Objectives
My 2013 Caching Diary is dominated by one key objective. I wanted to fill up my “Days I’ve Been Caching” matrix on the stats page. Or maybe the “Finds by Date Placed” or the “Finds by Month Placed”, but mainly the first one.
This may sound relatively easy, and in Milton Keynes it would be ridiculously easy if you were a beginner. We’ve got about 500 just in the town. A newbie could therefore do one a day for over a year without ever having to travel outside MK.
For me, however, it’s a bit more tricky. As the year started I had about 130 days left to fill. But I had less than 20 caches I could reach in under 20 minutes. The “20 minutes” is a practical constraint. I have to work during the week, and there’s no light in the evenings for much of the year. So odd ones and twos have to be done at lunchtime. Towards the end of the year, though, I started using my remaining holiday time.
Sure, a few weekdays could be safely filled with business trips and with evening events. But I’d still need about 70 or 80 on weekdays. From that perspective, maybe allowing 2 years would have made more sense than just 1.
But “Bum to it !” I had a go anyway. And there’s a whole new world of caches in the “Challenge” category that become eligible if you fill these things up.
So here’s a summary of days I went caching, and places I went.
Monthly Statistics
- January – 61 finds
- February – 134 finds
- March – 127 finds
- April – 54 finds
- May – 155 finds
- June – 183 finds
- July – 137 finds
- August – 114 finds
- September – 140 finds
- October – 84 finds
- November – 121 finds
- December – 215 finds
Summary
So there we have it, my 2013 Caching Diary. So what did I actually achieve:
- A total of 1,525 finds, made on 186 different days
- 130 days ticked off the “days found” list
- The first day ticked off my Shifty Fifty Challenge
- My first ever day with over 100 finds
- One new country – Germany
That was a decent effort. I missed two days from the “Days Found” matrix. One was an evening in February where I couldn’t find either my main target or my backup. The other was a day in June where I got it wrong and just forgot to go out. Still, two days left, and both were suitably booked as holidays to make sure I get the job done.
