Val d’Oise Madness
The Mystery Trail du Val d’Oise is a massive geoart series on the north side of Paris. I spent a week over Easter in 2018 doing them. It was a busy week.
A Place to Stay
I got us a cheap (ish) hotel in Cergy-Pontoise, a distant north-western suburb of Paris, but the closest large settlement to where we needed to be for the caching. The Campanile is functional as a hotel, and it had a couple of very functional offers on food every day.
Getting There
Clearly, you can read the individual posts below, but we traveled through Eurotunnel very early in the morning and managed to get ourselves down into the caching zone fairly early in the morning.
The Caches
The Mystery Trail du Val d’Oise itself is a geoart consisting of just over 600 caches. Each is a simple puzzle where the final coordinates are just hidden as white text on a white background, and as a result they were quick to solve.
In terms of the hunting, most were very simple to find (placed to be found). Many were accessible from the roadside, and this made the finding much quicker. Essentially we would do one or two walks each day, and then whenever we got tired we jumped in the car for a few drive-bys. We also concluded most evenings by doing drive-bys until (most nights) it was more or less dark.
The fact that maybe half of the caches were accessible by car made the whole experience much easier. Without it, we would not have managed the succession of 100+ days that we did.
Extras
You’ll see also that we took the opportunity to go into central Paris by train on Good Friday, and we also drove into the centre (nearly) on Saturday morning to do a parkrun. Well, it would be rude not to.
Frouville
Livilliers
A Day Off in Paris
Hérouville
Jouy-le-Comte
Valmondois
