May | 2012 | Thompson Life & Travels

South Australia is starting to get a reputation for being the Geocaching Power Trail State of Australia. To keep the reputation going, I spent today out near Port Wakefield and Inkerman laying yet another Power Trail.

The series that I have put out is the “Premiers of South Australia“. Originally when doing the research, I thought. “how many could there be?”. Well there has been 45 in total since Parliament started in South Australia in 1856. Some like Thomas Playford were in for a long time (27 years) while others were only in for a few days such as John Baker. The early years of South Australia were obviously very tumultuous.

Rather than just a long line of geocaches, I hid them in the shape of South Australia and was lucky to find some roads that fit the shape well, just south east of Port Wakefield.

After spending a few hours hiding the caches, it was time to grab some of the caches that I have been passing by over the years due to lack of time. Most of these were along the coast and required a 4WD and some others didn’t but did require a lot of patience – a nano cache on a Leopard Tank. 🙁

Following the coast down, I traveled through Port Parham, Thompson Beach (couldn’t miss this one) finishing up at St Kilda on sunset. A good finish to the day. 🙂

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It was a funny sort of day today. Bradley had his Year 12 formal last night and was needed to be picked up at 4:00 am. As I was on call, there was no guarantee I would be around the place so Jenny headed out to pick him up.

I had a few projects to do today.

The first project: Waeco Battery Pack. Our battery pack is a few years old and doesn’t hold the charge too well. A replacement is $335 so I bought a couple of replacement batteries for $150 but my soldering iron wasn’t up to the task. First stop was Jaycar Electronics for a soldering iron with more power and then replace the batteries. Both tasks completed OK.

Second Project: Sleeping Bag zip. One of our sleeping bags has had issues with the zip with the slide breaking. It should be easy enough to get a new zip slide. Headed to Spotlight but they only had zips. So grabbed a short zip with the right size zip and took the slide and put it on the sleeping bag. New slide on OK but there seems to be other issues with the zip. 🙁

On my travels, I returned the suit that Bradley wore last night for his formal. The suit had been hired from Ferrari Formal Wear.

It was a good afternoon to be out and about and there were a few new geocaches around the Edwardstown and Morphettville areas and I made 9 geocache finds. Even one down near Morphettville Racecourse while the historic race with Black Caviar was being run.

Third Project: Film Canisters. South Australia is starting to get a reputation of having geocaching power trails. These involve many geocaches hidden close together along a road in a country area. There may be 50 to many hundred geocaches in a power trail. I recently completed the ET Highway Power Trail in Nevada which had 1500 geocaches. I have plans for a couple of trails but not to the size of the ET Highway power trail. Today I readied 220 film canisters for this task. It involved printing log sheets and putting one in each canister, then printing labels and labeling each canister. Task complete now to go out and hide them 🙂