Gara Loop: Mole in a Hole Armidale, New South Wales, Australia
By magpiecottage on 10-Aug-18. Waypoint GC7VXW6

Coordinates changed from:S 30 34.706 E 151 48.295Coordinates changed to:S 30 34.718 E 151 48.279Distance from original: 111.3 feet or 33.9 meters.Too many invisible ankle breakers between road and cache no. Moved to new spot.

Tftc Out looking for D2/T1.5, D1.5/T2, or D2/T2. After seeing the snake earlier, I was a bit hesitant on going through the long grass to get this one. I walked along the road until i was as closeto gz as I could get before heading through the grass. Im not sure which was faster - signing the log or getting back to the road.

Reperio 19:38Day 2 of our tour of Tamworth caching trip, and Master Vitruvius and I decided to head out towards Uralla and Armidale, and eventually towards Hillgrove and Wollomombi. With lots of drive by caches, most the finds were nice and quick, with a few nicely crafted caches thrown into the mix. The most pleasingly part of the day was that nearly all the caches were available and found.Gratias magpiecottageAs a well spent day brings happy sleep, a well spent life brings happy death - LDV

Travelling with FootyFanatics. Parked on the side of the road. Wasnt happy doing about this one because the grass was very long and I was worried about snakes. GPS was sluggish here and jumping around.

Found it on a sunny Tuesday while out and about with evangt. After a bit of bush bashing further than I'd like on a hot day, evangt found this one. TFTC

Great little hide. TFTC

That took much longer than expected. Shouldve followed the instinct rather than GPS. Lovely spot with beautiful bird calls around. TFTC

Good to see the mole emerge safely from his hole ... and go back again. TFTC!

Out caching with Anne of Green Gables 2 on my birthday. Quick park and grab today.

TFTC

Out with Mystery Sleuth for the day, quick run and grab

TFTC

A trip to check out some of the awesome places in NSW and grab some old caches. TFTC.
Quick find but took a while to get out.

Yikes this grass is long! Hubby made the dash to GZ while I waited it out like a sook. Haha

Staying around the Armidale area to cache for a few days.
Today was a power trail day, we tackled the Gara, Hillgrove-Metz and Long Point trails and started the Chandler Trail. Overall a very busy day of caching.
Thanks for the cache

That mole has a very neat hole, and such a secluded spot TFTC Magpiecottage

Thanks!

#5400
It was wet and 7 degrees this morning, so we decided that a few drives to interesting caches would be better than endless in and out of the warm car, so we decided to focus on the letterboxes around Armidale and go from them. We drove the Gara loop managing all but one, we turned around at the river, with a difficult to determine depth and quite fast flowing, so did the trail in two halves.
Good coordinates (actually all the trail is) so a quick find of a sneaky cache....

Found today while out on an afternoon drive on the road out to Dorrigo, found a bunch of caches but took longer than we thought due to a flooded causeway that we probably could've crossed, but decided on the safer option and came around the caches from the back way...

TFTC

Happy for the cooler weather recently while retrieving this through knee high grass. Cache can no longer be retrieved by the intended method, but still easy enough to grab. Thanks!

The impressive growth on the grass here made me very glad I'd kept my jeans on and sad I had put my thongs on. However I was not to be deterred and shouted to the snakes "I'm coming in !" And forged ahead. Signed log , dropped it and the penicil in the long grass but scrabbled round til I could replace it all back the followed the vague geotrail back to the car.

Tftc found with earthly65

Nice lil cache...unexpected different type...fave point ..thanks magpiecottage

Nearly went head first on the bushes but I got there

Find # 6799
Nice quick find.

TFTC magpiecottage
31 March 2021 11:35 pm

Stopped here while touring the New England area along with ilook4geo. It was a quick and easy find. All was good with the container and its contents. This is an enjoyable series of caches. Many thanks go to magpiecottage for placing this cache for us to find and enjoy.

Came looking for some more smiley faces with goingplaces2. This was one of the caches we found. Cache retrieved, log signed, all replaced! TFTC.

Hello magpiecottage we found your geocache at 9:01 a.m. on the 16 November 2020. This is #5881 for us.

I did the bush bashing while Mrs coongoola did the driving.

Long grass
......
Plus my massive fear of snakes

But still managed to locate

Thats so e looong grass! Tftc

I have found it

Out collecting the various trails and a few extra caches today. A good day in total with only 1 DNF

Thankyou to the CO's for placing and maintaining the caches

**Total find count: 1029**

After what has felt like an eternity, we are finally taking our first geocaching road trip since Clear Waters with Crzymelly, TeamPQS and HubbyandMrs.

