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The Sketch
As with last year I’ve been struggling a little with my geocaching mojo again this year. Things have just got in the way. Well, mainly, redecorating Daughterus Maximus’ bedroom over the course of several weekends has got in the way, but the effect is quite good now it’s more or less finished. Back at the plot, today was my first day of caching in February. I was due a bit of a session to get the month moving. Geoff&Steph released a new series up in the woods near Silverstone Woods about a week and a half ago.
The series had 47 caches on it. That makes for a pretty decent day out. It makes for as much as we can manage, to be honest, given that Daughterus Minimus was coming with me. It’s not that Izzy lacks mental toughness – far from it, in fact she has several brilliant ways of playing through the boredom and/or pain to keep going – it’s just that her legs aren’t very long, and they have to take an awfully large number of steps. I estimated that this walk would be just about on her tolerance limit, and so it proved.
We set off some time before 9 am with Daughterus Maximus still doing her best impression of a log and the Good Lady Wife out for her customary Sunday morning run, which turned into a disaster by all accounts. Our route out took us around the outside of Stowe and up to a small car park by the side of the road in between Silverstone Golf Club and the bottom end of Silverstone Circuit, and we arrived at about 9:30. The first cache was sort of in the car park, so it didn’t take us long to get on the board.
Walking Around
The series takes you on a figure-of-eight to the south and west of the start point, with the northern loop being somewhat smaller than the southern. The first part was through some rather pleasant woods, and we found it quite easy going up here, despite the rather large number of dog-walking muggles. Sunday morning must be “taking the dog out” time in these parts. Most of the dogs seemed to be Labradors.
Meanwhile, out of the woods, the footing got a bit heavy as we started to cross fields. We were only about a quarter of the way in at this point, but somehow it seemed a bit longer. We’d been out just over an hour and had done 12 caches.
We picked our way along quite smoothly from here, albeit not quite as fast as I might have liked. Eventually, we found our way back to the car after about 5 hours, having found 47 caches. We grabbed three random others from the car on the way home to make it up to a nice half-century.
The caches we found on the day up in Silverstone Woods were: