by Kevin | Aug 15, 2021
It’s Been a Long Time
The last time we took a “proper” family holiday was 2019, our epic driving adventure in France. That was two years ago. In fact we set off on that trip exactly two years before this one. There’s been a lot of trauma since then, which I’m sure I don’t need to explain, but we decided it was still a bit early to go abroad. Still too much risk of cancellation at the last minute. So we reverted to type and booked a trip to the Lake District. We were heading up on a Sunday, to make it a bit less stressful. I’d been away in Lincolnshire the previous weekend and it felt like a rush to get everyone ready on Friday night. Kas and me were both working all week. So Sunday it was.
Motorways
The route up to the Lake District is somewhat familiar to us. We tend just to hack up the M6 because it’s easy and, very helpfully, it goes near to the Lake District. Always advantageous to use a road that goes where you want to be. Our traditional stop on the way is at Norton Canes Services. It’s about 90 minutes from home. That’s only about a third of the way, but it’s one of the better service stations. So we set off at around 11 am to make sure we arrived at lunchtime. It was kind of full when we got there. We had to rely on our usual parking karma to find a place. I guess it’s a warm summer day and maybe quite a lot of other people were setting off on holiday on Sunday. I dunno. We didn’t really get much – just some snacks and drinks to keep us happy for the rest of the drive. We were hoping (expecting) to do the rest of the trip without stopping.
The rest of the trip was as dull and uninteresting as it ought to be, apart from a couple of flurries of wet weather. So we arrived at our chosen venue mid-afternoon, filled up the last sensible parking space, and retired indoors.
Home for the Next Week
We’d booked rooms at the The Swan in Grasmere for a week. We normally do some form of self-catering in the Lakes, but this year we picked a hotel because it was a late decision to go. Options were limited and we wanted somewhere central. It turned out to be quite expensive but it’s well placed and it included breakfast. In comparison to previous trips we were planning a fairly leisurely week, with not quite so much hill walking and plenty of eating and drinking. So that was fine.
We booked a double room and a twin. They were able to put these across the hall from each other so we weren’t separated by any great distance. The rooms were clean and tidy if a bit old-fashioned and not huge. We learned that they’d just been taken over by a new hotel chain, and that their promised refurbishment had been delayed by COVID. If we go again it’ll probably be smarter. It was fine though.
An Evening Stroll
We did a couple of things in the evening, and to be honest I can’t really remember what order we did them in, so I’ll guess. We hadn’t really decided what to do for dinner at this point.
Firstly we legged it down into Grasmere and back. It was a half-mile or so from the hotel. We found a decent place for cake and coffee just as many places were starting to close. I remember sitting outside and I think I may have partaken of an alcohol-based coffee. After this, a quick walk around the village confirmed everywhere was full for dinner, so that made the decision for us. We’d have to eat in the hotel. It proved a strange week as many places were either running reduced numbers because of COVID, or they weren’t taking bookings.
Secondly, while the ladies were getting ready for dinner and/or snoozing, I legged it up the road to grab the nearest geocache. As I do. It never takes me long to get ready, so I had plenty of time. The weather looked a bit threatening while I was out, and this became a bit of a theme for the week.
Dinner
The hotel was able to accommodate us for dinner, even though we hadn’t booked. To be fair, they didn’t have a lot of spare tables, so we were probably lucky. Anyway, they had a reasonably broad generic hotel menu of British favourites covering everything from fish ‘n’ chips, through steaks, burgers, stir-frys and curries. Something for everyone, as it were. They also did beer.
Whilst enjoying dinner we had a chat with the proprietress. She told us about the lack of refurbishment and also mentioned that the hotel was normally full in the early evening because people tend to pop in for a drink and a bite after they’ve been walking, but then it gets quieter later on in the evening. That’s good to know. When we came back from our walk the car park was significantly emptier than when we’d arrived.
And that was more or less it. We ate a variety of things, all of which was decent, before heading up to bed. A fairly relaxing start to the holiday, given that it involved 4 hours in the car.
The Morning
So the first full day of our week in Grasmere. Time to go and investigate the hotel breakfast. It consisted of fairly typical hotel options. There was a table full of cereals and fruit, and from the kitchen, they supplied cooked breakfasts with copious amounts of toast and coffee. It was good except, as we discovered on subsequent days, taking one or two things off the full breakfast didn’t mean you got more of the other things. Anyway, it was a “tester” session, so we tested.
We’d decided the previous day to split up in the morning. Ami wanted to walk up a hill. Izzy didn’t. Not a big one, anyway. So Kas took Ami in one direction and I took Izzy in another. Some human Brownian motion, in fact.
Stone Arthur
The closest hill of note to the hotel was Stone Arthur. It seems debatable whether it is or isn’t a different hill to its parent, Great Rigg. But for this purpose we shall concur with Alfred Wainwright, even though that means two of us have completed a Wainwright that the other two haven’t.
Obviously, not having been there myself, I don’t have a lot to say. Kas reported that Ami was off like a proverbial rat up a drainpipe, at least for the first stretch. Their walk took them up an initial straight slope and then around more of a gradual slope around a “noggin” to reach the fairly well-disguised summit point.
By the look of the photo here, the view from the top was acceptably good.
Rydal Hall
Izzy and me chose to visit Rydal. There were a couple of physical caches and a set of Adventure Labs that we could do whilst having a pleasant walk around. It was uphill from where we parked (just off the main road) but not as far uphill as a proper hill walk.
I squeezed into Pelter Bridge Car Park, which nestles in the valley where the River Rothay flows from Rydal Water on its way down to Windermere. From here we had a short walk through woods and over the main road before climbing up on the road towards Rydal Hall and Rydal Mount. We were doing a geocache whilst walking up, collecting clues from around the church and up the road.
Rydal Hall has a big house that’s not accessible to Joe Public, as well as free-to-access gardens. It also has quite a lot of camping space, much of which was full. It was quite late in the morning but people in the campsite still seemed to be very much in “breakfast” mode. I thought campers got up early.
Back at the plot, we walked around the gardens finishing off Adventure Labs and finding caches for an hour or so and then I got hit by the need to make a comfort break. So we retreated over to the nearby Rydal Mount to see what was what.
Rydal Mount
Rydal Mount is the former home of William Wordsworth. You know, the bloke who wandered around this area finding and writing poems about daffodils. The building and gardens are still owned by his descendants and they make a meagre few groats by charging people to look around. They make a few more groats by charging people for coffee, cake and ice cream, so we allowed them to extract some money for that before anything else.
Our food and drinks were delivered to a cast-iron circular table on the patio at the front of the building. It was pretty decent weather so we were happy enough. We also allowed them to take enough money off us to cover two entry tickets for tours of the house. Well, we might as well.
The house was maybe a little disappointing. Much of the upstairs is inaccessible because members of the family still live there. Indeed they use the downstairs during the day too. But upstairs you could see one small bedroom and an attic room that was being set up for an art display. Downstairs we were given a fairly long talk covering the two main rooms at the front of the house. First was the original (and only) living room of what was a very small cottage. Second was the somewhat grander living room of the extension. Is it still an extension if it’s three times the size of the original?
I think Izzy enjoyed it more than I did, even though it was tricky because, somewhere, she’d dropped her facemask. I only had one, so I couldn’t help unless we did the tour separately. For me, the tour was a bit dull, to be honest. Maybe that is because it was about a subject that doesn’t interest me very much. I maybe also wasn’t in the right frame of mind. I’m glad I went though.
On the way back to the car we stopped in a couple of places to see if we could find Izzy’s facemask. Eventually we found it at the side of the road about 100m from the car.
Ambleside
Back at the car, we’d got a message from Kas to say they were on their way back down. So we drove back to Grasmere to meet them and discuss lunch.
The agreed approach for lunch was to go to Ambleside, and we were ready to go more or less immediately. That meant trying to find somewhere to park, which proved troublesome and time-consuming. Lunch was provided by a branch of a chain coffee shop. The one that rhymes with Hosta and roster. There was a bit of an issue because the payment transaction failed and it wasn’t clear whether we’d been charged or not. When the system came back we paid again and we were invited to check or banking app in the week and go back if we’d been charged twice.
After lunch we did a bit of walking around. I was trying to work on another set of Adventure Labs and Izzy wanted to buy some rocks. There’s a specialist rock shop, so that was her happy for a while. I was less than happy because I could get a stable signal. Every time I was in the right zone to answer a question I lost signal and couldn’t answer it. So I had to do a series of repetitive shuffles around the town to try to find signal. Annoying. A 10-minute exercise took over half an hour.
After all this I requested that we walk up to Stockghyll Force to finsih the Ad Labs series. We’d been up there on our previous holiday in the Lakes (in 2019). On that day it was a brief couple of hours of dry weather on a day when otherwise it rained all day. Today was a bit drier. Again I couldn’t do the Adventure Lab stage as I had no phone signal, so I was in a bit of a grump. This became a running theme for the holiday. I’d already got the coordinates for the bonus cache so that was OK, and as it turned out, phone signal returned halfway down the hill and once you’ve been into the right zone with the app running you can answer later. So I was able to complete the series.
It was getting late in the afternoon by the time we’d done all this, so we jumped in the car and went back to the hotel.
Dinner in Grasmere
We’d decided to walk into Grasmere for dinner to see what was what.
We found Harley’s, a nice little bistro in a converted church building. They were able to accommodate us without booking but were closing quite early. That’s a thing in Grasmere apparently. People turn up on busses during the day to wander around the church and a Wordsworth museum. They have a coffee in the afternoon, then they get back on the bus and go home. So Grasmere has little nightlife. Even the people staying in the village tend to stay in their hotel to eat. Back at the plot, they did beer which was cold and wet. And they did a range of pizzas, pastas, salads and other stuff. Everything we had was good, so that was a bit of a result.
