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Hopes and Fears
Ami’s been singing a certain well known song written by Keane and covered by Lily Allen for several weeks now, because it’s going to be included in the school assembly her class will be doing at some point this year, along with Katy Perry’s “Roar” and Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida”
Whilst watching my geocaching inbox through February I kept noticing new caches pop up near Northampton which are titled by lyrics from the Keane song. One or two of them were coming up every day, so I was keeping an eye out and trying to figure out how many more would be coming, and when.
On a subsequent day out I made an idle comment to a friend about waiting for them all to come out before going to find them, and he told me that the cache owner is someone that he knows (although presumably not someone that only he knows), and that as there are 28 days in February, and 28 lines in the song lyrics, it should be plain when they’re all released.
Strangeland
And so it proved. By the 1st of March there were 28 caches. I solved the two of them that are puzzles, and I traced the complete route on a map by going from one lyric line to the next. About 5-6 miles round, with 30-32 caches, and hence a nice little afternoon out. Or so went the theory.
Now, at this point in one of my blog posts, I’d be getting into some long rambling stuff about what we did on our day out and how it all went, but in this instance it might be more fun to rewrite the lyrics of the song using the names of the caches we actually found, in the order we found them, and ignoring the ones we didn’t. We started off trying to sing the relevant lyric line each time we found one. By the time we reached “pub o’clock” halfway round we’d sort of lost track a bit.
If you know the song well enough you’ll notice there’s a few lines missing from our version (3 we couldn’t find, 1 we just missed) and some others are out of order. But we made up the difference by chucking in a few caches from other series. The end result was a good afternoon’s caching for a sunny, breezy Saturday in March, although it took muck longer than I anticipated, and a few of the caches were, in my opinion, somewhat more difficult than their rating might suggest.
Somewhere Only Cachers Go
Roade Rail – THE END
M1 J15: Trainspotting
I walked across an empty land
I knew the pathway like the back of my hand
I felt the earth beneath my feet
Sat by the river and it made me complete
Oh simple thing, where have you gone?
I’m getting tired and I need someone to rely on
I came across a fallen tree
I felt the branches of it looking at me
Is this the place we used to love?
Is this the place that I’ve been dreaming of?
Oh simple thing, where have you gone?
And if you have a minute why don’t we go
Talk about it somewhere only we know?
So why don’t we go
Somewhere only we know
Somewhere only we know
Oh simple thing, where have you gone?
I’m getting old and I need someone to rely on
So tell me when you’re gonna let me in
I’m getting tired and I need somewhere to begin
And if you have a minute why don’t we go
Somewhere only we know?
Keep to the Path
‘Cause this could be the end of everything,
So why don’t we go
Fox’s Trail Series – 1
Fox’s Trail Series – 0.5
* 2014 Remixed Lyrics by Kevin and Ami Gardner based on Geocaches by Burncache and others.
** Although, to be honest, I think Keane’s version scans a bit better than ours.
*** Good job he didn’t do the Katy Perry song instead – there’s twice as many lyric lines, so we’d never have finished them in an afternoon.
Anyway, the caches were found are shown in map-o-vision below. You can also see from that map that much of the area the series was in is now a new industrial estate.