Riga Rigmarole 3-5 June

Our plan is to visit every country in Europe whilst we have the opportunity. My plan is to find a geocache in every European country. 😉 I have now crossed the border and found at least one cache in 24 of them. We had the opportunity to visit Riga, the capital of Latvia, one of the former Soviet satellite countries.

I am trying to qualify for one of Rubyshoos Challenge caches on the Isle of Dogs by finding five different icon caches in five different countries but I didn’t think that I would be able to find five different here.🤔

We were there for two nights, flying in early and leaving late so I had hopes to get a few different caches.🤫 I had a plan to find maybe four different cache icons so I checked the caches available and saw that Earthcache, Virtual and Trads were easily available but all the multis were written in the Latvian language so no joy there.

I checked the Mystery caches and found a 5/5 where the qualification was a complete D/T grid so all I had to do was find that one. Amazingly, two Events had been arranged for the two nights that we were there. I went to the first one arranged by Uncannyannie (taken from an Ian Dury and the Blockheads song😀) and PandaDriver at the Freedom Monument. I had found the two difficult icons😀

Over the course of the three days, I was able to pick off the trads and the virtuals and also the EarthCache based on the Freedom Monument. The photo is part of the qualification for the Earthcache.

The highlight cache was the trad at The Tea House cache. This one is situated at an old Russian Tea House which would have been on my agenda anyway. I had to go to the counter and say “Could I try Mandarin please?” to get the cache. On hearing the magic words, the assistant reached under the counter and came out with the cache.😀 This is the first one like this that I had encountered.

We were killing time on the last afternoon so I went for a wander around the Central Markets. These were housed in five former Zeppelin hangers dating from WW1. There was one last cache on my list Spikeru Promenade which was about a half mile away so I strode down there to capture the well hidden cache. It was on the way back that I saw the Riga Ghetto Museum, the least said about this place the better.☠️

This reminds me of something else, the different caching standards between the U.K. and elsewhere. There’s another cache that I visited - Memorial To The Saviours. It’s an odd title as it’s the remains of a former synagogue. The Nazis herded 300 Jews in here on 6th July 1941 and set fire to the place with no survivors. How can there be a cache inside there? How can that be allowed? It wouldn’t get past a moderator in this country, how can that be allowed anywhere?

1 Earthcache, 1 Mystery, 1 Event, 2 Virtual, 14 Traditional

#7390