Bonus Lab de 20 000 Lieues sous les Mers

The Bonus Lab de 20 000 Lieues sous les Mers geocache (GC9B66Y) sits at Le Crotoy, on the northern shore of the Baie de Somme in France. The place explains the theme all by itself: Jules Verne stayed here from 1865 to 1870, in a villa named "La Solitude" still standing near the harbour. There he bought a fishing launch, the Saint-Michel, and turned it into a floating workshop; it was on board that he wrote the first part of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, and a letter to his publisher in March 1868 speaks of his attachment to the boat. Local legend has it that the model of the Nautilus sleeps somewhere in the harbour.

This is no ordinary geocache: it is the bonus of an Adventure Lab, a round of geolocated stages played in a dedicated app. Once the round is done, you come away with what you need to work out the coordinates of a real physical cache - this one. LeChasseurDeMoldu placed it in May 2021, after sinking into the sixteen hours of the audio version of the novel to find the right tone. Allow more than an hour of walking between the harbour, the streets of the town and the beach facing due south. The cache collects plenty of favourites and is perfectly on theme - we will leave you the surprise!

The owner is a regular of geocoins.io, and when he got in touch to show me the beautiful virtual geocoins he was creating, meant to become Sharables, we thought it would be good to bring one into the game - and this is his favourite.