The walk back to the hotel involved putting one foot in front of the other. That can be complex and strenuous, so we sat in the bar for a while and had a drink before going to bed. It had been a fairly full day.
A Slow Morning
We’d booked an early afternoon session at Go Ape over in Grizedale, so we were in no particular hurry. We took a leisurely breakfast in the hotel again.
The drive around to Grizedale was fairly painless. It’s a bit of a twisty road and, much as happened in 2019 when we came here, we got lost. The sat nav was all but useless, mainly because the postcode for the site covers a large area and the sat nav takes you to the wrong part. We had a flash of recognition at one point and knew we were more or less there, but not before we’d driven 5-6 miles along tiny roads in the wrong direction. To be honest, I don’t think there are any “good” roads into the place.
Apeing Around
This time around I’d booked tickets for all four of us to go around. I thought I’d give it a go, and soon regretted it.
Back at the plot, we waited for a while before our slot so we took a service break had a drink.
When it was time, we were ushered through quickly and joined the group at the base of the first step for our induction / training. They were running a bit late, but it wasn’t really a problem.
All four of us went around the beginner’s loop. It was rather slow because a group of quite small children has got in front of us and they were going rather slowly. We all got round this fairly easily, but I have to say I didn’t enjoy it at all. I didn’t like the sensation of things moving beneath my feet as I was walking. Obviously I was fastened on so I couldn’t fall, but balance isn’t a strong point of mine. I just didn’t feel secure at all.
After the first loop we started up the second one and I spied some parts I really didn’t fancy. At about the same moment Izzy expressed some concern about going on the larger one too. So she and I decided not to bother going further. If you’re going back, decide so at the start. So we back-tracked out and left Kas and Izzy to do it. Izzy fancied another go around the smaller circuit, so off she went while I sat at the bottom. Maybe next time I’ll remember and just not buy myself a ticket.
A Quiet Evening
Driving back was fine, but we couldn’t be bothered with much in the evening, so we went back to the hotel.
One of the other hotels in Grasmere had suffered a COVID outbreak amongst its kitchen staff, apparently. As a result, everyone was wandering around trying to find tables for dinner. Our hotel had allocated a few but had also decided that they were going to keep aside enough tables for all residents to have dinner if they wanted to. So that’s what we did. The food was functional and substantial again. I think the girls had more or less the same thing every night we ate there.
The Morning
Another fairly easy-paced morning involving some breakfast in the hotel. The weather was a bit grey, but not too bad. Our plan for the day was to go to Borrowdale to attempt the “Fairy Walk.” I’m not sure why it’s called that, but it’s worth a go. Izzy didn’t fancy any massive walks but a shortish walk on the flat was deemed acceptable.
So after breakfast we saddled up and made our way around through Keswick and into Borrowdale, supposedly the wettest place in England. The walk required us to park in Rosthwaite, where there’s a handy National Trust Car Park. And of course, we can park in those free of charge.
Fairy Walk
We’d read beforehand a brief description of a walk up the Stonethwaite Beck and past Galleny Force to some rock pools where the Langstrath Beck joins. It was only a mile and a half or so. The walk was mainly flat and there was a handful of geocaches on the way to keep me occupied while the ladies walked. At the rock pools there was a particularly troublesome cache that I decided wasn’t there. I started preparing a replacement and messaging the owner to check, and just as I was about to place it I spotted the real cache. D’oh!
All the while I’d been doing this, the ladies had made their way down to the water and started paddling. I joined them eventually and got my boots off for a quick dip. There was a nice and relatively shallow bit with decent rocks that we could sit on, so we sat there for a while, plodged, and generally soaked up the atmosphere. It was a lovely spot, even if the weather was a bit average.
The walk back, down the other side of the beck, seemed to take much longer. Maybe we’d had enough of walking. Anyway, the car park also had a cafe nearby. So we availed ourselves of some drinks and lunch while we were there.
We hadn’t really planned anything for the afternoon and Izzy was done, so we went back to the hotel.
Legging It
A general lack of enthusiasm for more exercise amongst the ladies lead to a decision by them to just chill at the hotel.
I wasn’t quite so tired, so I stole away to walk my way around Grasmere, picking up a few caches on the way.
I started by walking down the main road towards Ambleside. At Town End I went off the main road and onto the local road around White Moss. This eventually bought me out quite close to Rydal Water and I walked back through the woods and along the little river that drains Grasmere into Rydal Water.
I crossed the river onto the far side and walked my way around the west side of Grasmere and back into the village. I was getting a bit parched so I grabbed a drink from the Co-Op on the way past.
By the time I got back to the hotel I’d walked just over 8km and I’d been outside for an hour and three-quarters.
A Night on the Town
The girls had saved enough energy to go out in the evening rather than stay at the hotel. So when I got back from the walk I had a quick shower and we headed to Ambleside. We’d seen a few decent-looking places when we were there two days earlier. Our favourite-looking one was a brew-pub right next to the car park. They had a bit of a queue and said it might take about half an hour before we’d a table. So the girls went and sat on a wall by the river while Kas and me stood in the queue.
It eventually took a little under half an hour, partly because some people just walked away.
Once we got inside we were treated to some nice, fresh beer (well, I was) and a menu that had a bit of everything. I think we ordered a lot of pizzas, amongst other things. It was really busy, which was rare for this holiday. The hotel restaurant had been quiet every night we’d eaten there and the one night we went out we were in a quiet restaurant too. This place was busy. All the tables were full and the wait-staff were running around like blue-arsed flies, only more efficient.
Back at the hotel Kas and me retired to the bar for a swift half while the girls went up to sleep. It had been the busiest day so far.
The Morning
The morning was characterised by some doing of not-very-much. Kas went for a run, I think, and took a few photos of Grasmere while she was doing it. The plan was to make a trip up to the far end of Bassenthwaite Lake, but before that we had some breakfasting to do.
Kas got back from her run in time for us to all have breakfast together. And then we jumped into the car to head off.
What’s at Bassenthwaite?
We had a couple of things planned to do, both of which were at the far end of Bassenthwaite. Well, if we’re honest, they were at the same place and one only exists because of the other.
The first place we were visiting was the Lakes Distillery, which is a very rare thing indeed. It’s rare because it’s a whiskey distillery, in England. The location at Bassenthwaite is apparently ideal, with just the right kind of water nearby. It’s in a pretty spot next to the River Derwent at it’s northern outflow from Bassenthwaite Lake.
We’d organised a tour round the distillery, which I found quite interesting but I don’t think the kids were especially bothered. It looked and smelled like a distillery, which was encouraging, I guess. Anyway, as it’s a new place, they currently only sell a few fairly early (young) types of whisky and have yet to start marketing their “proper” aged single malts. They are addressing the cashflow issue this causes by selling gin and vodka instead. Well, if you insist. It would be rude not to.
The Afternoon
There’s an alpaca farm more or less attached to the side of the distillery. It turns out that one of the major waste products from the distillery (the spent grain) is an ideal foodstuff for alpacas. So there you go.
It’s possible to arrange visits go feed the alpacas. I’m sure it’s primarily a tourist thing rather than “actual” feeding, but anyhow, it allows you to get close up to the creatures and discover quite how soft their fur is. It’s really, really soft. I mean they are fluffy. It’s like touching a cloud, only warmer. And without the obvious “falling to the ground afterwards” issues.
On to Keswick
After the alpacas we had a bunch of time left, so we decided to head into Keswick to see what we could see. Kas kindly drove us down to the lakeside so I could attempt some lab caches, and then we parked up in the town centre to go for a wander around. I was trying to find a few other caches of various types but I struggled with all the labs, essentially because I had no phone signal. That was kind of disappointing, but at least I managed to find a couple of traditional caches. I seem to remember also that it started raining, which kind of put a damper on things in general.
And that was about it for the day. I’m pretty sure we just ate in the hotel’s restaurant again.
The Morning
Another morning in Grasmere. On the plan today was a trip to Honister to have a go at their Via Ferrata. We were booked for late morning so we had plenty of time to indulge in a serious breakfast beforehand.
We allowed a shade over an hour for the drive, what with it involving a loop all the way to Keswick and then down Borrowdale and up the Honister Pass.
Preparations
At the top, we got ourselves parked up and went inside to see what was what. We had a few minutes spare before needing to assemble for our Via Ferrata, so we had a quick service break and a coffee before joining the rest of our party.
We’d all previously done a Via Ferrata in the Pyrenees but this one was our first in the UK. There’s only a handful in the UK anyway, three, I think, but nevertheless this was our first.
We were all dressed in our raincoats, because the weather didn’t look great for the morning. It was a bit suspect, to be honest, so the coats were a wise choice. Anyway, back at the plot, our instructor / leader arrived and gave all of us some instruction in how to wear the equipment and how to use it. These things are quite important when you’re hanging off the side of a mountain, so we all gave it our best attention.
We were in a group of about a dozen. There was a family of four from somewhere in Lancashire and a group of youngish women (younger than me, anyway). We arranged ourselves in roughly family order and started the relatively lightwieght route up to the Via Ferrata. Lightweight means it was essentially a test of our nerve before going on the steeper bit. There were a couple of dodgy little bridges over steep drops, and a few bits of (basically) steep path with ropes to fasten yourself too.