Today was "trail' day. We elected to complete the Gara Loop, Hillgrove-Metz and Long Point geocache trails. All found logs were dry and had room for more names.

**TFTC magpiecottage**

------
The following TBs and Geocoins helped with the search to find the hidden cache:
* Miniature Itsonlybarney
* GeocachingNSW 2016 Geocoin
* GeocachingNSW 2017 Geocoin
* Geocache Talk Geocoin
* Planetary Pursuit Micro Geocoin
* Geocoin Club Jan 2015 - Rescue Coin
* Geocoin Club May 2018 - Blodeuwedd
* OzGeomuster 2018 Geocoin
* Col Miner HAVOC Geocoin
* Geocoin Club June 2018 - Illumination
* Caching Under the Moon
* Geocoin Club July 2018 - Dive Deep
* Geocache Talk Blackout Geocoin
* GeocachingNSW 2018 Geocoin
* Clear Waters 2019 Geocoin
* OzGeomuster 2019 Geocoin

Another big day of caching with @itsonlybarney, @TeamPQS and @hubbyandmrs. We decided that we would head out to Hillgrove from where we were staying in Armidale. We had a great time on the Hilllgrove-Metz trail, then we headed into town, luckily we had lunch with us and stopped off by the little playground for the geokids to be able to have a run around to stretch their legs. Once lunch was done we collected all the caches in Hillgrove and then headed out to complete the Long Point Trail. Loved all the Hillgrove history with all the signs indicating what was originally there. The Oyster Saloon sounded yummy. TFTC.

Out caching with a friend, haven’t done much out this way so thought we’d pick a few up, had a good time and found some interesting and well thought out caches! TFTC
I particularly enjoyed this one, really cool and a nice change from the surrounding caches, favourite point for the thought!

The farmers friends here were nuts and we figured we had more available without the need to de-prickle so we left it for another day!

Find #66 (29/6/2020) on a trip around to Maitland, Armidale and back with JessYoung96.

Easy find, just not a fan of the farmers friends, we spent about 5 minutes getting them all off of the both of us after getting out of there.

Nevertheless TFTC.

Found with TheProdigalGoat on 29/6/2020. Heading back to Coffs Harbour today to finish our caching trip
Easy find, great location and GPS led straight to the cache
TFTC

Getting too dark, long grass and lots of farmers friends we decided not to even attempt this one today

Hopefully we will be back one day

Tamworth and Amrmidale Trip March 2020. Day 6. I headed north with Fitzy_1965 along the New England Highway towards Tamworth. This was our day to get the cache trails to the North and east of Armidale, it was a long day with rain showers on and off all day. The day was mostly roadside caches, but they were all of differing levels of challenges, especially when you have to deal with Farmers Friends and Stinging Nettles at almost every cache.

Thanks for the cache magpiecottage

28740.75 TNLN
Visited: World Traveling Gold GC A#6 & 2016 10th Anniversary Compass Rose Pupis A#337

**Albida**

20,721. Found with albida33 during a meander up to and around the Tamworth and Armidale regions.

Day 6 of our trip. Enjoying the luxury of staying in a hotel room after our campsite booking got cancelled, it was a nice easy start to the day. Headed out to where we finished last night for what turned out to be another big days caching. We aimed to finish the various trails around Armidale. Next stop for the day, and we came up with a quick find. Signed the log, replaced the cache, then headed off to the next one.

TFTC magpiecottage !! Lovely area to drive around.

Awesome hide. That's 100 finds for us!

Nicely hidden TFTC

The GPS was a bit indecisive here and it looked, at first, that we might have to investigate holes in logs. Cast the net a bit wider and, bingo!

I'm out on a geocaching drive accompanied by Little Jimmy and we've decided to try the Gara Loop. My goodness me, it is so dry out here - but it's the same all around inland New South Wales. The Grafton (Waterfall Way) Road is closed east of Wollomombi, with bushfires at Sandy Creek. Very few cars on either the Gara or Grafton Roads, and the paddocks are mostly devoid of stock. One has to wonder how it will ever recover.

Please excuse the "cut and paste" logs, but there are a few to cover.

Thanks so much for placing the cache, magpiecottage. Signed the log, travellers visited and we moved on . . .

found on a caching day around Armidale. Thanks

Found while on a geocaching holiday with tmann421.
Enjoyed the trip around and all the great hides.
Stamped TM/WW NZ, or if in pen our full names

Another day of fun driving / walking around the area with woolwood9.
*More good caches found along the way* **TFTC**
Stamped logs as TM/WW NZ or our full user names or tm421/ww9 in pen.

Good cache!

Sneaky.

Found it

Don’t let go of the line.

Very clever

Gotcha !!! A few detours on the way from Sydney to Glen Innes. TFTC

This cleverly crafted cache had us wondering a little as the gps was sending us up the garden path. Found within 5mins though after using commonsense. TFTC

I did my first drive and grab geocaching tour. Coming from Switzerland, normally we would go for a walk to look for caches. So this was intersting and I finally got the hang of it. I did the Gara River Tour, did some hikes and finally took a detour through Hillgrove following the magpie cottages trail.

Serious day caching around the Armidale greater area with Liz and Bruce. Good country dirt roads with the car again covered in dust. No DNF's today and some creative caches or great hides were given fav points. we didn't get all the caches in the two days here so we will be back to enjoy the locals hospitality.
TFTC magpiecottage
Total Cache Finds 6053

With our base established at Uralla we headed out to different surrounding localities finding caches as we went. We enjoyed exploring the area and this was one we (us and Snakepiters) targetted and found. Thanks to magpiecottage for hiding this cache and adding to our enjoyment of the area.

Having a caching day around the new trails to the east of Armidale and also collecting a few other individual caches. As well as finding a variety of cache containers and hiding places we appreciated the effort that goes into planning, placing and maintaining these hides. Thanks to all the COs for showing us your wonderful countryside.

Visiting Armidale with joojoo57 for a couple of days and decided to do your Chandler Trail Caches.
Set off around 9am to complete them before it got to hot, which it really did not. Thoroughly enjoyed travelling through the countryside.
Apologies for the generic log however due to the number of caches we did, it would take me ages to do different logs. Enjoyed finding the caches in their various spots.
TFTC magpiecottage.

Found

A quick and easy find in the heat, just a few more then we can head to camp...

Nice quick find on this one.tftc.

Decided to take a country drive along Gara Rd, Silverton Rd, Metz Rd and Chinamans Gully Rd then return to Armidale on the Waterfall Way. We collected 26 of Magpiecottage's caches along the way. Accurate coordinates and helpful hints made all of these quick finds.
We thoroughly enjoyed our day, a big thanks to Magpiecottage for placing these caches.

Tnln sl

Hi there magpiecottage.

It looks like we had a magpiecottage day today. We started off with your caches in the "Gara Loop" before moving on to the "Hillgrove-Metz" series. We had our lunch stop at "Bring a Picnic" whilst exploring around Hillgrove, and finally we headed off down the "Long Point" trail.

We had a really fun day driving around the countryside today. The caches were all well placed, the coordinates were accurate and we can see that a lot of thought has gone into the placement of all the caches we found today.

Please excuse our boilerplate logs - find it really difficult to craft individual logs when we attempt so many caches in a day. [:(!]

All up we found 52 caches & DNF'd 0 in this cache run. Thanks for placing the caches. Without geocaching as our guide we would never have found so many interesting places while we meander around Australia.

**Coordinate Accuracy:** We found each cache about 2-4m from where the GPS said we should be looking.
**Cache Condition:** The containers and log books are mostly in good shape.
**Took:** If we found a balloon we took it out (they perish and make the other swaps stick together).
**Left:** A gold coin was left in caches big enough to hold one.

Regards

Ian & Penny.

Easy one tftc

Found OK, although I am not sure about any moles. TFTC.

Found at 12:14 PM GAFF1 in the company of DiMorgan.
We spotted the container and thought how are we going to get that out and then we saw the retrieving method
Thanks magpiecottage.

We have set up camp with pprass overnight at Wollombi National Park. After dropping off our caravans we headed out on the Chandler Trail & the Gara Loop with a few other caches thrown in along the way.
It was good to find such a variety of caches & hides along the way.
Thanks for placing this cache magpiecottage

Nice to find a cache here.

TFTC magpiecottage
Baby Birt's find no. 708

Found the cache and first thought was........ hehe, the hint. It was then we found there was another way. I guess you could say it's blustery if the cache attachment is whistling in the wind... TFTC magpiecottage.

Interesting series of different types of caches & hides ..
Funny how you can miss the bleeding obvious sometimes, saw the cache, looked where it was and completely missed
seeing the line, so went back to the car to get a retrieval tool, arriving back at GZ I then saw it ..

All Good .. TFTC ..

Tftc with kawaiipotato99

Published

A few inquisitive very young black calfs and there mums watched on as the cache was located signed FTF and a couple swaps added,.. Thanks magpiecottage