Another one of these. Simply Paul does like organising events! I’d previously attended both the 2012 Geolympix and the 2016 Geolympix, so it was becoming a bit of a habit. Obviously SP doesn’t like only doing one mega event every fourth year. He decided to stick in a Winter Geolympix version as well, and this was that.
The girls were away for the weekend, which gave me the opportunity to have a double-caching weekend. I hadn’t had many of those recently, so this one was quite welcome.
The event was up at the Ashridge Estate again, like the 2016 summer event. One of the issues with using Ashridge is that parking can be a little limited, so it pays to turn up relatively early. For this event I’d arranged to meet up with BingBongLong and Wallace Warrior, so we were able to spend our day being “Team BMW”, which makes a change from my normal. I parked in one of the slightly dodgy unsurfaced car parks down the main road. And then I sat in my car for a while waiting for the others, who arrived presently.
We’d parked on the eastern edge of the site rather than trying to get right up to the event site. Parking was quite easy there and we were able to head off in double-quick time. We began with the walk around the loop of caches set in the northern part of the Ashridge Estate. These were mainly the letterbox series SP had set just for the event, and they were mainly fairly easy finds. To be honest, a fair percentage of them were at locations I’m sure I’d been to during the 2016 event.
After walking around the north of the estate we then went down to the event site and had a hack around the Lab Caches there, as well as grabbing a coffee. We didn’t spend long here, and instead chose to go head off around the south side of the estate to do some more of the series as well as tracking down Simply Paul, who was reputedly one of the lab caches. We found him effecting a few running repairs to one of the other labs.
For the evening session, none of us had much enthusiasm, so we split up and the other two went home. I decided to walk down the road to the evening event site and do some of the lab caches there. Well, I went to the event site and acquired some of the answers for the lab caches.
I hadn’t really planned what to do on my second day of caching for the weekend, but on my drive home I decided I wasn’t going to come back to Ashridge. There weren’t enough caches remaining to make it worth coming, because there’s not enough other series nearby to spend a day – it’s all proverbial odds-and-sods around there.
My trip to the Winter Geolympix ended up being a day of 53 finds, including the lab caches.