Running Whilst Caching
Kingsbury Water Park is one of those British industrial regeneration jobs that the East Midlands is very good at, although technically this might be the West Midlands I guess – it’s close to the borders between Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Leicestershire in an area where I can never quite tell where I am.
It was autumn half-term and I was staying up at my parents’ house in Measham and had a bit of free time, so I decided to combine a run with a bit of caching. Kingsbury looked like a good place for both. The previous day I’d been out caching locally and made 10 finds at fairly rapid pace.
Back at the plot, the site of industrial regeneration at Kingsbury Water Park is a bunch of old gravel pits that have been allowed to fill up with water and have been surrounded by a bit of forest-like tree planting to create an area that is now a haven for anglers and twitchers from miles around.
My first issue here was nearly a catastrophic one. You have to pay for parking, and you have to pay on the way in. The payment requires coins that I didn’t have (I didn’t actually have any coins at all). So before I could even start with anything I had to go and find a shop. A shop in which I could buy a token item and request a stack of coins my change. I eventually found a shop that I could park outside in Kingsbury village. I bought myself a small bottle of water using a £10 note, and took all the change in coins.
Once I eventually got into the place and found somewhere to park the rest of the morning went quite smoothly. I found 13 caches inside the park on a run of about 5km and then had enough time left to drink my water and do a few drive-bys alongside the M42 on the way home.
The caches I found over the course of the two days were :