useful like a car though.  It’s more likely to be a CD of Celine Dion or a key ring or something like that.  I suppose it’s a handy way of getting rid of rubbish?

This geocaching is quite popular.  There are web sites devoted to it.  You dump a bit of rubbish in a field somewhere and put the coordinates onto the web site, and then someone else goes and finds your rubbish and they get all excited over it.  Very strange.

Of course, to someone like myself, this seemed like too good an opportunity to miss.

I signed up for a geocaching site.

I put in the coordinates of a place and said I had left some very valuable stuff there.

I sat back and waited.

I visited the spot recently, and there were a few cars and motorbikes parked there.  There was no sign of the owners, but I didn’t expect there to be.

Pat’s Hole is well known in the area.  It’s a bog hole near the top of the mountains.  We steer well clear of it as it has a nasty reputation.

It looks like solid ground, but it isn’t.

God knows how many sheep, deer and geocachers are at the bottom of it now.