BOT: Patea (Taranaki) Stratford, North Island, New Zealand
By Phronimos on 04-Mar-16. Waypoint GC6CKP3

Found a few days ago with friends only just got premium so i can now log it myself

Found

Cool find, thanks

Found TFTC, lovely place not been here for years

Checked all good here. Replaced plain paper log with a waterproof one. Transferred names. Is all good here.

Found it easy

Thorough check up and down showed no cache. Took ages to track down a suitable retaining stone then added a replacement for the CO.Took Friday off for travel as Im heading up into Taranaki for a couple of days out New Plymouth way. The last few times Ive visited Ive been time poor and have done Bulls- NP-Bulls in an extended driving day and been dead beat when I got back. This time I gave somewhere to stay so can enjoy my journey there, my time there, and the trip back. Also less pressure when searching and the Autumn weather is being kind too. Redeemed a couple of DNFs created a few more and had a nice time. Good to complete some Ad Lab series too and the Taranaki region COs are thanked for their hides and maintenance.

Replaced with pill pot, log in ziplock. Was missing

Not at the third for me today.. plenty of hints in previous logs, but still no.

Nice hide, spent a while finding this one. When we found it, it was a bit of a doh! moment

TFTF

Took us a little bit to find but found it finally

Thanks for the cache! Lovely spot. Left a bunch of trinkets and a pen.

Nice and easy. Great to fi d a container with room for swaps so left a smiley eraser. TFTC

great bridge on a lovely walkway. Thanks for the placement

Thanks for showing me this cool little spot! Didn’t know it existed! Tftc

Right by my house and I feel stupid for not finding it

i took the high road and Squirrel went the low road.
he had the luck today and cache soon in hand.
TFTC

With Gap (of Fap and Gap)…

Auckland Anniversary: The Taranaki weather had been particularly good to us this weekend, considering the mayhem it had sparked further up the country. It felt almost anticlimactic to be going home today, but work beckons…

We got momentarily waylaid by the obvious structure and quickly ran out of options. There was just one place left to search. Thanks Phronimos. TFTC.

**17,276**
Spent a bit of time on the bridge, as that would be closer to the terrain rating but as there was nowhere to hide a small-sized cache, soon ventured down to the correct level and thereby located the cache. TFTC

I signed the log while Dad took pictures of the nearby surroundings. We used to live less than a 5 minute walk from here for over 10 years so it was cool to revisit a familiar place.

It did take me a bit of searching but once I figured out what the clue meant the cache was soon in hand.

School holidays so time for a tiki tour to visit friends in Taranaki. Stayed the night in Stratford so now collecting some local caches. Great walk with the geohound along the river and over the bridges. Was getting a bit dark but no problem finding the cache. Found I had misplaced the own hence the photo. Thanks Phronimos for the smiley.

Found after much looking

Just passing through. looks like someone can't count.

Nice spot for a walk
TFTC

Nice find. TFTC

Drove around to the walkway entrance, and counted up and guess what I found! yep the cache.

Lovely location, thanks for the hide Phronimos

No luck for Arcane Junior and I this afternoon unfortunately.

Had a look at the hit and tried a couple of what we thought were obvious locations but with no luck.

Will try again when we next come back up here.

A great walk by the river with friends tftc

Some impressive numbers here and there seems an impressive amount of water in each one. Needed the hint then had to explore a few options before finding

Tftc. Great spot.

Quick stop and grab

No luck here for us today

searched and searched for this one but no luck be back

Out geocaching in Stratford for today. Nice quick and easy find. Our fourth cache of the day. #178. TFTC

Very cool! Tricky find, gotta look down

(# 5687). A flying visit to Taranaki primarily to get the TMGT geotour caches. Day 2 was to drive from New Plymouth to Hawera then back on home directly. Had me going a bit. Had checked the hiding spot but missed the container which was well hidden. On a second sweep I managed to locate it . Everything in order. TFTC

.This elusive one had us searching for ages. Rechecked the hint and rechecked the terain before finally snagging this one. Cheers

Day 8 - Saturday 21 December. A long day from New Plymouth to Egmont, then Stratford and back to New Plymouth for a few well earned ZZZZs.