The Via Ferrata
Unbeknownst to me, one of our number was not enjoying herself. When we got to the official top of the steeper bit of Via Ferrata, the truth came out. I think it was around the time when people started disappearing over the edge of a vertical drop suspended a couple of hundred metres above the road below. To be honest, I started at it and thought twice. Daughterus Minimus thought about it, went over the edge, and decided she wasnt keen. So she came back again. We had a quick discussion with the leader and she said basically they could stay put and be escorted back down to the rope-assisted path. Kas very kindly volunteered to stay with Minimus while me and Maximus did the proverbial ironwork.
To be honest, it wasn’t a very long thing anyway. We were out of the top end in under 20 minutes, I think. We walked a bit further until we came out somewhere in the top of Fleetwith Pike, but not quite at the summit. From here we walked in a group all the way back down the old slate mine access routes back to the activity centre.
Splitting Up
Once back at the activity centre, Izzy said she was feeling like she’d not really got the best out of the day, so she asked Kas if they could go for a walk back up the mountain for a while. That was OK with me, because it meant I could go and grab a handful of geocaches at the top. It was also OK with Ami, because she was busily chatting to the daughter of the family from Lancashire. When she was done with that, she was busy having lunch.
My geocaches took me first down the slope a bit to the Youth Hostel, and then over the road to the path going up Dove Crag.
By the time I went back, Ami was getting bored, but Kas and Izzy were visible on their way back down, so the timing was all fine.
That just left us to jump back into the car and drive down into Borrowdale again.
Coffee and Cakes
Rosthwaite in Borrowdale is home to a National Trust car park. Many places round here have one of those. The one at Rosthwaite also has quite a pleasant little cafe where you can sit outside and admire the view northwards along Borrowdale. If you can get out of the wind (and regualr rain) it’s a beautiful spot. It had dried up a bit by this time anyway, so all was well with the world.
So we sat and drank some hot drinks and ate some cakes.
Andesite Lava Boulders, Batman!
Que? Very much as it says on the tin, the Bowder Stone is a big lump of andesite lava that fell off the Bowder Crag in Borrowdale between 10 and 13 thousand years ago.
We decided to pop along and have a look. There were a couple of geocaches, which always draws me in. There were a number of rock climbers there who were trying to free climb it. They had padded mats at the bottom to avoid any serious injury.
We took the wimp’s option, and climbed it using the ladder. On top, there was just about enough room for a couple of us to park our butts and have a photo taken. Not quite enough for everyone at the same time.
It was an entertaining diversion for an hour or so, but by this time we were ready for home. Getting home obviously took us the rough end of 40 minutes.
The Evening
In the evening we fancied a change from eating in the hotel, so we took a walk into Grasmere Village to see what we could see. It turned out though, that most of what we could see was restaurants with no free tables. The problem with this whole global pandemic thing was that not everywhere was open. As a result, everywhere that was open was full. To make things worse, one of the larger lodgings in Grasmere had a problem with the kitchen staff getting COVID, so their kitchen was shut. All their residents had to go elsewhere.
As it was chocker everywhere, our hotel adopted a policy of no evening wlak-ins and priority for anyone who was staying there. That proved very useful after we walked all the way around town and ended up back at the hotel. So we ate in the hotel again. It was fine. And there was some beer involved.
The Sketch
Today’s plan was, for me and Ami at least, to walk our way up to Easedale Tarn. On paper that looked relatively easy. It’s just a shame that the geology of the Lake District doesn’t include any significant deposits of paper.
The Morning
The day began with a substantial breakfast and a lot of staring out of the window at the less-than-pleasant weather. The forecast had been for some rain, and they were right. It was the kind of weather where you wouldn’t want to climb any high mountains. Thankfully we weren’t planning to do that, so all was good.
After breakfast we stuffed our bags and put on as many waterproof clothes as we could manage. Our plan was to walk all the way, so that Kas could take the car. That meant the first bit was downhill into Grasmere village. It also meant we could stop at the Co-Op on the way past to get some drinks and calorie-laden snacks to stuff in the bags. Calorie-laden snacks that come in waterproof packets. It was going to be a soggy walk.
The walk up to the tarn begins by following Easedale Road out of Grasmere. There’s a couple of bits where the path is the other side of a hedge from the road. And then you reach the part where you leave the roadside and traverse a small bridge onto the fields. There’s about 3 fields to cross whilst still in the bottom of Easedale before you come out into the common land and start to climb.
The climb up to Easedale Tarn is a shade over 150m from the valley floor, so it’s not far, but sadly it was raining quite a lot, so the footing was a bit treacherous in places. We were in good spirits though.
Soggy Lunch
We stopped for a rather soggy lunch at the tarn so we could get our breathe back and refuel a little. I’d found one geocache on the way up and there was another on the far side of the tarn from where we were, so we went for that one after lunch. After that though, there was little to do other than go back again. The weather wasn’t fit for lingering and we didn’t have the time or energy to go any further up. So back home we went.
Back in Grasmere Village we decided that we’d be best served by going back to the hotel rather than sitting in a coffee shop dripping water everywhere. That gave us the chance to get warm and dry.
Meanwhile, in Ambleside
Kas and Izzy had decided (mainly Izzy, I think) to head for Ambleside for some industrial grade relaxing. Full details are unavailable, but I believe it involved some period of time visiting the rock shop (geology, not confectionary) so Izzy could sit in their display of small rocks and collect a few to pay for and take home. After that, they went to a cafe for coffee and cakes. That was Daisy’s Cafe on Rydal Road. This is a totally useless piece of informaiton though, as the establishment appears to have closed.
Afternoon
We had some unhealthy snacks at the hotel and spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing and packing our bags. We’d got an appointment with the road system the following day, so we needed to get ourselves sorted out.
In the evening we returned to Ambleside to go again to the brewery tap place we’d visited earlier in the week. It was good again.
The Morning
The bad news is that this was the day of our departure from the Lakes. The good news is that we weren’t going home just yet. We were driving to the North-East to see family for a few days. We had an appointment at a maize maze.
Before any of that, though, we had one final hotel breakfast before retiring to our rooms to finish off the packing.
What’s a Maize Maze?
As the name suggests, a farmer plants maize in a field, but does so in such a manner that there’s a maze to walk around between the heads of maize. I guess it vastly improves the financial return on a field whilst still notionally producing some useful crops.
The one we chose was at Lakeland Maze Farm Park, a fairly substantially-sized affair to the south of Kendal. The parking there was, interesting, to say the least. I wasn’t over happy about dumping my massively-long close-to-the-ground vehicle in what was basically a field. Especially not as it looked like rain. They also had some quite interesting angles and slopes on the parking area, to make it more entertaining.
The place itself is designed mainly as a day out for families with younger children, and so it’s full of families with younger children. That means lots of random running around, shouting and crying. It also means somewhere that sells very unhealthy food. The last time we did a maize maze was away back in 2006 on Lindisfarne. That one was just a field. There were no other services present. I was kind of expecting this one to be the same, but it wasn’t.
Getting Lost
The Maize Maze was, to be honest, very big and impressive. It had overhead bridges for crossing various bits. And it had a game to play where you had to find a dozen or so signs within the maze. They were sneakily hidden in all the dead ends. I can’t remember if there was a prize for completing it, but in any case, one of our kids was more enthusiastic than the other about walking at high speed along every avenue trying to find the signs. That caused a bit of fraction (partly wth me) but I think in general we all had a sense of not wanting to be there. The place wasn’t really in the Lakes, and nor was it with family in the North-East. And it was designed for much younger children.
So basically we got round as quickly as we could, had a swift snack and drink, and jumped back in the car.
Which Way?
As we were in Kendal, we could have picked a number of routes to get across to Sunderland, but the most obvious was the short journey down to the M6 and then up the “good bit” where the motorway cuts through the mountains just south of Tebay.
I think we stopped at Tebay Services for something better to eat and to fill up with fuel. From there we crossed the Pennines through Kirby Stephen and onto the A66, up the A1M and into Sunderland. We were on our way to Sunderland to check into a hotel because family members were temporarily unable to host four of us. This was partly caused by COVID and partly caused by a pending move of house. Anyway, we were booked into the Hilton Garden Inn, which is on the site of the Stadium of Light. The rooms were very nice.
The Evening
After a fairly long day out we didn’t have the energy for much more than having a shower and going to Kas’s mum’s for dinner. Another long day, and a sad day because we left the Lakes, but a happy day because we’d still got three whole days left and were spending them with family.
The Morning
A slow morning for many of the family after spending much of yesterday in the car. Kas was going to go for a run but was still in bed when I got up. The kids were still hiding beneath several layers of bedding. I planned to go and do a clutch of new(ish) geocaches around the north side of Sunderland, through the district of Roker, mainly, and then meet the family for lunch. As I was walking, I left my car keys so that the girls could get around. I didn’t bother with breakfast at the hotel. I wasn’t really in the mood. Anyway, the sun was up, so it was time to get busy.
Wearmouth Colliery
First up was a walk around the Stadium of Light. It’s quite impressive from close up, but my main purpose was the two or three caches. The car parks have a handful of monuments and memorials. Some relate to the football club, but most are historical in nature, relating to either the WWI and WWII servicemen who came from the club or, more prominently, the coal mine that used to be here.
The piece of land on which this stands is relatively small and is trapped between the river (on three sides) and housing on the other. When Wearmouth Colliery was here, the headgear for the shafts was right in the middle of what is now the playing surface of the stadium. So they had to begin by putting a solid cap onto the shafts to avoid any issues. I mean, I know the football there hasn’t been great recently, but a literal opening up of the ground and swallowing up of the team is still beyond reasonable limits. It hasn’t happened yet, anyway.
