The route this day took us from Vilnius to Riga, where the main goal was to find a cache in Riga and visit the airport museum. We also had time for a quick trip into the city itself.

Approximate time out caching/traveling: 11 hours
Total walking distance: 14,62 km / 9.08 mi (22 094 steps)
Flights taken: 1
Total cahes found: 9
Total DNF: 0
Cities visited: Vilnius, Riga
Famous places visited: Riga KGB house
Most memorable cache: GC1MMWR Aviation museum
Biggest surprise: Arriving at the KGB house while the museum was still open
Weather: Clear
Temperature range: ~-3°C / 26°F

Starting the day with problems

We woke up to several error messages on cachetur.no, and various complaints from our users. So instead of spending the morning eating breakfast, and finding the cache we had to give up yesterday, the morning was spent troubleshooting.

Arriving too early

After spending too much time troubleshooting, we had to go to be at the airport as early as the tickets told us to be. Turned out that was too early, because the bag drop didn’t open that early! Strange to tell people to show up before the airline does themselves…

So we spent the time finding the cache outside the airport instead. After the cache was found, it didn’t take too long until the bag drop opened.

After getting through security, the waiting time was spent doing some more troubleshooting. And at least managing to fix the most critical error.

Finally in Riga

Eventually it was time to board, and head towards Riga. Brand new airplane, and very comfortable seats!

The flight was short, and so was the distance from the airport to the hotel. After checking in, the troubleshooting continued, and the root cause was finally discovered.

Time to head to the museum

After doing a temporary fix on cachetur.no, it was time to head out to the airport museum – before it closed. Our first find in Latvia would also be the cache inside the museum, so we really needed to get there! The museum wasn’t very far away from the airport either, so we made it in time. And wow, this might just be a huge collection of old airplanes, but we still enjoyed it a lot!

We found the cache without any problems, and spent the rest of the time the museum was open walking around the area. We also got to take a quick peek at the private camera collection hidden away at the back of the area. Definitely the most interesting stop today!

Way more difficult than anticipated

The next cache on our list was GC3H5H7 RIXPORT\RIXPOUND 2.0, which was easy enough to locate. But impossible to get open. The only tool we had, was tweezers and some coins… Didn’t take long for the tweezers to break, but the coins actually worked. Unfortunately they only worked for the first 1-2 centimeters. So we decided that we had to just give up, and come back with a tool later (which we foolishly had left in the hotel room).

In the footsteps of KGB

We had to walk past a few hundred taxis to get to the extremely difficult cache. So we decided to jump into the closest one, and have him take us to the next cache, GC7B8YA Melnais slieksnis.

That cache was a new virtual outside the old KGB building. A pleasant surprise, was that we got there before it closed for the day. So we also got to take a look around inside.

More virtual caches

After a long walk from the KGB building, we arrived at the next cache, an earthcache this time. We found two more virtual caches and a mystery cache in the city. We didn’t get to spend very much time in Riga, but it looks like a very nice and clean city! The weather was very nice, but also very cold.

One more try

After taking the bus back to the airport (it was crazy cheap!), we returned to the hotel to do some more work on the fix on cachetur.no.  And finally managed to get it back to a full working state.

While cachetur.no was working on the last few bits itself, we went back out to attempt that difficult cache again. We also found another cache at the airport.

We broke the tool!

We brought our multi-tool this time, and that helped a lot. Unfortunately, the cache was harder than our tool, and this tool broke as well.

Giving up now was not an option, even if we had to sleep next to the cache! After working very hard, with what’s left of the tool, we finally managed to get it open! Our last, and definitely hardest, find in Latvia! Oh, the inner container was very hard to open as well…

We had a very early flight the next morning, so we really had to get back to the hotel to get some sleep now.

Trip report

Curious about which caches we found?
You can see all of them on our trip report in cachetur.no, which you can find here.

Pictures