My husband and I are coming into Melbourne the end of Feb. till middle of March. We are leaving our trip open as for doing things, we want to spend as much time as possible enjoying the beauty of the land and not so much stuck in cities. We will be bringing some geocoins and TBs with us in hopes of caching a few caches. IF any one can help we would be very grateful. We are coming from Northern California. We have no idea where to start downloading caches. PLEASE HELP. Thank you,

Hi methvin

You have made a good choice coming to Melbourne, it is a beautiful spot (especially when you get out of the city on the bay, etc).

There are many things you can do in Victoria and best of all, they can all have day trips taken to see them.

I would recommend taking a tour of the Great Ocean Road as there are a lot of caches down there and it is one of the most beautiful things in Australia.

You could also come down and explore the south east coast on the bay and see the famous Brighton Beach Boxes. There are a lot of caches around there all showing great spots.

I would also highly recommend seeing the Dandenongs (mountains) as it is just a brilliant area.

If you want to download the caches in these areas, I recommend making 3 separate Pocket Queries with the amount of caches set to 300 each (because these are big areas and you just do not know where you will be) with the radius being 100miles and coords being set to...

'Great Ocean Road' have them set to S 38° 51.160 E 143° 31.427
'South East on the bay' have them set to S 37° 54.340 E 145° 00.259
'Dandenongs' have them set to S 37° 49.863 E 145° 21.705

Good luck down here and have fun

Liam (lemmykc)

lemmykc.

Thank you so much for a reply, we are taking the advice we receive and are planning our trip around it, we really hope to meet other geocachers on our trip. Once again thank you, we still have over a month for our plans so love to hear from any of you.

Hi Methvin,
I too am planning a trip to Melbourne, going to the Oz Mega in April. If you haven't come across this in you're planning, take a look at the Penguin Parade and wildlife sanctuary on Phillip Island. You also might want to set up a Meet n Greet so you can meet some of the local cachers. Someone here should be able to give you a good location to hold it at. I figure I don't need to since Ill be at the mega meeting lots of Aussie cachers.
Don't forget to use the favorites feature to pick some of the must find caches either.

If you are planning on touring Victoria and want every GC cache in the state, http://geocaching.com.au/stats/range/ will show you the date ranges for your pocket queries.

The good thing too about Australia if you have a laptop or smartphone is that every McDonalds and a lot of other coffee shops, fast food outlets have free Wifi so you can update the queries on the trip if needed or you decide to travel to somewhere you hadn't originally planned. (free wifi is annoyingly hard to find in New Zealand).

Maybe you can fill-in-a-day on your cache per day grid..
29th Feb event! http://coord.info/GC30M7F