Personal History
Towards the end of my time as an A-level student I made a visit to Newcastle University for a few days introduction to their Mining Engineering course. It was a varied mix of tours around the campus and some drink-filled evenings in the halls of residence. The highlight of the trip, though, was a full-day visit to Wearmouth Colliery. I don’t mean a quick jaunt around the surface site either. No. A full-on tour of the underground workings.
From the surface you could never get a feel for what Wearmouth was like. It was, in its day, one of the biggest collieries in England. It was severly limited by the fact that all its working were out under the sea. That’s not dangerous (there’s lots of impermeable rock above the coal), but it meant it took proportionately a very long time to get to the working faces. Extra travel time equals lower productivity, and hence extra cost.
A second issue was that the main coal seams they worked were quite thin. The face we visited on the tour was no more than four feet thick. When you add the depth of the props the men were left with a crawl space of about 3 feet. I’m not a tall person, but I had to shuffle my battery and gas mask from my back to my stomach to avoid banging them on the roof as we crawled along the 250m face. That was an experience. I have the greatest of respect for men who did that every day. It wouldn’t be a great place if you were claustrophobic.
A few years later, as I approached the end of my final year studying mining in London, I was assigned a major design project that started with the original borehole data for Wearmouth and finished with a fully designed mine operation (at quite high level). My conclusion, not surprisingly, was that if it wasn’t there already you wouldn’t start digging. There were multiple places, even in the UK, where coal was much easier to extract than it was at Wearmouth. So much for my personal history of the place, though.
River Front
Next up was a walk down to the River Wear. There was a set of caches along the riverside walkway that started near the sea and finished under the Wearmouth Bridge. That meant a long walk to begin, but then a pleasant walk back along the riverside towards the bridge. It was quiet. Clearly mid-morning on a weekday is not a busy time for dog walkers, runners and general amblers. There were a few more people around the National Glass Centre, where I stopped to grab a quick drink, but not enough to be troublesome to me.
From the bridge I walked back through the University building and past St. Peters Church.
Monkwearmouth and Roker
From here I headed north into the housing and commercial estates. There was a smattering of urban geocaches that made it worth the walk, plus it was the natural route to my next destination. The area is generally a bit run down on some streets and then starkly new in others. A lot of the new bits are where the previous football stadium was – Roker Park. This area now has housing (mainly) and streets named on a footballing theme.
There were a few caches of the “urban” variety in the area, and I was fairly successful in finding them. All of this lead me in the general direction of the other Roker Park. This other Roker Park is a an old Victorian affair with formal gardens, a few newer playground facilities, and an exit to the seaside. That exit involves walking down a steep valley (which I guess is natural). It leads out to a small bay from which there are few escapes that don’t involve a big hill.
Lunch O’Clock
From here I climbed up to road level and then headed north. Kas had called and we’d agreed to meet for lunch at Seaburn, about half a mile from where I was. They’d spent the morning at Nana and Grandad’s.
For lunch we went into a new (new to us) place called The Stack. The architecture of the place is sort of “converted shipping containers” but inside it was quite creative. There are multiple small stalls selling food and drinks in varying different styles, and they have communal seating. So you grab a space and then everyone wanders off to get their own food. Most places give one of those red flashing alarm jiggies so you know when your food is ready. It works well for casual eating. The only downside (on this day) was that it was school holidays, so they had children’s entertainment. By that, I mean loud irritating music and lots of shouting. Thankfully if you found a table upstairs or out front it wasn’t so bad. The food we had was very good.
Walking on the Beaches
But probably not looking at the peaches. No fruit farms round here.
So after lunch the weather was still good, so we walked along Seaburn Beach in a northerly direction. The sea was most of the way out, so there was a big expanse of sand to work with. At the northern end is our favourite local ice cream vendor, so we stopped there before walking back. I love walking on the beach every time we’re up in the north-east.
Snoozing
By mid- to late-afternoon we were done, so we headed back to Nana and Grandad’s house for some industrial-grade snoozing. All this fresh air is bad for you, I reckon. Anyway, snoozing right up to the point where we went to fetch a takeawy Indian for dinner. That was good too.
And then we were done, so we drove the 15 minutes back to the hotel and went to bed.
A Quiet Day
This was one of the quieter days of the holiday. We started off quite slowly and then went over to Gateshead to meet Kas’s sister at Derwenthaugh Country Park. As a result of this quietness, this is going to be a short post.
Derwenthaugh Park is located in Whickham, and is part of the Derwent Walk Country Park. It features woodlands, meadows, wetlands, and riverside areas, all connected by a network of waymarked walks. The Derwent Walk follows the former Derwent Valley Railway route. This was once used for transporting iron ore and passengers between Consett and the River Tyne. Derwenthaugh Park itself was reclaimed from the former Derwenthaugh Coke Works, and was transformed into a space for people and wildlife over two decades ago.
Its like quite a lot of old industrial areas in the UK. The “Land of Oak and Iron” gives some of the history of the site, but there’s really very little trace of the old works now. It makes for a pleasant walk on a summer’s day.
Finishing Off
In the afternoon the weather was still decent, so we went back to the beach at Seaburn for another walk around and more ice cream. I could sense that our hearts weren’t really with it though. Ultimately, we were heading home on the next day, so whilst the beach was good, we were maybe not as keen as normal. There was time still for another ice cream. It might be our last day, but some things can’t be removed from the holiday schedule.
Dinner Time
We decided we’d be better off spending an evening back at the hotel having a nice meal and making sure all our bags were packed. So that’s what we did.
The hotel restaurant was half decent, to be honest, and we gave their menu a thorough testing.
The Morning
Our final day, and time to go home. But not immediately. It was the time for older daughter to start looking at universities, and Newcastle University had an open day where we could have a guided tour around the site.
So we packed up the cases, loaded everything into the car, and set off for Newcastle. We took the whole shebang because it would be way easier to drive straight home from the city. Anyway, Newcastle has a decent amount of parking, not that I can remember where we parked. At the Baltic Centre, I think.
Ambling Around
I was in the “not doing the tour” crew along with Minimus. So I can’t comment on the tour, but I hear it was good.
Minimus and me walked along the Quayside and ultimately up to the castle after which the city is named. We off course went inside and climbed to the top. The view is quite good, even though on this day the weather was mediocre. Technically, the only remaining bit of the castle is the old keep. But you could convince yourself that the keep and the castle are synonymous, if you’re not too picky about medieval military architecture.
Lunch and Home
There was another version of The Stack in central Newcastle, so we went there for another adequate lunch. From there we walked back to the car and set off back down the A1 to home. The house was where we’d left it, which is always good.
Summing Up
It had been a good holiday all-in-all, after not being able to go anywhere in 2020. The Lake District was a little weird, because many places hadn’t quite got themselves up and running properly after the COVID shutdowns. Booking restaurants was tricky and a few things were just closed. It’s a good job that the Lake District’s best bits are all outdoors.
by Kevin | Aug 7, 2021
The Sketch
Every year there is an “official” UK Mega geocaching event. The Lincolnshire Mega is this year’s iteration, and was to be held at the Lincolnshire Showground. A lot of cachers go and camp for a few days at the UK Mega. This group was enticed this year by the annual Piratemania event being held the weekend before and within 10 miles. So some went up for two weekends, with a change of location halfway through. I didn’t. I’m not a camping fan, and anyway I only wanted to take one day off work.
The Trip
I’d arranged to spend the Friday and Saturday nights at my brother’s place in Southwell, which is only about 40 minutes from the event site. A few days beforehand though, I decided I’d like to get an early start on the Friday, so I booked a cheap(ish) hotel in the centre of Lincoln just for the Thursday night. That meant leaving home as soon as I finished work on Thursday. Lincoln is about 2 hours drive from home.
The car park at the hotel caused some swearing because it had online payments. The website told me I couldn’t book a space for “now” because it was full (it was actually half empty). The telephone service was useless because I don’t know how to type a registration number on a phone keypad. Eventually, after wasting ages, I decided to go and ask for help in the hotel. Whereupon I spotted the “old skool” card payment machine next to the hotel entrance. D’oh!
Anyway, I managed to get checked in to the hotel eventually. I had a huge 20 minutes to get back downstairs to order food before they shut the restaurant. I sat eating a substantial burger and drinking a beer or two whilst watching it rain cats and dogs. My mind turned to how much caching we’d get done on Friday if the rain stayed. The weather forecast said the rain was set in for the weekend.
Friday Caching in Lincoln
Friday morning still looked a bit damp. The hotel supplied a substantial breakfast, which was most welcome. Which left me a while to pack the car and wait for Pesh to arrive. I’d arranged to meet him to cache in Lincoln on Friday. While I was waiting I walked off to find a couple of caches. One wasn’t there. The other was on the tank memorial, right outside the hotel.
The sketch for Friday was to work our way around Lincoln. There are six sets of Adventure Labs in the centre. Plus we could do any other caches that we passed. Once this was done, the plans were unformed.
Pesh was a bit later than we’d arranged, but we eventually got off some time between 10 and 10:30. My hotel was at the bottom of the big hill, and there was one set of Labs that required you to walk up the hill (and do the points in sequence), so we started with that series.
There was a flashmob event outside Lincoln Cathedral late in the morning, so that set our time window for the morning caching. We managed to get most of the caches to the east of the central “uphill” bit. At the event it was my first opportunity to meet up with old caching friends that I hadn’t seen for months.
Caching Uphill
After the event there was another set of Ad Labs in the “uphill” area that had to be done in sequence. The last of these was closest to the cathedral, so it was a bit of a hack to get them right. I also discovered the pain of trying to run multiple Ad Labs series concurrently. It’s hard to remember which points are where, and which series to have open in the app at any given time. I’ve solved that now by creating laminated QR codes for each target series so I can just open the Ad Labs app when I need it.
There was very little sign of the promised rain. We had one 15 minute shower at about midday and another an hour later, but the rest of the time it was quite bright. I wore sunglasses most of the day. Fair enough when it did rain, it rained hard, but it didn’t rain for long.
Our route took us on an anti-clockwise loop to the north of the cathedral and around to Lincoln Castle. We didn’t linger there though, because time was moving on and Pesh wanted to get out to the Cache-In-Trash-Out event mid-afternoon.
There was some delay searching for a solved wherigo when it turned out that the final zone of the wherigo is not the same place as the cache location. That took a while, but we got there eventually. We finished off in the town centre by walking down Steep Hill to Brayford Pool.
Heading for the Hills
I wasn’t bothered about going to the CITO event, but I was quite keen to do a load more caches. There was a big series of 81 challenge caches out to the south-east. I’d reviewed them and confirmed that I qualified for nearly all of them. They were notionally set up as drive-bys, so that seemed like good news after a busy morning of walking.
In practice, the parking wasn’t great at most of them and there were lots of other cachers around. It was slow going and I missed a few. I eventually found 30 more caches, of which 25 were from the Challenge series. At this point, I basically got bored and decided it was time for the evening to begin. I stopped at an earthcache on the Lincoln Edge on the way past. By the time I stopped caching I’d made 81 finds, which counts as a decent day.
Homeward Bound, Sort of
The drive over to Southwell was uneventful apart from having the strange feeling that everything has got smaller since I was young. Maybe it’s just that both me and my car are somewhat larger. Anyway, it always feels to me that things have got smaller than I remember them as a kid. The roads, the houses, the whole town, whatever. So driving into Southwell felt a bit peculiar at first.
I wasn’t sure whether my bro would be home yet, so I pulled into the nearest car park and checked my phone, which had been charging in the car for a while after getting drained right down to the last electron whilst doing all those Adventure Labs earlier. Anyway, he’d texted a while back to say he was home already, so I was able to pull off the car park and head into his flat. He has gated entry, and I didn’t have a doo-dad to open it.
I hadn’t seen my brother in ages (in fact, I can’t even remember when it was), so it was good to catch up for a bit. I got showered and changed quickly so we could head off out for a couple of beers and a curry.
Be Careful Not to Drink Too Much
As I’d been out caching all day the beers disappeared rather quickly. Rather more quickly than I could have done with, if truth be told.
But back at the plot, the conversation turned to the weather. Not because of that particular English obsession, but for the more practical reason of how it might affect Saturday’s plans. I was due to be caching all day, and as I was “in the zone” I was going to the event regardless. Bro had got tickets for the Test Match at Trent Bridge, and the weather forecast was that there’d basically be no play at all. When he goes to the cricket he likes to avail himself of the onsite hospitality, and that is incompatible with driving there (or with driving home, anyway). So he normally gets a taxi. How lucky did he feel about paying for a taxi both ways if the weather forecast was a 90% chance of no play at all? So while we were in the pub he cancelled the taxi and decided not to go.
While I was in the pub, I met a few of the bro’s friends. I’m sure I’ve met some of them before, but so long ago that I couldn’t remember. I also consumed too much beer. By the time it was curry o’clock I was in need of a change of scenery. One of the bro’s friends came across with us. One who was also supposed to have been going to the cricket in the taxi.
The food in the Indian was good, but they don’t do dhansak like my local does 🙂
Saturday is Event Day
I woke up on Saturday morning with a stinking hangover (it serves me right). It was much earlier than I really wanted. I knew I wasn’t going back to sleep and the bro was still in bed, so I decided to go for a walk around Southwell to grab a few caches. There were about a dozen on the radar that I reckoned I could find in an hour or so. It’s not that big a place. The morning was quite bright and there was no sign of the predicted rain. In fact, it was gorgeous, and the cool morning air did wonders for my head.
By the time I got back, bro was out of bed and offered me a bacon sandwich, which I was powerless to resist. All of this happened prior to 9 am. I really did wake up far too early.
I left shortly afterwards and found myself at the Lincolnshire Showground about 20 minutes before the event formally started. Spot on, I’d say.
My first order of business was to find a coffee. The second order of business was to go and find the Beds, Bucks & Herts caming group, otherwise known as “Team Cake” during mega event week. They’re easy to spot if you know your English county flags. Anyway, Pesh was there too, and his caravan was surrounded by massive rainbow flags. That made it kind of easy to navigate to them. Most of Team Cake were in residence that early in the morning, so having coffee, some washing up after breakfast, and some having just returned from parkrun. So I sat and nattered for a while until the event site was properly open.
The Actual Event
Inside the event there was the usual array of geocaching supplies traders and caching knick-knacks. There was an “official” Signal the Frog banner, which allows you to gain a very rare locationless cache by posting a photo of yourself next to it. I collected my supporters pack from the team and promptly gave them a load more money for geocoins because there were extra designs that weren’t included in my pack already. In the traders’ hall there was a set of 10 adventure labs that required you to visit stalls and (somehow) obtain a password. Those took a while, but partly because I kept spending more money on geocoins.
Once I’d done all the ad labs indoors and chatted to a few old friends it was time to go and wander around the site to do all the daytime adventures. There were another two sets of ten, one on the theme of bears, and one on a theme of birds. I got all of the birds but somehow failed to log the tenth bear, so now I have a set on my profile that will remain forever unfinished. D’oh!
I was toying with how to spend my afternoon. Some fellow Team Cakers advised they’d done the new Lincolnshire Legends series of traditional caches that were close to the event site, and it had taken them about 3-4 hours. That sounded like a good use of time, so I set off across the extensive car parks to find a way out.
The Great and the Good
It was a mainly very easy series. At the start I caught up with a guy from London who was doing the first few. Then about halfway round I caught up with TonyDev, who’d started partway around. We walked together until we were joined a couple of others that he knew, and we made a team of four for the rest of the route. With four of us it was quick going.
It’s fair to say that the weather all day was a lot better than predicted. In fact, whilst it was a bit breezy, it was sunny most of the time and I got sunburnt. There was one shower that lasted about 10 minutes. If bro had gone to the cricket he’d have seen more or less a full day.
By the time I got back to the event site it was all packing up, so I said a quick goodbye to the BBH crew and headed off back to bro’s house. He was at home watching the Rugby Test Match between the Lions and the Springboks. I arrived just around half time. He already had a selection of food in the house that was good to eat whilst watching a sporting event, so we were sorted.
In the evening, because bro had already shifted a few beers and I’d had a long walk, we couldn’t really be bothered to go out. We stayed in and I typed up all my caching logs whilst drinking a couple more beers and watching baseball on the telly. I’d found another 85 caches during the course of the day, so I reckoned that was enough.
Sunday
On Sunday I’d promised my parents I’d go see them for lunch. The ladies of the house weren’t coming up because Kas had some stuff to do during the day, so the folks arranged to go out for lunch in Tamworth at an Italian restaurant they fancied trying.
Before I left I took the opportunity to find a few more caches in Southwell. I had a change of clothes handy so I wasn’t bothered if I got a bit mucky caching in the morning. I could always shower when I got to their house, if I needed.
After four caches in and around Southwell I set the car sat nav going. It took me a rather creative route around the outside of Nottingham, but I was happy with that as it can be difficult to follow when you’re in a town anyway.
Once at the folks’ house we had a short elevenses break before setting off for Tamworth. The restaurant was an Italian that they’d been eyeing up for a while. It was nice. There was some mucking about trying to find car parks, but that’s not the restaurant’s fault.
The Reckoning
In the final reckoning I’d found 170 caches over the weekend, which is somewhat more than I was expecting. They are shown in the maps below.
by Kevin | Jul 3, 2021
The Sketch
A chance random event saw a friend discussing with his sister the fact that there are lots of geocaches near Milton Keynes. She kind of knew this anyway, but that lead to an excuse for visiting. However, said friend (and brother) isn’t a geocacher, so he referred the discussion to me. So, do I want to go caching somewhere local with a good friend’s sister? Er, yes, of course. And where could we go? Well, there’s a series of moderate length at Rushmere Country Park, down near Leighton Buzzard, that I haven’t done. “That’ll do”, as they apparently say in Yorkshire.
The friend’s sister, and newfound caching companion, was HellieMW. She doesn’t geocache alone though. She always brings along Desmond the Dog. He’s apparently a very excitable soul, prone to going a bit wild whenever he meets someone new.
Setting Off
HellieMW and Desmond arrived at my house quite early in the morning ready for us to set off for our walk. We agreed to go in my car (as I knew the way), which meant we expected Des would be a bit manic in the back, but it can’t have been that bad because he was basically silent the whole time.
We parked alongside the Grand Union Canal at the Three Locks pub and dismounted whilst finding the first step of the first cache of the series.
Up to Rushmere
Our first stretch of walking took us along a road and then into fields running south-east towards Rushmere Country Park. It was fairly easy going until we found a field full of cows. This isn’t always an issue, but in this instance there were a few problems:
- There were calves in the field – cows are more protective when they have calves.
- There seemed to be a bull in the field too – sod that for a game of soldiers.
- Whilst it wasn’t a big field, we couldn’t see the stile on the other side.
- Des was with us. Dogs make cattle twitchy.
So we decided we ought to bypass that stretch and loop around a nearby road, and then back in from the other direction. As we were walking up a random farm track to the road we were challenged by someone, but once we explained he was fine with it. I think he was camping rather than the farmer, so not really his business anyway.
Once we officially crossed the road we had one more field to cross before reaching the country park. It didn’t have cows in it, just a load of tall plants.
Rushmere is somewhere I really only know because we’ve been there a few times for Rushmere parkrun. What I remember from parkrun is a course that’s mainly uphill. It’s in woods and is a part of the Greensand Ridge, so underfoot is mainly sandy apart from the bottoms of valleys.
Our walking path bought us into the park about halfway along the parkrun back straight. There’s a bunch of other caches in the park that were off the main series. We had loads of time so we tracked around the north part of the park, more or less backwards around parkrun, grabbing those.
Down the Hill we go
After passing the cafe in the Country Park we followed the path down the hill towards the Leighton Buzzard road. This is a bit of the park I’d never been to before. You don’t normally go there during parkrun. It was easy to navigate downhill from cache to cache and we soon found ourselves walking along the road, having picked up another clue for the letterbox cache that began at the very start.
The walk along the road here is actually a footpath that skirts the fields. At one point HellieMW snapped the landscape shown here.
As we rejoined the road we picked up another clue for the letterbox cache. Or so we thought.
Back along the canal
When we reached the canal we collected the final clue for the letterbox cache and sat down to work out the final location. We took the opportunity to snaffle some lunch too. Whilst we were calculating, we realised we were supposed to have gathered much more information from the previous location. We were missing two numbers. I sort of knew (or guessed) where the final cache would be. This was based purely on the hint, which implied it was the same physical container on the canalside that I’d done before. However, I couldn’t remember exactly where that was and our candidate numbers were giving a range of about 200m of canal that the cache could be at. That’s too much for guessing.
So once we finished lunch, I legged it back to the previous point while HellieMW and Des the Dog went slightly south to find a Church Micro cache that was just off the loop. 10 minutes lost, but it probably saved considerably more than that in the long run.
The final was exactly where I thought, except I’d forgotten the precise situation. It was definitely the same box, secured in the same manner, as the previous complex multi I’d done down here.
Once we got back to the car, there was a traditional cache out of the back end of the car park that I’d done but HellieMW hadn’t. So off we went. It was a right old bushwhack to get in. And it probably drew a few looks when we came out again.
Leighton Buzzard
There was an Adventure Lab series in Leighton Buzzard that neither of us had done, so we drove in and parked in the car park of a well-known supermarket. While we were walking up to that, we grabbed a challenge cache that Hellie hadn’t done. The previous two searchers hadn’t found it, but I kind of knew where it was.
The Adventure Lab required us to visit five spots of (minor) historical interest in the town, including an old well and the library. It had a bonus cache to follow which proved to be in a convenient location for us.
While we were out and about I showed Hellie where the final of the central Church Micro is, and we ventured to a puzzle which was easy to solve but quite hard to find. I’d have given up but Hellie persisted a while longer and was rewarded with the find.
The bonus for the Ad Labs was in a location that helped Hellie find another (that I’d already done).
On the way home we stopped roadside for Hellie to do another puzzle that I’d found a few years back. The drive home was peaceful. I think Des the Dog must have had enough.
Well, that was a decent day out!
Thirty-something caches found and a new buddy (or two) to go caching with. We should do that again.
by Kevin | Jun 19, 2021
The Sketch
Every post has to have a sketch. In this case, because it’s a post about a piece of geoart, the sketch is of a dog. A dog made-up of smiley faces on my geocaching map. That’s more or less all the sketch you need to know about the Geohound series at Grafham Water.
It was a Saturday afternoon and there weren’t any games in the Euro 2020 that I particularly wanted to watch. And anyway, I hadn’t been caching for more than a month. And Kas was taking the kids up the shops for some retail therapy after the latest period of lockdown.
Driving there was fairly uneventful, which is good. I went to the massive car park on the south-east corner of the lake. It’s actually a reservoir not a lake. It’s supposedly 16km round, and is the third largest in the UK by surface area. Not by volume though, because there’s not many hills near here, so it’s really shallow.
Around the Car Park
I chose this car park because on the caching map there seemed to be a big confusion – no obvious route through. This turned out to be because the area is a huge open field with a few trees. Multiple routes are available between locations and there’s no obvious flow to the footpaths. Anyway, it meant I’d found 10 caches before venturing more than half a mile from my car. I also found this coo.
Where do we go from here?
Is it down to the lake, I fear? Here we go…..
I was walking in an anti-clockwise direction around the geohound loop, which meant I was going in the opposite direction to the geocache numbers. And I’d started in the middle. I don’t like being conventional.
Anyway, it was a flat path and pretty easy to follow. The biggest two problems were that the weather was all sticky and clammy, and that the recent rain meant the undergrowth was neck-high in some places. This can make for some challenging cache finds. I was going quite slowly, but at least the path was a nice, wide, clear pathway suitable for cycling.
Round the Back
At the back of the lake (the west end, the other end from the dam) the path starts to run through farmland and leaves the lakeside a little. I speeded up a bit around here even though the underfoot conditions were worse. Speeded up, that is, until I hit four or five in a row that were “small tube hanging in hedge”. In the middle of summer you basically don’t have a prayer with these unless you get lucky or you’re very persistent. I was neither, so I have left four solved puzzles in the middle of nowhere. I know I’ll never go back just to do those four.
The Village
Around here, the circular bikeable path runs into Perry, and there were a few “off series” caches in this bit. It felt a bit slow and fiddly, with some backwards-and-forwards. I found everything in the village though, so I was reasonably happy with that.
After the village the path went back into the trees and away from the roadside to complete the loop.
Dam You, Geohound!
Most of the eastern end of Grafham Water is the large earth-and-concrete dam that holds the water in. At this point on the walk you have to trust in engineering. The route goes onto a footpath below the top of the dam rather than over the top of the dam. So you have a big earth wall on one side of you. And, bizarrely, you have a big solar farm on the other side.
By this stage my feet were starting to hurt a bit, and I also noticed I’d switched off my GPS’s tracking at some point and hadn’t switched it back on. That means no complete track to upload to Strava. If it’s not on Strava, did it even really happen?
One of the last two caches looked like it was on the path but it turned out to involve a hike along the top of the dam to get onto the watery side, and then a walk back. That took a while and my feet weren’t happy.
When I got back to the car park my car was where I’d left it, which is good. I hadn’t got the energy to attempt any more caches so I just set off home from here. It was about 3:30 by this time.
I’d found 72 caches over the course of the day, which I thought was enough anyway.
At home there was the rest of the family, food, beer and football, in roughly that order.
by Kevin | May 9, 2021
The Sketch
The boy ryo62 likes to set caches. He doesn’t like it as much as he used to, but he still likes it enough to keep setting big pieces of geoart near his home. The “D’oh!” series is one of those. A set of puzzles themed on everyone’s favourite dysfunctional American cartoon characters. The series has 92 puzzles. When you add the surrounding new adventure labs, village hall caches, church micros, village sign caches, war memorial caches, and so on that makes enough for a good old day out. Or maybe two.
I spoke to Pesh about doing these and we agreed that two was the magic number. Very early starts and very long days don’t always suit, especially when you’ve got to drive an hour each way and you’re still not allowed to share a car. There’s also the small matter of Jack. He’s not that small, but Pesh has to consider how far it’s reasonable to expect him to walk in a single day. So two days it is. We planned the first May Bank Holiday and the following Sunday.
Day #1 – Monday, May 3rd
We drove in convoy to our chosen parking location. It was somewhere I’m very familiar with, having parked there twice before for big caching days. Orwell Clunch Pit has its own small car park which is both free and off-street, which is ideal. The Clunch Pit now has a set of adventure labs as well as being a decent starting point for the D’oh! series.
We’d planned to do the “lower” loop from Orwell to Little Eversden and round to Barrington. I was familiar with the route and knew it was quite quick going, so I wasn’t expecting any issues. It turned out much as expected. The weather was breezy and a bit warm, borderline between a jumper and no jumper for me. All of the caches en-route were easy to find. We didn’t do much in the way of breaks so we got round the 20km fairly quickly. Nothing much of note happened apart from deciding not to do every cache in Barrington (it was getting late). With occasional bits and bobs nearby I recorded 78 finds.
Day #2 – Sunday, May 9th
Day #2 looked a bit more random than Day #1. We started off in Barrington to finish off a few walking ones and do the adventure labs that we’d left the previous time. After that we moved and parked the cars at the church in Great Eversden for a walk around the remaining bits of the D’oh! series. The walk was a bit shorter than last time. The weather was nice again. Very similar, in fact. Breezy but sunny. It was warm enough to require a sit down on the grass so Jack could have a drink. This is even though the walk was a fairly paltry 12km long.
Because it was a shorter walk we had time for a few more afterwards, so we drove over to Cockayne Hatley, where there were a few to be cleared up.
Over the course of this day I logged another 64 finds, making 142 over the two days. That made it my busiest week in quite some time.
The Scores on the Doors
78 finds on Day #1 and a more modest 64 finds on Day #2.
by Kevin | Mar 23, 2021
The Sketch
Since Christmas I have been trying to gradually improve this website. One solution I was searching for was a way of displaying an interactive cache maps of my finds on a particular day. I found a solution, and I think it’s good enough to write about. Why not?
One of the improvements I’ve worked on is to try to improve the search engine ranking for some of my posts. Not because I’m big-headed or because I’m trying to make money – I’m not. But I feel that if I’ve written a post about a cache series that I enjoyed, the effort is wasted if searchers on Google can’t find it. This was a problem I had with many of my “adventures” posts.
I enlisted the help of the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress so I had some guidance on how to improve rankings a bit. Yoast has an issue that the “suggested improvements” don’t work if you have a WordPress template that includes its own page builder. I do, but the problem is resolved adequately by changing the template each time I’m using that function. That is, however, by the by. This post relates to another issue, and the way in which I solved it.
