The Sketch
The boy ryo62 likes to set caches. He doesn’t like it as much as he used to, but he still likes it enough to keep setting big pieces of geoart near his home. The “D’oh!” series is one of those. A set of puzzles themed on everyone’s favourite dysfunctional American cartoon characters. The series has 92 puzzles. When you add the surrounding new adventure labs, village hall caches, church micros, village sign caches, war memorial caches, and so on that makes enough for a good old day out. Or maybe two.
I spoke to Pesh about doing these and we agreed that two was the magic number. Very early starts and very long days don’t always suit, especially when you’ve got to drive an hour each way and you’re still not allowed to share a car. There’s also the small matter of Jack. He’s not that small, but Pesh has to consider how far it’s reasonable to expect him to walk in a single day. So two days it is. We planned the first May Bank Holiday and the following Sunday.
Day #1 – Monday, May 3rd
We drove in convoy to our chosen parking location. It was somewhere I’m very familiar with, having parked there twice before for big caching days. Orwell Clunch Pit has its own small car park which is both free and off-street, which is ideal. The Clunch Pit now has a set of adventure labs as well as being a decent starting point for the D’oh! series.
We’d planned to do the “lower” loop from Orwell to Little Eversden and round to Barrington. I was familiar with the route and knew it was quite quick going, so I wasn’t expecting any issues. It turned out much as expected. The weather was breezy and a bit warm, borderline between a jumper and no jumper for me. All of the caches en-route were easy to find. We didn’t do much in the way of breaks so we got round the 20km fairly quickly. Nothing much of note happened apart from deciding not to do every cache in Barrington (it was getting late). With occasional bits and bobs nearby I recorded 78 finds.
Day #2 – Sunday, May 9th
Day #2 looked a bit more random than Day #1. We started off in Barrington to finish off a few walking ones and do the adventure labs that we’d left the previous time. After that we moved and parked the cars at the church in Great Eversden for a walk around the remaining bits of the D’oh! series. The walk was a bit shorter than last time. The weather was nice again. Very similar, in fact. Breezy but sunny. It was warm enough to require a sit down on the grass so Jack could have a drink. This is even though the walk was a fairly paltry 12km long.
Because it was a shorter walk we had time for a few more afterwards, so we drove over to Cockayne Hatley, where there were a few to be cleared up.
Over the course of this day I logged another 64 finds, making 142 over the two days. That made it my busiest week in quite some time.
The Scores on the Doors
78 finds on Day #1 and a more modest 64 finds on Day #2.