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Where’s that?
The MKBW Blue section ran from Weston Underwood around the north of Olney up to Warrington. It was almost entirely agricultural and completely devoid of places to stop, rest or shelter. It’s fair to say that I didn’t greatly enjoy being the owner of that section, given that it’s quite a long way from my house, it’s point-to-point and it’s the middle of nowhere. I could never motivate myself to go and maintain it, and it really surprises me that anyone actually bothered to walk around it to collect the caches. Still, they did, so that shows how wrong I am.
Anyway, setting them took me two attempts. On the first one I made a provisional allocation of caches along my chosen route (which I’d been carefully planning over the summer). I’d taken a guess at some locations and created a few template cache pages, but that was about as far as I got, to be honest. Not really very careful, but sort of planned. A bit.
Very many of the locations I planned turned out to be unusable and I ended up doing a lot of walking backwards and forwards trying to find sensible spots.
Like Talking to a Tree
The reason why I needed two visits was because on the first visit I unknowingly placed a bunch of the boxes into some Forestry Commission land without permission. My choice from the reviewer was either to move them, or gain permission. I did try writing to the Forestry Commission but never received a reply, so eventually I gave up and moved the boxes.
So ultimately I ended up releasing 25 caches (including a bonus), most of which were of moderate size. The bonus was roughly in the middle, like what we planned.
Most of them proved to be good hides. A couple were so good that even I couldn’t find them when I went back to maintain them. One was so well hidden that it took ages for anyone to find it, despite the fact that it was all fine.
I was ultimately glad when I decommissioned MKBW Blue at the start of 2016 (see Bye Bye Magenta and Blue).
Anyway, enough grumping.