A FTF, but not before I had to do quite a bit of searching...

This morning, I was in the office catching up with things from the weekend, when a new cache notification came up not too far from home. The sun is out and a FTF opportunity presents itself - hmmm, do I go out and find it or not? Tricky one - NOT!

I was soon at stage 1 and dismayed to see lots of trees that match the hint. The hint also implied the cache could be one of two possible sneaky hides. I think I'm going to have my work cut out for me here as I've no idea if this cache setters co-ords are generally good as this is their first hide.

I spent quite a while staring into and up the trees but could not spot it. Then a muggle with a dog came and sat on a bench overlooking GZ. No chance of further searching as he was watching me (and probably wondering what the heck I was up to by the trees) so I went off to scout the park for items matching the final cache hint. There was only one area but I could not find the cache there.

I then spotted the muggle had moved on so thought I'd go and expand my search for stage 1. I then found it after a further (quite long) search - it was 40ft off the stated co-ords. Once I'd got the very small piece of paper out of it, I saw the final co-ords were in a different GPS co-ord format than most caches so changed my GPSr settings so I could use them.

Off I went to the final cache, but the GPSr zero'd out 55ft from the nearest hint item (in an area I'd already searched earlier). Looks like the brute force approach of re-checking everywhere and trying to think of places I'd not looked is in order.

After quite a few scratches from hidden hawthorn I finally managed to spot the final cache and was pleased to say I was FTF. A really nice area for a cache and good fun to find, despite how it sounds above.

I've emailed the cache owner with my readings at both stages so they can hopefully update things and make it a bit clearer for future finders.