Sunday League Error
I should have known better, but then I was a bit of a novice. I was cache planning at Stowe but I made a bit of a mess of it.
I’d been working with the National Trust at Stowe since the middle of the previous year trying to see whether we could set a few geocaches on their land. During that time we’d got to the point of seeming mutually interested, but then their marketing lady left. Plus they went into a rather busy period while they moved their operations. They’d recently finished renovating the New Inn, on the south side of the estate, and as a result it all went a bit quiet.
I contacted them again at around Christmas time, hoping that things had moved on. Indeed they had moved on, to the extent that they were ready to talk to me about some locations.
Lots of Trees
I was initially planning to place caches through the inner landscape gardens at Stowe. There are a lot of different tree species in the gardens and I thought it would make a good theme for the series to use different tree types. It was quite easy to get up to 16 different types of tree, and it was easy to get a good geographic spread throughout the gardens.
In the event, though, that wasn’t to be. I set out an excellent (well, I thought it was excellent) cache series in the gardens and prepped all the pages. But when I released them the reviewers bounced them on the basis that the gardens are pay-to-enter. That’s not allowed under current rules, even if it’s for a charitable organization. So I had to go back and collect them all up again and think of another plan.
It’s a shame. I personally thought that a series inside the gardens was a much better idea than the ones I eventually set. But the rules is the rules, so I had to put up with it. The funny thing is that if I’d tried listing them on an alternate listings site they would have been fine, but on geocaching.com they weren’t. ‘Nuff said.
Anyway, while I was attempting to place the caches I took some decent photos. Some of the trees I was attempting to use as hosts were very photogenic.