The Seagnoid, Zara, Toby and I are spending Christmas exploring Taranaki via geocaching. Its been an amazing 3 week adventure. Rattls BBQ was a great event, meeting many other cachers. But also managed to fit in a few more events, especially New Years Day celebrating the start of 2020. Lots of caches - over 500. Lots of cache maintenance. Lots and lots of kilometers. And lots of amazing places visited along our journey. Mt Taranaki remained elusive for much of our travels and the caches on it at the top. Loved Pukekura Park Night Lights Show and the the Wooden Mechanical toy exhibition at NP Info centre.

Search the are, search everywhere else. Didn't find it? Do it again! Search the a... There it is!!!
Arrgh. Hate it when that happens!

Day eight of Taybeedragon's and my big 3 week circumnavicaching trip around Mt Taranaki, starting from Palmerston North. Today is up the mountain and Inglewood and Stratford.
Highlights:
* 3 weeks, 536 caches
* Mt Taranaki had been removed for washing, which was a bit of a shame. Even after it had been returned we were only allowed to see it for it was less than half an hour a day.
* High percentage of caches with crappy coordinates
* Amazing Pukekura Park
* AMAZING Pukekura Park light show!
* Pukeiti Gardens
* Lots of cache maintenance!

***[======== NZ Mega 2020 ========](http://nzmega.com)***

Planning for the [NZ Mega 2020](http://nzmega.com) event is well underway. It will be held in Auckland over Labour Weekend, 23 to 26 October 2020. It's going to be a massive celebration of geocaching:

* 20 years of geocaching worldwide.
* 20 years since New Zealand had the very first geocache hidden outside of USA.
* And it's 2020 - all the 20s!

Talk to your geo-friends and start planning to be part of [this event](https://coord.info/GC87777) - you won't want to miss it!

Found it

This cache is a short walk from work and I have been saving it for an important dot day. Today was that day. No interruptions from workmates doing lunchtime exercise so it was a straightforward find. Thanks Phronimos.
[#922]

Find number 6455. Doing a trip to grab some TMGT caches and others as well. Stopped here after doing the TMGT to ride my bike along the river trail. Shot down to find before setting off. Quickly found and signed. Thank you for the placement.

Locals filling in a Sunday TFTC

Nice spot, quite a full river below as we searched the wrong places. KR for the win, he took the different path.

Up here for an awesome weekend jaunt with Team Gators, TheWanglers and Karma Reprint to do a loop of the mountain in 48 hours grabbing as many caches as we could while having a good laugh. Logs signed as some derivative of (KT)^2

Cheers Phronimos for the cache

A planned geocaching trip to the USA was shelved (but is all go for this time next year!) so we came up with a weekends Plan B. Taranaki with TheWanglers, KarmaReprint and KiwiMoose - logs signed (TK)^2 or a variation of. A really fun trip with the forecast rain and thunder seemingly always in the distance but never hindering us. A really fun weekend.
Arrived in New Plymouth; grabbed the rental and hit the road running - aiming for Hawera....
Woot woot...another cool spot with history. Thanks.

A plan was hatched for a few of us to head to America for a Mad Mission. With life getting a bit crazy a downsized trip was organised as I had sorted childcare for the cachelets. The big America trip is now set for next year. We asked a member of our crew if we could go to Nelson, Dunedin, Auckland, Wellington, Hastings the answer all came back "I don't have many to find there". We left it to that member to suggest an area. He came up with New Plymouth and a loop around the mountain. That's a go from the rest of us. We sorted puzzles, gpxs, motels and a car and hit the ground running. The forecast was doom, gloom, rain, hail and lightning. Oh well, sounds exciting. We had very little of any of the weather that affected our caching and found we had all overpacked (thank God!).
Day 1: We grabbed the car and started caching at 2pm and made it to Hawera after 8pm settled into our accommodation and had a bit to eat and hit the town before calling it quits for the day.


Thanks for the cache Phronimos.
#6068
Find 14 of 80 for today.
Find 14 of 224 for the trip.

A quick and easy find. look high or look low. One of those works!!. Cheers

Day one, New Plymouth airport to Hawera.

A long weekend cache raid to Taranaki. The weather didn't stop us doing anything, and we had fun times. Logs were signed with a combination of KT and 2 depending one which of did the signing. Thanks Kiwi Moose, Team Gaters and TheWanglers for a choice time.

Thanks to all CO's for placing and maintaining their caches. Cheers

It was just a short weekend visit to Taranaki for me. The little time I was able to devote to geocaching was made even shorter due to the awful weather. Eventually, I was able to get out and make my way to this site. It should have been a quick find but my first man look did not produce a result. A more careful inspection produced the treasure.

