The Sketch
A massive new series had been released at Weston Underwood to the north of Olney. It was just begging for a visit, despite it being mid-winter. I solicited opinion on Facebook and agreed form an away team in Weston Underwood early in the morning. A different group of cachers were doing a different part of the same series and agreed to walk backwards for a bit to meet up with us.
I parked up in the village with a degree of caution. It was my first caching trip in the new cachemobile, and I was still being very careful where I parked it. Weston Underwood has a nice broad area of roadside parking at the right end for our walk. It has big bollards at the “back” end, which protect parked cars from approaching vehicles. That was as good as I was going to get.
One of my two intended caching partners for the day was late. I tried calling and apparently woke him up from his pit of depravity. This resulted in a decision to continue without him. So off we continued.
The Walking Bit
The first stretch of the walk was very familiar to me. In fact, it was all very familiar right up to the point where we met the other cachers. It ran along the previous route of my MK Boundary Walk Blue series. That was my least favourite bit of the Boundary Walk, partly because it’s a long way from home and partly because it goes through Killick Wood. Killick Wood was more boggy than a boggy thing every time I walked through. On this occasion, it wasn’t too bad, but then I remember we’d had a couple of dry winters. Maybe the soil had actually dried out pretty well. It wasn’t “up to the neck” territory anyway.
We walked all the way through to a path that comes south from Yardley Hastings (about 23-24 caches in) before meeting up with the others, who’d started a bit later from that village and walked around to meet us. Once we met up we continued round the circuit in an anti-clockwise direction.
With it being late in the year there isn’t a lot of daylight, and when we got halfway round I was starting to sense that we might not have enough time to finish. We were well past halfway through the daylight and were starting to get a bit tired. So we tried to accelerate a bit. Most of the caches were straightforward, but there were a lot of them to be heading for. We were still quite a way from Weston Underwood.
Enough is Enough
Eventually we decided we would give up on the caches belonging to the extra “little” series at the end of the walk. We were more or less out of daylight and had heard that they were a bit rubbish anyway, so I wasn’t too bothered. You can see a distinct gap on the map below – there were caches there, but we walked straight past.
By the end of the day I’d found 66 caches, which is good for a winter’s day. I evidently didn’t anticipate much excitement though, as I didn’t take a camera.