Why 'Lost: A Year...'?
Despite having been caching for over 12 years, I only hosted my first event last year. Since then, I've hosted a few more in places I have travelled to, and all have been local translations of 'Lost in...' the place I am visiting. Today, I will be caching around the Haywards Heath area, and all things being equal, it will be the day I complete a 366 streak. So, that's it - a Year Lost in caching!
Join me to celebrate this streaking milestone at:
The Lockhart Tavern, Haywards Heath, on Friday 10th November between 17.00 - 18.00
where I will be concluding the day's caching with a beer (they have a very nice selection, although plenty of other options available).
If you want more detail on the matter of streaks, here you go:
Geocaching streaks seem to provoke some emotion - but the great thing about caching is there are so many different ways you can play the game, so if you don't like the sound of it, look away now. The last streak I completed (consciously) was 101 days back in 2012, and it nearly killed me (or at least my love of the game). So it was not something I anticipated ever doing again. But then a series of events took their course...
Firstly, I signed the log of The Wombles' Chalk Challenge: 365 Streak (continuous caching) with the following 'Write Note' (and no intention of converting it to a smiley):
Not all challenges are for all people, a fact which some people get quite cross about. I was going to not bother signing this one, as it’s not a challenge for me. I concluded my streak back in 2012, with 101 days. That was enough to almost kill my love of geocaching, so it’s not something I intend to pick up any time soon. However, the future always holds surprises and there will be a time when my life is different to the one I’m living now, so I checked in here because, who knows? Maybe when I retire and do a year long trip around The States, this one will fall quite naturally! But in the meantime, it will just make that list on Project GC of challenges that have signed and not yet qualified for a little longer...
Little did I know at the time that less than a month and half after those fateful words, I would be embarking on this one!
Meanwhile, I had started a crazy personal challenge to complete a whole year with 500 finds a month, fill my Multi 365, and top up all of my calendar days to at least 11 finds (yep, that's stupid, but that's me!). And then sometime in December (when I was 11 months deep in these shenanigans), I realised that I had found 'Non-Trad' caches for about 20 days in a row. That seemed like the ideal opportunity to pick up on a challenge I had signed back in 2018: Dare to be Different: An Untraditional Challenge (and it's 60 day counterpart - in for a penny, in for a pound). By the time those two were complete, I realised that streaking was not quite as onerous as I had in my head and decided to carry on, and on.
It's been quite a strange, mad year and not one that is 'lost' at all, in fact I have gained many things along the way, including visits to some lovely places as well as meeting and spending time with some great people. Anyway, I am pretty certain that this is not the end, but who knows what the next year will bring! I have signed some pretty bonkers challenges in the past few months, despite trying (and failing) to resist checking in on some of the more idiotic ones. I'm fairly confident that they might steer some of my antics 
(oh, yeah, they already have!).