![Deportes caninos](/tiedostot/1/kuva/tuoteryhma/350/1676.jpg)
It’s the time of the year once again: to try to come up with fun activities for dogs and people for the day, so that they don't have energy to be too scared of the fireworks in the evening.
I asked Teme, our geocaching expert, for recommendations for this kind of activities. He gave some very good alternatives, between which I chose the Sillvik trail in Porvoo.
The trail isn’t that long in kilometres: an experienced trail runner would run it in a very short period of time. But on a leisurely New Year’s Eve, a pleasure-seeker like me can easily spend many hours on the trail with his or her dog, enjoying a packed lunch, finding tracks of different animals, and just admiring the wonderful nature.
A professional geocacher has probably all kinds of tools that would have helped also on this trail. On the other hand, if you just go into the woods and try to find caches by improvising and by luck, the trip will be a bit more challenging. And much funnier, in my opinion.
As the trail progressed, I learned to understand the nature of the caches and the potential places where they could be hidden. The darkest time of the year brought us challenges at the end of the trail: we started it quite late, so we had to walk the last part at dusk. But it didn’t matter, because besides sandwiches, we also had good headlamps in our backpacks. Geocaching is quite exciting in the dark.
The goals for the day were achieved. Both dogs and people had fun. We found a good number of caches, and even though there wasn’t a need for good old problem solving, all the other supplementary activities gave us great satisfaction. The best thing on this trip was the journey, not the destination – and that was definitely the main thing and the goal for the day. Wondering at little things. We also found many mushrooms for dinner. Not bad at all!
A hazy selfie of the party. It looked quite autumn-like even though it was the last day of December. There was some snow and ice here and there, though. Some of the caches were buried in the snow and needed to be dug out.