Making the Most of an Opportunity

Ahhhh! What better on an autumn afternoon than to leave the kids with the parents and do a bit of geocaching. In this instance, we were up in Measham and felt the urge to dash around the vicinity of Moira Furnace, Conkers and the park between Moira and Donisthorpe. We agreed an hour and a half window of opportunity while the kids went to Conkers.

This seemed like ample opportunity to walk about 2-3 miles and grab a whole pile of caches. There’s a nice circular walk that you can duck in and out of to suit. Most of the caches are by geohunter-x, so I’ll only mention the owner where it isn’t them.

Some People Say I’m Conkers

First up, and very close to Conkers, was Waterside Wander 1 Marquis Bridge. This was a nice easy starter for 10. The only potential issue is that you have to work at the correct altitude.

Next came Waterside Wander 2 Radagal Bridge, the location of which is one of the lock gates near the bridge. We didn’t actually get to search for this cache though. It was lying on the concrete near to GZ and so because we did not know where it was supposed to be. We decided the best option was to rehouse it and add a log entry to show what we had done. The owner has now sorted it out. All of this proved to be quite difficult though because of a 3 generation family of the slow moving and shouting at each other variety. They lingered around the lock gates for ages and it would have been a bit suspicious of us to spend a lot of time searching or replacing.

When they eventually moved on, we had time to rehide the cache, walk on the the next one (only 500 yds away), find it, sign the log and start walking again before they caught up with us. That one was Waterside Wander 3 Fishing Point.

The Furnace

Next was a previous failure – Waterside Wander 4 Moira Furnace. It was only a failure because at the time we had only the iPhone and a distinct lack of 3G phone signal. It was before we discovered the delights of iPhone Apps which save the GPX file onto the phone.

And so on to Waterside Wander 5 Bridge Over Troubled Water, which is another previous failure. It’s easy to see why we missed this last time. It is nowhere near the bridge from which it gets its name. It was a long way inland and cunningly hidden in one of those “simulated piece of nature” kinds of container.

Up the Canal

Next up we totally failed to find Waterside Wander 11 Crossed Paths – Probably because at the time it was not there, but somehow it had downloaded in the GPX file and onto the Garmin anyway. We lost quite a bit of time here.

And so to Waterside Wander 12 Another Bridge, which was a dead easy one. Lemon Squeezy, in a handy tubular container. Closely followed by one in some trees called Waterside Wander 13 Not a Muggle in Sight, and indeed there were no muggles for miles around.

I’m sure there were some muggles around while we were at Waterside Wander 14 What is it? The cache here was a quick find in a reasonably obvious spot. We had no idea what the object actually is, though.

The Hardest One of the Day

The trickiest find of the day was GCC11 Ennstone Trail by Grizzly Pair. It’s difficult to say why without giving the game away, but it took us ages to establish GZ. Plus there was a wasted couple of minutes caused by a group of teenage boy-muggles. They had no excuse for lingering around there, surely. OK, so if you’re not a cacher then we had no reason to linger there either, but please, move on will you!

And that was that, excpet it took ages to refind Granny, Grandad and the kids, because they had scuttled of on a mini train ride which seemed to take ages. Kids enjoyed it though, so it was evidently a good choice.

Ashby Castle

The following day Ami and Kev popped out in the afternoon. We needed to find a new home for a Sir Galahad TB coin that wanted to visit a few castles. Ashby seemed an obvious one so off we went, and then placed the coin into Hitch Hiking – a large and fairly easy cache just the other side of the A42.

On the way back home we had a dash at the Transatlantic Teleporter, which is in a tree in a ditch somewhere north of Towcester. It was a fairly easy find but in a remote location. The gist is that the owner will mail TBs to a friend in South Carolina. At the time we had two items that wanted to get to the USA but had so far spent a lot of time drifting up and down England. The owners of the TBs were happy for us to use the teleporter so off they went.