Steeple Claydon
The boy Simply Paul was 40 years old, apparently, although I didn’t really know him at the time. Life begins….
Anyway, to celebrate this momentous occasion he decided to set a series of caches around the village in which he spent his formative years, namely Steeple Claydon, in that there Buckinghamshire.
I happened to spot a bunch of notifications of these caches on the morning they appeared. It happened to be a Saturday afternoon when I didn’t have a great deal of anything else to do. So me and the cache mobile headed off in the general direction to see what we could find.
As it turned out, what we found on that Saturday afternoon was a bunch of empty log sheets. Apparently, nobody else was close enough and eager enough to go and give it a shot, so on my first visit I made about 26 FTFs. Cool. Although, by the time I got back, it was distinctly dark. Not great conditions for wandering across agricultural land in the winter. Anyway, my route for the day took me on a clockwise loop to the north of the village.
I only managed to do about two-thirds of them on that first afternoon, so I returned on December 4th to finish them off. In the meantime, I’d also been to Steeple Claydon for an event to celebrate SP’s birthday. This was at the now defunct Phoenix pub. I seem to remember SP didn’t actually attend. He gort caught by a delayed or cancelled flight somewhere. Back at the plot, the second day proved to be quite hard work. I struggled with a lot of the caches on the southern part of the figure-eight shape, but I got most of them eventually. Several of them required me to phone a friend. It was slow going.