The Nature of the Problem
The problem I found was one of keyword stuffing. This is filling your text up with the same phrase to encourage Goggle’s crawlers to think your article is the proverbial bee’s knees. “The machine” got wise, so keyword stuffing is now penalised. It wasn’t something I did deliberately, but something based on the way I was presenting content about geocaching.
If I find a series called “Heal the World” for instance, then I would name the post after the series. This naturally leads to setting the keyword to be the name of the post. If someone is interested in a caching series they are most likely just to Google its name.
So far, so good. So why does this cause a problem with keyword stuffing? I also like to list all the caches I found on that particular day. I link them to the actual cache page so people can go look for themselves. The problem is that for most series, each cache name is just the series name, and a number. The “Heal the World” post therefore had the keyword embedded 78 times in a single-page article. Google doesn’t like that.
So how do I display all the caches I’ve found without actually typing the names onto a page? Easy.
Interactive Cache Maps
The solution is evidently to remove the text, and to display a map instead. Why hadn’t I thought of that before? Because I hadn’t seen the problem before, that’s why.
Firstly I needed was a mapping plugin for WordPress. My wordpress template includes a module for this but it’s basic. It’s not designed for large numbers, and each marker has to be added manually. What I needed was a plugin which allows bulk upload of marker points. I also wanted to be able to use custom icons for the markers. And finally it must be capable of “bulk” use. I’ve written a lot of posts about geocaching.
After surfing around a little I settled on WP Google Maps – It does what it says on the tin. I tried the free version as an experiment. The free version only allows one map. Multiple maps requires the Pro upgrade, but if the thing worked how I wanted then the upgrade would be worth it. It worked. It took me a couple of goes, but I managed to add several markers onto a map and configure them so that the marker title is a link to the cache page. I then exported this sample map to a CSV file so I could see how the import/export works.
The Pro upgrade allowed me to add a custom icon. I butchered a geocaching smiley face. The upgrade also allows me to create as many maps as I want, each having as many markers as I want. That’s kind of cool.
One quirk is that Google now charges for bulk use of its maps. It’s possible to use mapping sites that cover that cost for you, so your Google costs can be controlled, or you can use some different (i.e. free) maps. I chose the latter. I have selected the Open Street Maps tiling engine. Many cachers are familiar with these anyway, and I already use OSM derivatives on my GPS and in Garmin Basecamp.
Show me a map then!
Alright. If you insist.
This one shows a part of the “Flags of All Nations” series on the west side of Milton Keynes. If you play with different devices you should see the map is fully responsive. You can make it go full screen, and each marker has a link to the cache concerned. As this is all set up in a spreadsheet, it’s remarkably easy to do.
by Kevin | Dec 17, 2020
The Sketch
I was minding my own business on Facebook one night (errr, is it possible to mind your own business on Facebook ?) when a certain local geocaching blogger, or blogging geocacher, asked me if I’d like to contribute to his experiment and answer a short quiz about my life in geocaching. He’s building a series of “20 questions” blog posts, where he asks geocachers to talk about their hobby.
Does a one-legged duck swim in circles? I’m always up for wittering on about an interesting subject, and even more so if that interesting subject happens to be me. So here goes.
The geocacher in question is Washknight, and you can see the results of the experiment so far at http://washknight.wordpress.com/tag/washknight-interrogates/
So here goes. Hold onto your hat…………………
And in the spirit of keeping things fresh, I’ve updated the whole post and some of the answers during an exercise where I had to change a redundant WordPress plugin, which forced me to redo pretty much every post that has embedded images.
1. When and how did you first get into geocaching?
I’d like to start by saying that it’s all the fault of my wonderful wife. No, really. I’d never heard of it. She’d been signed up for a few months and never actually been out searching.
She made me do it!
We were lucky enough to spend a long weekend in May 2010 in Marrakech. It was a corporate jolly that I won for being a top achiever. I joined most of the other top 5% on a weekend away in North Africa. The invite was for two, so Kas came with me too, naturally. The juniors stayed at home with my parents.
The weekend consisted of a packed programme of corporate schmoozing with a very short window of just 3 hours on the Saturday afternoon for doing things not in the official programme. It seemed a bit of a waste to go all the way to Marrakech and then come home again without seeing anything, so we booked an extra couple of nights in a hotel closer to the city centre (and somewhat cheaper) than the event location so we could have a look around before heading home.
On our final day Kas told me we were off into some random park near the city centre to try a new game. “Oooh er !” thinks I. The game in question was not quite what I was expecting, but it must have been OK because I’ve now done it nearly 13,000 times in 10 years. I’ve done it in 19 different countries, in all bar 3 counties in England, and in several counties in Wales and Scotland. Sometimes I do it with the kids, sometimes with friends, and quite often on my own. I’ve done it on every different day in the year.
2. Do you remember your first find?
Isn’t that a Pulp song ?
Absolutely ! It was the Cyber Parc Cache in the Cyber Park in central Marrakech. There’s a picture of it here.
I remember it mainly because we were, to say the least, comedy cachers. We were trying to use the official caching app on an iPhone 3. The GPS in those was suspect at the best of times, and there was no 3G signal either, so we were wandering around using only a compass and distance. It was hot, and we were being watched. And as I still had no idea what we were doing, the conversation with Kas went along the lines of…
“What are we looking for?”
“I dunno”
“OK, so where is it ?”
“I dunno”
…and so on. But we did find it eventually – well, I found it because it was above Kas’s eyeline – and the rest, as they say in France, c’est l’histoire.
3. What device(s) do you use for locating caches?
That depends on what kind of a caching day it is.
If I’m in town, or I don’t want to attract too much attention, or if I’m just doing a casual bit of caching I use my iPhone with the Geosphere app. (Update in 2020 – Geosphere long since passed its sell-by date, so for casual caching I now use either cachly or the Groundspeak app).
If I’m officially “going out caching” (which is coded for “I’ll be away some time, and when I come back, I’ll be mucky”) I use my Garmin Montana 650 – the batteries last longer than the phone, it’s fully waterproof, and the GPS locator is (I have to admit after doubting it for a few years) much better than the phone. It even survived being dropped down a drain once, although in this instance I use the word “survived” in very much of a Trigger’s Broom sense. It survived by being reincarnated in a completely new box. Good job we had decent home contents insurance.
I did once find two without any kind of GPS device. I stared at Google satellite view for a while, memorized the position and the hint, and then went for a walk. One of those two was quite a remarkable find. In a tree, in a hedge, and I found it by pacing out about 150 of my steps from a junction between 2 paths. Amazingly I found it in the third tree I tried. The other one that day was under a bridge, but I was still amazed to find it because it had been disabled after a load of DNFs.
4. Where do you live and what is your local area like for geocaching? (density / quality / setting etc)
I live in Milton Keynes. It’s very green for an urban area and we have standing permission from the MK Parks Trust to place caches so long as they’re not in dumb places where people will trample all the plants down. There are a lot of caches here, but mainly isolated rather than in walkable series. There’s several good series around the perimeter though.
5. What has been your most memorable geocache to date, and why?
The most memorable piece of tupperware was probably Sangam – It’s at one of the 4 centres belonging to the World Association of Girl Guides & Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) and it’s in Pune, India. It’s a simple little puzzle and I went there on an otherwise dead Saturday morning before catching a flight from Pune to Chennai (via Hyderabad – don’t ask!) in the afternoon. Given the location, I thought I’d better warn them. They were most welcoming and gave me a full tour of their site before abandoning me to look for the cache. And they gave me tea. And a biscuit. And before you get any dodgy thoughts about me, there were no girl guides there at the time apart from the staff, and part of the reason I went was so that I could raid their shop and bring home lots of bags, badges, and other stuff for my two daughters.
Without a doubt the best experience (and best find) was attending the first ever Giga Event in Munich in August 2014. Myself and Travelling Pumpkin (daughter the elder) went down on the bus that Simply Paul organised. It was an excellent trip and a brilliantly done event.
6. List three essential things you take on a geocaching adventure excluding GPS, pen and swaps.
If one of the kids is with me that would be Pringles, Maltesers and more Pringles. Otherwise we don’t get very far.
If I’m on my own it would be a small multi-tool, a notebook and my camera. And spare batteries. That’s four. I don’t use the multi-tool very often, but just in case.
I very rarely carry swaps. I have a bucket full at home and never take any out with me.
7. Other than geocaches and their contents, What is the weirdest thing you have discovered whilst out caching?
Simply Paul. Nothing else compares.
8. On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is I am obsessed by numbers and 10 is I am all about the experience and the quality of each individual cache. Where do you put yourself?
When I started I was probably a 9. Now I’m into it a bit more I’m probably about a 4. Most of my caches are done on quite long walks out in the country, where most of the caches are quite simple but the overall effect is a large total and a healthy suntan, most days. I go geocaching mainly to get me away from my work, which is sedentary and home-based.
9. Describe one incident that best demonstrates the level of your geocaching obsession.
Two whole days on a bus to attend an event. OK, it was a good event, and we visited 8 different countries on the trip, but that’s something that would be hard to convince a non-cacher about – especially the part about watching the Sound of Music on the bus’s TVs whilst driving back through Austria and Switzerland. Spending an entire week in Northern France finding geocaches, and only taking one day off to visit central Paris, would be equally obsessive, I guess.
10. Have you picked up any caching injuries along the way?
Yes. I left a big chunk of my scalp hanging from a sharp stick in Blackpool one night. It was a hedge that had recently been cut by one of those massive council fastened-to-a-tractor things, and it was dark, and I didn’t see the pointy end. It might have been worse. I guess it was about 4 inches away from taking my eye out.
