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The Sketch
Another weekend, another day caching, this time near Hauxton in Cambridgeshire.
I toyed with the idea of driving over to Clare so I could colour in my caching map for both Essex and Suffolk on the same day, but eventually decided save that for a weekend later in the year when there’s a bit more daylight. If I have to spend over 3 hours in my car then I want a good day. I want to have enough daylight to be getting 80-100 finds, to be honest. I don’t want to drive that distance and only have time to do 35.
So I picked an apparently very new series at Hauxton (it had only been released 4 days previously) and headed off with Ami for company, planning to get somewhere in the region of 50 finds. We had to drop Izzy off with Kas after parkrun before we could set off, so with that, and with the need to stop for breakfast and provisions on the way, it was more or less 11am by the time we parked up to begin caching.
The Hauxton Walk
The designated parking for the series was alongside the A10 in what was actually a bus stop with a very long run-in. Probably not. The bit I parked in had white dashed lines instead of the solid yellow lines of the bus stop, so it must have been OK. By the time we got back there were about 5 cars parked behind me anyway. So “not my fault guv – not me causing the blockage”.
The walk took us on a grand clockwise loop from Hauxton across some fields and then around towards Harlton. We included a small offshoot to go find an obelisk on the top of a hill. There was a cache there too, so it wasn’t a wasted climb.
When we got to the village of Harlton we found ourselves following another pair of cachers around. We caught up with them in the village. But then we got lost trying to find one they’d already done previously and they got away from us. We did catch up with them again later on and walked around the last five of the loop with them. It was “flamingo chaser”, although there were two of them. At around the same time we met local cache-setting junkie poshrule walking with Kev from Lorri-Ann & Kev. They were walking around anti-clockwise. They obviously like to live dangerously.
As we were getting back towards the car it was starting to get a bit wet, so we decided to give our legs a bit of a rest and do a few drive-bys near Hauxton, Harlton and Newton. This took us back down a bit of road we’d previously walked, but ho hum !
Foxton
We very shamelessly parked at a pub in Fowlmere and used their toilets before deciding we’d probably got enough daylight left to do another short series. Cunningly, there was one nearby. It involved walking out over 2-3 large fields and then back collecting numbers for a bonus cache. This series were mainly letterbox caches, so they added a bit extra sport.
Once we’d finished that walk the light was getting distinctly dodgy. We went back into drive-by mode and grabbed a couple more in Fowlmere and one in Harlton before deciding that it was time to head home. Having logged our first find at 10:50 we logged our last at 17:50. In that 7 hour period we’d logged 63 finds and 4-5 DNFs, which I thought was a pretty good total for a late-morning start in February.
The caches we found were: