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The Sketch

This all seems like so long ago. So I spent the day meandering around the Ms. Meander series near Hemel Hempstead, with a couple of other bits thrown in.

I had a day off work as a result of not taking many holidays during the summer. It was one of many such days. I didn’t mind saving them up because during the autumn half-term holiday it occurred to me that I had 5 full days of holiday remaining to be booked, and 9 weekdays (plus some weekend days) left to complete on The Matrix. That sounded like one full day and 8 half-days to me. That meant I could go make sure all those matrix days got filled up. This was the full day off.

The Morning

Kas was away somewhere in the afternoon so I had an appointment back home at around 3 pm as the kids would need fetching from school, so she agreed I could leave early and get going at the caches so long as I made it back in time. I’d planned to do SmokeyPugs Ms Meander series just north of Hemel Hempstead and I set off at just after 7am to make sure I had plenty of time. I parked up in Piccotts End as this seemed closest to the main road where I was arriving. It was a bit of a struggle to find somewhere to leave the car. I always feel a bit guilty when I have to park in a village and outside someone’s house. Not that there were twitching curtains in evidence, but you know what I mean.

Anyway, because I parked down here, my first task was to walk up a very steep hill. If only you could see that sort of thing on the satellite view.

There were a couple of caches on the way up the hill and then I found myself on top of a bit of a plateau, with a housing estate down one side and a load of agriculture everywhere else. The agriculture was somewhat flatter than the hill up there, which was welcome.

The caching was fairly simple apart from two. One of those required a field puzzle to be solved. The other was a multi-stage puzzle going in the opposite direction to my walk.

Solve & Search

After the Ms Meander series I moved over to the north-west corner of Hemel to have a go at ShadyLady’s Solve & Search series. These proved to be somewhat easier, having solved them a few weeks before. I even managed to find the tricky little one that several others had missed.

I followed this series up with a couple more in a park nearby after the final bonus for the Solve & Search took me in that direction.

So far I was going really well and I still had a good couple of hours left to kill before needing to head back, so I drove down to Gadebridge Park, from where I walked around a bit of old town and then back into the park to grab a handful more.

And finally I was at the point where I didn’t have time for any more walking. I set off home, with just time to do one Village Sign on the way past.

I’d managed to make 39 finds during the day. Given the short day and the frequent changes of location I thought was good.

The caches I found meandering around Hemel Hempstead were :