Quite Close to Drowning
Monday (the August Bank Holiday) began quite wet. From there it degenerated into “exceedingly wet” around lunchtime, before improving a bit towards the middle of the afternoon. So I did some quick replanning over breakfast and decided I’d head in the direction of south-east London, around Dartford Heath.
First on my radar for the day I had the Assiduous series of Challenge Caches over in Scadbury Park, which proved to be a little gem. It’s a part of south-east London I’ve never been to before. I found all of the caches bar one, although there’s several I’m not actually eligible for. I’ve signed them anyway, just in case I have a day where I do multiple tree climbing or swimming caches on the same day at some point in the future.
From there I drove back up the A20 towards the M25 feeling as miserable as sin. I’d had enough of being totally soaked and rather cold. I was on the verge of going home because of the wet, so I stopped at a McDonalds to grab some lunch and phone Kas. That gave me the opportunity to get warmer and drier before spending 2 hours in the car to get home. While I was there, the weather started to improve a bit and I got a second wind. So I decided I’d go attack a few more rather than just giving up.
There was a small series of mainly challenge caches that was accessible by parking in the car park at Hall Place just outside Bexley. As with the morning session, there were a couple of challenges here that I didn’t qualify for but signed them anyway. At least these looked like things I might well qualify for in the future. As it happens, I do qualify now, so I converted the “Write Note” logs to finds.
Turned Out Nice Again
After this there was a good looking series of 12 puzzles on a French theme over at Dartford Heath, so I moved the car and went for a pop at these. By this time it had actually properly stopped raining and I was feeling a bit better about the world.
The caches were good fun. The terrain on Dartford Heath was a bit different to everywhere else I’d been over the weekend. I actually enjoyed these ones. I didn’t enjoy that I couldn’t find the bonus cache for the series though. Grrrrrrr!
That’ll Do
And after all that lot, it was most definitely time to start heading home. I’d got half a mind to stop somewhere easy in Essex on the way home to colour in that county, but when I got through the tunnel on the way home I’d got nice and warm and cosy in the car and quite frankly I couldn’t be bothered to stop again.
When I gave up I’d bagged a further 37 finds (making 120 total for the two days) and have subsequently been able to convert a few of the speculatively signed challenges into actual finds, now that I qualify for them. One of those 37 was the conversion of a challenge that I’d speculatively signed in Hampshire in 2014. It required the finding of 10 other challenges on the same day. We’d failed miserably on that day in Hampshire (see Fortie Sortie). On my two days in Kent I’d bagged 8 challenges on the first and 20 on the second. The 20 is now 22. The 8 would have been 14, had I been able to find them.
The caches I found at Scadbury Park and Dartford Heath were :