The Sketch
London Calling 2023 was the second instance of the capital’s biggest and best Mega geocaching event. The previous one had been a bit of a monster day of caching, involving walking some considerable distance and finding what was then a new personal best of caches in a single day. This was the second instance, and it promised to be another day of mad caching. Probably.
Setting Off
The day began with a train down to London followed by meeting up with a few other cachers outside of Kings Cross Station.
Present for this phase were Alibags, Candleford and The Long Man. So between us we’ve got some fairly large total of finds. Not that this would be any guarantee of success, but some experienced eyes at least.
Our plan, such as it was, was to walk around north London, north of Euston Road. That’s a big area, so we probably needed a bit of focus, but to some extent the route was planned for us. Ultimately, we were trying to get to St Mary’s Church in Marylebone, which was maybe a mile and a half west of where we met. The area north of Euston Road is actually a bit devoid of caches by Central London standards, so we reckoned we could more or less everything between King’s Cross, up to Camden Town, Primrose Hill, Regent’s Park and then on to the event.
That’s a fair walk, so I guess we better get going.
Stations
The first objective was to clear the Ad Labs and other bits and bobs around the two stations, King’s Cross and it’s near neighbour St Pancras. The King’s Cross labs were quite easy, as was the virtual celebrating a certain fictional boy wizard’s commute to school.
St Pancras proved more tricky because it was a sequential lab that involved getting to the right GPS coordinates and also the right floor. We got them done eventually though, and hence were able to run over the Euston Road to grab the bonus cache.
Down the Town
Next up was a walk northwards via a couple of DNFs and also an easy find at the “world famous” Mornington Crescent. Or maybe it was at Mornington Crescent. It certainly wasn’t at Mornington Crescent, anyway.
Up (or down) at Camden Town, there was another set of Ad Labs, a virtual, an earthcache and a puzzle. Cool. There’s also, of course, the world famous Camden Market, home of multiple boutique stands stocking a variety of less mainstream items. I’d honestly never been there before. But we weren’t there for retail therapy, so we didn’t stay long and it might be a while before I go back.
This put us on the very edge of Primrose Hill. Technically, Primrose Hill is the park, I think, but the name seems to have been adopted by the local streets too. Anyway, at a point where a footbridge crosses the West Coast Mainline running into Euston, we stopped for a coffee and a cake. We’d been going a while by this stage, and it was a warm day. The coffee was nice.
A Bit Parky
Not in the sense of it being cold, obviously. No. I just said it was quite warm. No, it’s just that we were walking through two parks next.
The first was Primrose Hill, and we genuinely did just walk through it. On one edge there’s a couple of caches. They are somehow at exactly the same place. Well, within a few feet. That somehow slipped through the reviewers net. Both are “Old Skool” legacy caches that have been there since the dawn of time.
The next park was Regents Park. That’s home to the London Zoo, and that’s the side where we entered. It honks a bit, to be honest.
The London Calling 2023 committee had set a bunch of 10 ad labs in the park, which when added to the pre-existing set made 15 in the park. Plus a virtual. By this stage it was quite late in the morning (maybe early afternoon) and it was really quite warm. I was struggling a bit because of the heat and because we’d been walking for a while. And Regents Park is a lot bigger than I thought it was.
Waxworks
Eventually we managed to finish off in the park and break out onto Baker Street. Notice we weren’t winding our way down there. Not even I’m that cheesy. Well, I might be. But not right then. I was light in the head and dead on my feet.
Anyway, moving on.
There was a set of labs from the event at the junction of Baker Street near to the famous place that does the wax sculptures of people. I had a bit of a sense of humour crisis here. I couldn’t get a good enough phone signal to do the doings. Eventually I got there, but there was some swearing involved. Enough that I invited the rest of the team to leave me to it. I could catch them up in the event.
The Main Reason for Being Here
London Calling 2023 was the second instance of the event. They’d moved from Westminster up into Marylebone, and as a result they’d decided to theme the whole thing on Sherlock Holmes.
The event was held in the quite large space of St Mary’s Church, Marylebone. It was spread over two floors, in fact. And there were a load more labs – some in the church and some out in the local streets.
So I met up with the rest of the morning crew inside and mooched around in the event for a while, chatting with familiar faces and looking for stuff to buy. I got evented-out after a couple of hours though, so went out for a walk to do the labs around the streets and then retiring to a nearby pub with Candleford, The Long Man and Mr Sadexploration for a couple of swift halves and some well-earned food.
The Evening Event
Back at the event location there was another event in the evening, and some more ad labs to do. These took a little bit longer than usual as a result of being a couple of beers up in the game. They got done though.
After that, Candleford and Long Man were going back to the pub. I was starting to feel the call of home, so I decided to head off. It was a fairly fuzzy-minded walk back to Euston, but I got there safely enough and the train home was fine.
It had been a long day though, and I was ready for bed when I eventually got there.