TeamBOP have come together again for a trip to the Naki. Team BOP consists of myself (obviously), McJandals, Philip.Perry and DavidsonClan.
We decided to take the long way there, via the Forgotten Highway, experiencing the world famous in New Zealand Republic of Whangamomona Day.
Found quickly in a nice area.
Thanks to all the CO's for attracting us to the Taranaki.
TFTC

It was time to assemble Team BOP as I hadn't seen these crazy people since the Mega. The plan was Taranaki via the Forgotten World Highway and we were all pretty excited about it. It was a big couple of days so forgive the cut'n'paste logs as I'm logging retrospectively and a few of the hides are blurring together. TNXPro, McJandals, Davidson Clan & myself signed our logs individually or as TEAM BOP depending on time, log space or mood.

This cache was found quickly and in good condition thanks to accurate coords and a straight forward placement. Cheers Phronimos, TFTC

Found using Cachly app and logged using the text template, so please excuse generic logging in advance. On a spur of the moment roadie with Phillip.Perry, TNXPRO and Davidson Clan from the Bay of Plenty, a plan was hatched and here we are. Great to have these places to visit and many thanks to all you COs for the placements. Cheers

Out with Tnxpro McJandals and Philip.Perry for a weekend road trip towards New Plymouth.
Signed log Team BOP.

Good cache found quickly

Heading out in the company of HKCB for a quick 24 hours down to Taranaki collecting caches around the mountain to try to tidy up the area.
We departed Hamilton at 7pm Friday and made it back home 7pm on Saturday with a haul of 70 caches and 820kms traveled. A great drive through the night, clear sky's and a fantastic day on Saturday to view the mountain in all its glory, a calm sea along the coast. Together these factors made the trip memorable as we could not have asked for better conditions to cache in.
A big thank you to all the CO's whom have placed these caches for us and continued their maintenance.
After an early morning walk it was time to work our way through what remains of Stratford. Still had the place to ourselves

Thank you for the placement, thank you for the cache.

In the company of Cats&Dragons for a quick 24 hour blast around Mt Taranaki, with the aim to tidy up as much of the area as possible. Leaving 7pm Friday night and returning 7pm Saturday we managed the loop and found about 70 caches along the way, with a couple of hours sleep thrown in as well. The weather also played its part with fantastic vistas throughout the day of the mountain.

With some well hidden and maintain caches found throughout the day a big thanks must go to all the CO's for the placements. Thanks for the great hint as this was a quick find.

Took a little bit of looking, daughter found in the end

Found at 16:22.

Our second trip to New Zealand. This time we explore the North Island for 3 weeks. This was one cache we found.



Thank you for placing and maintaining this cache Phronimos

TFTC

As the weather looked quite unstable, we decided to go geocaching instead of hiking the Mount Taranaki. This brougt us to this two beautifull loops.
Took as little while, but in the end, we were lucky.
Thanks for hiding and maintaining this series.

We picked Stratford as our base to go hiking around Mount Taranaki. When we looked what Caches were in town we were surprised to find two small trails. Since the weather wasn't so good we decided to do our hiking and Caching along those trails. We started with the Western Loop, which we enjoyed very much, so many beautiful trees! Since the weather was holding up we continued with the Eastern Loop, which was more interesting in the second part, than in the first.

This one was on our way between the two loops, so we had a look. The coordinates were a bit off, but the hint gave us a good idea where to look. At first we only found a suspicious, but empty hollow and already feared, that it was gone, but then we looked in another corner and found it. All in good order here.

Thanks for this Cache!

# 2076

No luck here today

Quickly located while out with tmann421
Beautiful area

Second time here - last time it hadn't been put back properly, this time it was a quick easy find. I like the location.
TFTC

Found while out on a homeschool adventure with the 9 year old. Took a while but we got there. Thanks.

I have set myself a goal to get the requirements for the mystery cache The well-rounded cacher challenge (Manawatu) This requires me to get 25 badges 5 of which need to be gemstone badges. So each time I go out caching weather it is by myself or with fellow cacher I will try to get a least one cache that will get me closer to my goal

Out today grabbing some caches with the aim of getting enough caches to get the World Turtle souvenir and also getting some caches that will help with my main goal

Once I had a better idea of where the cache was whether it was high or low down. Once I add chosen the right level I soon found the cache

Thanks for the cache

Found it

In the area today with a meeting down the road so time to pick this one up. All good and log dry. Pen inside is wet so BYO. Mission accomplished, this one is a wrap. Thanks for the cache from Blenheim Bear!
This cache posted with CacheSense for Android.

