Geocaching in Krysuvikurkirkja, Iceland

Last year I published a short story, “Bobbing for Bob,” in the first Geocaching GPS anthology of geocaching stories, Geocaching GPS: Stories of Romance, Adventure and Connection. The story was about my husband and I finding a diving geocache called “Bob” off the coast of Oahu on our trip to Hawai’i a couple of years ago. That was my first publication that was not a scientific paper. As I admit in the story, during that find I made some progress overcoming my fear of being trapped under deep water, but my husband ultimately found the cache, not I.

The anthology was a success and this year there is going to be a sequel anthology about “geocaching firsts.” I wanted to submit a story to the sequel too, but I wasn’t sure what to write about for this one. My first geocaching experience was fine, a perfectly nice hike, but nothing to write home about. It was in a large group, we had finicky GPS’s, and I didn’t make any of the finds. Besides, it was so long ago that I barely remember it other than that it was with some friends of my husband’s and took place in the Blue Hills Reservation in Milton, Massachusetts. My first FTF (“First To Find”) was a little more interesting, but it was kind of random, during a tournament, and again a pretty long time ago.

So it seemed like it was time to get creative. Our family does like to travel, and we have been on some interesting trips. We go to Germany somewhat regularly to visit my husband’s friends and family. On our way home from Germany one year, we stopped in Iceland on the way. We went caching in Iceland, our first time caching there (and only time caching there, at least to date). That seemed like a good “first.”

The anthology doesn’t use pictures, so I decided to post pictures here from the cache I wrote about for my story submission. The cache was at the site of an old historic church that is no longer there: Krysuvik Kirkja. This is what the building used to look like, before it burned down in 2010. It was a simple 2-story structure with no electricity. Photo credit: Guðmundur Albertsson.

Krysuvik Church, Iceland, May 6 2007, before the fire.

 

When we got there in July 2011, it was just a vast open space with sheep grazing.

The only sign of the building was a layer of stones and a small, white cross.

Some sheep got a little too close.

But I still found the cache:

Read more about this story and many other geocaching “firsts” in Geocaching GPS: Great Personal Stories of Geocaching Firsts, available now from Amazon!