The Sketch
Minions Part 1 – my first major trip out since the COVID lockdown, with the prospect of a major caching exercise on the radar. The chosen location was over to the east of Biggleswade for the One in a Minion series of puzzles. The form here is that it’s a bit of geoart that draws a minion. All the puzzles had a minion-based theme.
I parked at the given parking location – a small car park near the pub in the middle of Dunton. I’d parked here previously whilst doing parts of the Hatley Heart Attack series in 2015 and I remembered the village as soon as got there.
Off on my Way
As it happens, the walk was all very familiar too. I’d walked round here previously with Izzy. It all looked very familiar. The previous trip was quick going, and so was this. Before long I was over the first tranche of fields and onto a wide and quite busy bridleway. I was still caching quite quickly down here, but it was getting a bit irritating because of the number of disturbances.
When I’m caching I’m generally used to it being quiet, so it was surprising here to be disturbed every couple of minutes by hordes of cyclists out for a morning ride. I mean loads of them. Not just a few. I guess on reflection they didn’t disturb the caching very much, but they certainly did disturb me when I needed to turn my bike round. Seemingly every time I went to stand behind a tree a bunch of cyclists would stop right next to me. Grrr!
Eventually I turned off this bridleway, heading south towards Hinxworth and Ashwell. The walk through Ashwell village was good but I made a mistake. I assumed I could get to the “little loop in the middle” more easily if I moved the car down. Laziness is not always a friend, but more of that later.
Heading Home
The walk back out of Ashwell took me along a pleasant country road for a while. I was accosted by a local at one point, who wondered what I was doing. He was perfectly happy with my explanation. He’d heard of it, but never tried it. He didn’t realise that he lived somewhere where he must pass dozens every day. Just after here my path rejoined the bridleway of doom, but thankfully it was now devoid of cyclists. I wasn’t on it for long anyway. I turned north to cross a couple of fields and was back in Dunton – the end of Minions Part 1.
It was still fairly early when I got back to the car, so I decided to do a few drive-bys on my way back through Ashwell. I tried, but I failed. All the ones I wanted to do as drive-bys didn’t have anywhere to park. I mooched about for half an hour before I eventually found a bit of hard-standing just off the road that was vaguely near where I wanted to be. Vaguely near in the sense of needing a half-mile walk over rough fields to get back again. At least once I’d done those I found five caches in quick order on the way back.
And that was more or less my doo-dah for the day. There was a Sunday roast calling ever louder. Not a bad day out.
The Finds
Minions Part 1 yielded a total of 91 finds on the day.