It all started when I bought a new phone with GPS. I thought GPS was a lifesaver and that with it you could hardly ever get lost or be at a loss. Fortunately, I now know that the GPS in a phone shows different values depending on how you hold it, and you always have to treat the readings as a range of about 1-20 m. But today, for example, when I was in a deciduous forest, it was off by at least 150 m. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
It started when I left home at 15:45, but I realized that I had no pen or pencil, so I went back and didn’t leave again until 16:30. It’s strange, but ever since we got a station announcement system in Ropice, the trains no longer run with 15-minute delays. In Cesky Tesin I went straight across the Freedom Bridge to Poland. There I entered the Raszka Avenue, or at least that’s the name of the street that runs through it. Right at the start I was greeted by a sign saying it was some kind of protected landscape area or something. Now is the right moment to tell you what I set out on the hunt with.
These were the caches:
- b – N 49 ° 44.561 E 018 ° 37.949 – roots of tree – Mieszko Cieszynski
- c – N 49 ° 44.735 E 018 ° 38.208 – right corner – Pomnik Trzanowskiego
- d – N 49 ° 44.889 E 018 ° 38.008 – magnet – 1200 lat Cieszyna
- e – N 49 ° 45.006 E 018 ° 37.808 – sit down – Teatr w Cieszynie
- f – already found
- g – N 49 ° 44.517 E 018 ° 36.943 – Stand in front of the entrance door, turn right, hop over the low wall and look for a hole in it. – Cesky Tesin Grammar School
and a single map, this one (thanks for it, @adlgCZ):
However, since the cache and point “B” were somewhere else entirely, I ended up searching somewhere else entirely too.
I even “climbed” up a steep slope to check whether the cache might be on the other side of the tree. 😀 The hint said the cache should be among the roots of a tree. On top of that, the navigation on my phone was fooling me by hundreds of meters, so I was searching in a completely different place. There was also a trodden path between the monument and the road, so I thought geocachers had made it.
I raked leaves away from the tree roots, but I didn’t find it. All in all I searched there for up to 15 minutes. I told myself this was off to a fine start. That was this cache: https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC1A018_mieszko-cieszynski . Then I moved on to the next one, https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC1A0FG_pomnik-trzanowskiego . Here again I was confused by the printed map, but looking at it now, the mistake was mine, not the map’s.
Anyway, I managed to get my bearings quickly enough and only took a detour of one street. I stopped at the Trzanowski Monument and the cache of the same name. I always waited until nobody was coming, then quickly pulled it out (the hint made it immediately clear where the cache would be), signed the log and put it back just as carefully, watching out for muggles. So one cache down. I went on and again wasn’t sure if I was going the right way. In Cesky Tesin every street is signed with both a Czech and a Polish name, but in Cieszyn mostly not even with a Polish one! Luckily there was a square nearby, so I used it to get my bearings, and soon I confidently found the street I needed.
Once again it was mostly my own fault, because I didn’t realize that the blue line didn’t lead somewhere into the street. I was confused by the big arrows; without them I would have seen that the cache would be right at the very beginning of the street, not further in. I searched in that street, in a courtyard where there were iron trash bins and iron benches, and when that wasn’t enough, I looked at everything else that could be metal and hold a magnet, such as drainpipes or the undersides of windowsills. I didn’t find it.
It was this cache: https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC2B7TV_1200-lat-cieszyna . Fortunately, after that I didn’t get lost even once, it was totally fine. I reached the spot of the last Polish cache I intended to hunt today. However, the GPS was playing tricks on me again, and at the spot it pointed me to there was nothing, just the sidewalk I was walking on.
Fine, there were benches in front of the theater, but it didn’t occur to me that the hint “sit down” referred to them. The cache was this one: https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC3772V_teatr-w-cieszynie . Besides, it was busy there, and I didn’t want to attract the attention of some muggle by searching for something for ages. From there I went back to Cesky Tesin and straight to the Czech grammar school.
The map shows a route to the Cesky Tesin theater, but I didn’t go there because I had already found that cache back in 2010 or 2011. I still remember searching for it when suddenly an adult showed up with about 15 kids, they all crowded in and found it right away :D. So at the grammar school it was finally a piece of cake even for me, I found it straight away: https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC2RY6F_gymnazium-cesky-tesin .
Throughout my time in Poland I had a signal from the Czech O2 network and didn’t have to use roaming, not even when I played songs from my memory card and scrobbled them straight to last.fm. Today I’m going to hunt down the rest of the caches, because I’ve already consulted @adlgCZ on how to find them..
Some photos from the trip are here:
All the photos I took while geocaching, including these, can be found on 👻 link – Google+ shut down in 2019.