What’s it All About?

Thursday night. Kev’s scheduled exercise night, but what to do. Run? Bike? Or go caching? How about caching on the bike? Sounds good – some exercise, some caching. Got to be worth a go. The plan for this evening’s madness was to cycle across to Monkston and attempt a short series there.

So all that remained was to select a target and load onto the GPS. An excellent little jaunt from our house would seem to be the four Monkston Micros followed by “Don’t Torc Rubbish” – all by Monkston Madgirl. Monkston is about 8 km from our house so looks like a nice out and back job.

So with the girls having tea and getting ready for bed, Kev got out the trusty steed and set off in a generally eastward direction through Emerson, Furzton, the Bowl, Bleak Hall, Eaglestone, Woughton-on-the-Green and eventually to Monkston. Nearly 9km by the route chosen, in about 25 minutes.

The Hunt Begins

First up for the evening was Monkston Micros – West (GC19AZ8). This is shown right by the redway around the west of the estate. It proved to be the most difficult of the evening. I initially overshot and ended up 200 meters too far along. It was also in a bleedin’ tree according to the notes. But which tree? It took a couple of missed ones but then all of a sudden on the fourth or fifth one there it was, just winking at me. Not so bad after all. Just harder than the evening’s other ones.

So head off round the south side in search of Monkston Micros – South (GC19AYZ). This one is difficult to describe really. It’s round the south of Monkston. If you check the hint, and have the GPS pointing at the right place, it is easy as pie. Signed log, hit the road again.

Now the third one for the evening – Monkston Micros – East (GC19AZ3) – looks from the hint and the Google Maps view that it ought to be a very easy one. Can’t say why without giving the game away, but it doesn’t take a brain the size of a planet to guess where it is from the hint. And sure enough it was there. So that was the first one ever found without any GPS assistance on site, and probably the fastest evr as well. It is a bit muggle strewn round there, though.

The final link in the chain is Monkston Micros – North (GC19AYW). I also had a theory on where this would be from the hint only, and aside from a short detour and delay caused by a cycling muggle parked right at GZ this one was also successfully found without any GPS assistance. This game is getting quite easy.

A Brucie Bonus

And so on to Don’t Torc Rubbish (GC19B0A). This can only be found by reading numbers from the logs on the four Monkston micros. Although if you do some schoolboy simultaneous equations and make the perfectly reasonable assumption that the answer must be in Monkston, then there’s actually only a couple of possible sites. Further to this, two of the four don’t need to be found at all because the “in Monkston” premise binds them to a single value. Enough of the maths lessons anyway.

The cache itself was the easiest spot of the night. It is in a quiet location and so it can get away with not being hidden. It contains a few little trinkets and the usual log and gubbins. Sorted. Five caches found in double-quick order.

One for the Road

Which meant it was probably time to cycle home again. Given my location at the time I decided to progress along H7 and check out Taking the Pea (GC29VJC) by niccademus. The hint gives it away really, and once you find it you can understand the title. Locating the correct piece of highway furniture was the only issue given that I hadn’t loaded the location into the GPS, so I was playing blind.

For the second time in the evening I overshot by about 200 metres and had to backtrack. Once I got to GZ it was an easy spot though. It’s just in a very public location. Unless you’re there in the middle of the night you might have to try the very brazen “just sit in the grass and look like you know what you’re doing” technique. There is no way you can find this and sign it without being spotted by a driver. It’s also on the side of the road opposite the redway, so you really have no legitimate reason for being over there.

And that’s all you can say, really. I cycled home by pretty much the same route and got home 105 minutes after setting out, having cycled 19km in 1 hour while the wristwatch Garmin was running, and having found 6 caches while the hand-held Garmin GPS was running.