Noodle Stash

The Noodle Stash geocache (GC4C) was placed on 14 June 2000 southwest of Stockholm, six weeks after the game was invented: it is the first geocache in Sweden. Tobias Radeskog had slipped a blue box with a white lid under a bush between two trees. Inside, the packet of instant noodles that gave the cache its name, split peas "if you want to make a soup" and an internet subscription CD. The owner recommended a visit to the beach at Mälarhöjden, two hundred metres away - in summer only, he warned.

"Stash" is the word of those very first months: the activity had just been renamed geocaching, on 30 May 2000, but the boxes were still stashes, and Mike Teague's list filed the country under "Sweden GPS Stashes".

The box disappeared after about a year. In 2012, the owner wrote a write note describing a place that had turned into a dumping ground, and sent the curious towards Match Stash (GC4D), placed on 11 August 2000, still in play and the oldest active cache in Sweden.