This is a short summary of the original Finnish article “Mistä tämä kaikki hölmöily nyt taas sai alkunsa?” I started to write this only in Finnish, but maybe I should put also some words in English, maybe a short summary in the beginning of each text? I don’t know if anyone really cares. Or if anyone actually reads these.
In Finnish geocachers group in Facebook, there was a discussion about how many municipalities people had visited. There are many who have already visited all Finnish municipalities and found at least one geocache in each of them. In Finland, I have mainly focused on southern regions with some also from Lapland. In the figure, the municipalities from where I have found geocaches are green, and the rest are red.
During the years, I have been cycling a bit. So, somewhere inside the grey pulp that some people call brains grew an idea to take a cycling tour and get some municipalities green in the geocaching map. The most promising area is the Ostrobothnia, the costal area of the western Finland.
The idea was to take a 10-day tour, starting e.g. from Seinäjoki and try to visit as many new municipalities as possible (and find a geocache also in each of them). Rough plan is to cycle ~80 km per day. Some very early alternatives are in the figure below.
At some point during my planning, I started to follow Taneli Roininen who has been cycling around the world since 2014. Currently he is in Chile (or Argentina, or somewhere there). Reading his text is entertaining, a lot can happen during such a tour. As a comparison, my planned tour looks pretty small-scale as you can see in the picture below.
More to come… maybe.
80km + kätköily kuulostaa paljolta. Are you sure 80km + caching isn’t too much? Paljonko tuollaiseen kätkön löytämiseen yleensä menee?
I’m planning to pick only a few caches during a day and select some that are very close to the road. Typically there are lots of easy ones, so it will be like five to ten minutes stop on each site. I would say 1-2 hours of geocaching during a day.
I have been cycling some 34 km per day now to work and back home, which is not much and that distance can easily be doubled with little less speed. Currently my speed is 21-23 km/h and I estimate my average travelling speed to be 16-20 km/h next summer. Of course I have had only backpack, but I’ll try to minimise the amount of stuff that I need to carry. E.g. I’m planning to sleep in cottages (or hotels if necessary) during the trip so no camping equipment is needed. However, that may be a difficult part of planning as there are not much places to stay when cycling around villages and small towns. That I found out with some quick googling.