Muddled around here for ages checking out all the thirds we could find. In the end we kept going back to GZ without realising over and over again without any luck. Did an sos to owner and realised that we couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Felt pretty daft when we realised where we had looked repeatedly! All done now though. Tftp

Got some help to find this one. Lovely quick response. Thanks for the help and the cache.

Took a while until we worked out which third.

Out on a Sunday drive and finding a few caches. Lots of possible spots matching the clue...I think I checked them all before I finally found the right one. Tftc

Finished a Guiding training nearby, so just have to try for some smilies on the way back to where I'm staying .
Quick find here, very 'Taranaki' view that I didn't expect to find in town.
Thanks for the smilie Phronimos.
2120 14 April 2018 16:52

Grew up around Stratford and no stranger to the Patea river. Home from Oz for school reunion. Lovely to see town on a different mission. Tftc

Down to visit friends this was close so had a quick find.

Out in Stratford this morning for the nexus walk, so afterwards me and the geo dog have to find a cache as you do, tftc

Nice easy cache ... once we figured out the right direction! Left some swag. Tftc

What a neat spot. The only decision was which way? Decided to head the right way for a quick and easy find. Tucked away safe and sound, then to the bridge to race some leaves with Lilfishy. TFTC

Nice little walk down the street to find this little baby

Cool little walkway. Nice quick find

Found with Trayc.g and TeamAlmawoody logging now as I have my own account. TFTC

Found this a bit tricky first time. Had help today and bingo

What a nice spot! TeamAlmawoody had been here before with no luck so came to help out and found quite quickly. TFTC

out with my cadets showing the joy of caching, found and signed TFTC

Part two of my geocache maintenance mission. This cache was not missing just put back in the wrong place. All back where it should be at "third". PLEASE, Please put the caches back where you find them! All good here now

Wasn't missing just relocated to the wrong place.

No luck today

I will check it this weekend

Couldn't work this one out today.

Travelling through to New Plymouth and back, to do final details organization for Mum in laws 90th birthday in August and had to locate a t least few caches en route.
As i arrived and man and his dog were enjoying the the view of the river..and it seemed like forever before they moved on. and after a few fruitless attempts i decided i needed to change the approach after re reading the hint! And then it made sense and it was retrieved, signed and replaced. It is a very pleasant little spot and i thought i might have my lunch there but it was too chilly.
Thank you for this new cache and another smiley face.

In the area after a weekend visiting my mother for mothers day, we had been to this spot before, but had been unlucky as a muggle was hanging around and looked like he was staying there so it was a no go that day, but today no muggles around found the cache quickly signed the log and placed it back where we found it, just in time some muggles came across the bridge. Picked up 1 TB and dropped off 3 TB's. TFTC.

Quick find while out and about in Stratford. Tftc

It took quite a while to find this cache, initially looking in the correct place, but missing it, and trying various other hint possibilities, before eventually returning to the first place and this time finding it. TFTC

Found after looking in the wrong place for awhile makes sense when we got it! TFTC

Heading up to the 'Naki with MacGyverson for a few days to catch up with friends and geocache as we go. Spent far to long here as the GPSr had us along the rivers edge aways. Had all but given up but I decided to have one more look in the likely spots given the hint, where MacGyverson had already looked, and there it was. Thanks for the info and the placement Phronimos.

Love it quick find

Heading to New Plymouth for a work seminar this evening and taking advantage of the drive to collect a few of the new caches that have appeared since my last work trip.

What a beautiful spot that I would never had known about if it wasn't for caching. Quickly found the cache and swapped tbs, dropping one that I bought up from my recent South Island trip.

We looked for several minutes but no joy. Couldn;t figure out which 3rd it meant!

One last cache for the day. But had a chat with a nearby neighbour watering thier garden before heading in to GZ. The cache was quickly located and was larger that I expected. Big enough for a travel bug so i left "Gregory the Great".

Despite getting a bit tired, just had to get this one before going home. Clear hint and placement, thanks, Phronimos. Replaced cache more snugly than it had been. TFTC

This one took our group of 8 ages. But I am proud to say that the oldest and wisest won the day and figured it out!