11. What annoys you most about other geocachers?
What annoys me most about other cachers are the ones who get annoyed about other cachers. It’s only a game. Chill.
Seriously, I can’t be doing with all the stressing about logging protocol, and whether you’re allowed to find puzzles you haven’t solved and whether you can claim a find on a cache up a tree when you sent the kids up, and the like. It’s a bit of fun, innit! I go caching for fresh air and exercise. I don’t go because I want more time in front of a PC or because I want to get into a fight. It was quite entertaining to watch two cachers having a fight in the car park at the UK Mega in Llangolen in 2016 though.
12. What is the dumbest thing you have done whilst out caching?
There was an FTF hunt in Oakhill Wood one night. I have no idea why I went, given that it’s behind the prison and the place gives me the willies in daylight never mind at night. And I went on my own.
I found it though.
13. What do your non caching family and friends think of your hobby?
The kids come caching with me sometimes. Kas comes out occasionally. She thinks I’m obsessed. But then she runs marathons for fun, so calling me obsessed is leaning towards the proverbial pot-kettle-black scenario.
14. What is your default excuse you give to muggles who ask what you are up to or if you need help?
Most of the muggles I meet when out caching tend to fall into the “livestock” category. I’ve had very few human muggle incidents and to be quite honest I don’t spend a lot of time trying to disguise things – you see a lot of people out on the streets doing much more weird things than furtling around in the bushes. I have never been challenged in a threatening way. I generally go with the “I’m playing a treasure hunting game” line and see where the discussion takes me. A couple of times when people have been in my way and don’t look like moving I go with the old “you’re not really seeing me do this, and there is nothing here of interest” one, which is a surprisingly good way to knock someone off guard and make them relax.
15. What is your current geocaching goal, if you have one?
Probably colouring in all the English counties on my MyGeocachingProfile.com profile. As I write this post I have 6 to do – East Yorkshire, Suffolk, Essex, Isle of Wight, Devon & Cornwall.
So that was 2014. I still haven’t completed the challenge, though I did make a disappointing trip out to Suffolk and Essex one day and we grabbed one in East Yorkshire on the way up to Newcastle once. So now 3 left to do.
Since 2018, when I changed jobs, caching has become a lot less frequent and very opportunistic in nature, and as a result I don’t really bother setting specific targets. I’ll do challenge caches if I already meet them and they are somewhere I’m going anyway, but I don’t often do caches specifically to meet any target or challenge. I’ve been caching for ten years and I still haven’t filled the D/T grid, for instance.
16. Do you have a nemesis cache that despite multiple attempts you have been unable to find?
I used to have, until I found them all. As things stand now it would have to be the promise of something pretty spectacular to make me go back for a second attempt at anything. I have learned to embrace the inner quitter. Anyway, I travel a long way most times I go out, so unless it’s a big series that takes two attempts I pretty much never return to the scene of a previous crime.
17. What three words or phrases best sum up what geocaching means to you?
Good question, if only because it requires at least three answers.
- Fresh air. I like to get out in it. Some areas have fresher air than others.
- Meeting other people and pretending not to be doing anything suspicious, unless they are also not doing it.
- Always having an excuse for going somewhere I’ve never been before. I’m a restless soul and I always liked geography.
18. What prompted you to start blogging about geocaching?
I find it relaxing and it helps me sort of organize my memories. I’m a bit retentive at the best of times and I like to feel I’ve captured something about my trips other than the photos. I use my blog like Dumbledore uses the pensieve.
19. Which of your own blog entries are you most proud of.
I’m not one for championing my own work, generally, but I quite like Imbibing Imber.
20. Which other geocaching blogs do you enjoy reading?
Well, Washknight’s one, obviously. There are no others. (Can I have my fiver now please ?)
Update for 2020
Since 2014 there’ve been a few new highlights:
- We’ve done monster “colour in as many countries/regions as possible” trips while taking family holidays in Italy and France
- I spent a week in northern France with Travelling Pumpkin finding a series of 600 puzzles
- I “coloured in” Asia, or more specifically Japan, when Kas got an entry into the 2018 Tokyo Marathon and her chosen running buddy didn’t – she needed someone to fill half a hotel room
- We spent a week in the French Alps finding some of the highest caches in Europe
- I’ve completed more than 1,000 of ryo62’s caches, and as a result he’s placed a cache named after me (and I’ve been to find it)
- I’ve travelled for mega events in Aberdeen, Llangolen, Kent, Bruges, Valenciennes, Saint Omer, Dunkirk as well as more local Geolympix ones
- I spent a mad 2020 Leap Day attending 11 different events in 24 hours
- I increased my total finds to nearly 13,000, despite having very quiet years in 2019 and 2020
by Kevin | Sep 20, 2020
The Sketch
Having done the bottom half of the Minions a couple of weeks ago I thought I better go do the rest. After my first trip to the Minions I had about 38 left to do. That’s not really enough to last all day, so I supplemented Minions Part 2 with a couple of extra circuits. There are a couple of series of Traditionals near to Ashwell that I noticed. These plus a few more made a possible 90-95, which is definitely a good day out.
I set off fairly early as I knew it might be a long day. When I head in this direction I normally stop at a garage on the way out of Milton Keynes to grab a mobile breakfast and some provisions for the day. Today was no different, and I added a fill-up of the fuel tank for good measure.
I tried to park in the same place in Dunton as a fortnight previously, but there were no spaces. There aren’t any other car parks in the village, so I needed to find a suitable roadside. I needed a couple of attempts to find somewhere I was happy with. It’s not good to park on main roads and I also don’t like parking in residential streets unless there’s loads of room. Dunton doesn’t have many streets like that, but I found one eventually. Even then I had several goes at parking before I was happy.
The Morning Walk
The start of my route went north out of the village in a vaguely clockwise circuit. All the caches were, as ever, quite easy to find and in decent condition. The walk was pretty quick and quite pleasant apart from one section where I didn’t read the map. Well, I had the map, but I assumed the ditch would have a bridge but it didn’t. That resulted in a lot of messing around. Eventually I found a very well hidden railway sleeper that I could use to get over the problem ditch, which was good.
Not long after that I was on a stretch of road and made some fantastic progress until I was level with Dunton again. There were a few more heading south, including one by JazzyJessups as a tribute to ryo62. That one was hanging from the bottom of a bridge in the middle of a stream. I was really quite surprised I reached it without getting wet.
After that one though, I slowed down quite a lot. It was warm and I hadn’t taken enough drinks, and the caches seemed a bit more awkward to find. In total this first loop was 11.5km long and took me 31/2 hours.
The Afternoon Walk
I eventually made it back to my car and grabbed a drink to see me on the not-so-long journey down to Ashwell. Once there I again had trouble finding anywhere to park. It was a nice late summer afternoon and loads of people were out. It’s a small village with a narrow main street that doesn’t really suit parking a big car, but I got lucky at the cricket green.
The walk from here involved two series of traditionals called the Steeple Morden Shuffle and the Ashwell Agadoo. They meet up close to Ashwell, allowing a single big loop. I’d promised ryo62 I’d do some maintenance on the way round. These two loops needed more maintenance than the Minions did.
This second part of the walk was a couple of kilometres further and took me 4 hours. By the time I got back into Ashwell village I was very tired and I wanted to stop. I had intended to do a couple of drive-bys on the way home but when I got to it, I couldn’t face it. I just drove home for some beer and relaxation.
The Finds
A total of 90 finds over the day.
by Kevin | Sep 6, 2020
The Sketch
Minions Part 1 – my first major trip out since the COVID lockdown, with the prospect of a major caching exercise on the radar. The chosen location was over to the east of Biggleswade for the One in a Minion series of puzzles. The form here is that it’s a bit of geoart that draws a minion. All the puzzles had a minion-based theme.
I parked at the given parking location – a small car park near the pub in the middle of Dunton. I’d parked here previously whilst doing parts of the Hatley Heart Attack series in 2015 and I remembered the village as soon as got there.
Off on my Way
As it happens, the walk was all very familiar too. I’d walked round here previously with Izzy. It all looked very familiar. The previous trip was quick going, and so was this. Before long I was over the first tranche of fields and onto a wide and quite busy bridleway. I was still caching quite quickly down here, but it was getting a bit irritating because of the number of disturbances.
When I’m caching I’m generally used to it being quiet, so it was surprising here to be disturbed every couple of minutes by hordes of cyclists out for a morning ride. I mean loads of them. Not just a few. I guess on reflection they didn’t disturb the caching very much, but they certainly did disturb me when I needed to turn my bike round. Seemingly every time I went to stand behind a tree a bunch of cyclists would stop right next to me. Grrr!
Eventually I turned off this bridleway, heading south towards Hinxworth and Ashwell. The walk through Ashwell village was good but I made a mistake. I assumed I could get to the “little loop in the middle” more easily if I moved the car down. Laziness is not always a friend, but more of that later.
Heading Home
The walk back out of Ashwell took me along a pleasant country road for a while. I was accosted by a local at one point, who wondered what I was doing. He was perfectly happy with my explanation. He’d heard of it, but never tried it. He didn’t realise that he lived somewhere where he must pass dozens every day. Just after here my path rejoined the bridleway of doom, but thankfully it was now devoid of cyclists. I wasn’t on it for long anyway. I turned north to cross a couple of fields and was back in Dunton – the end of Minions Part 1.
It was still fairly early when I got back to the car, so I decided to do a few drive-bys on my way back through Ashwell. I tried, but I failed. All the ones I wanted to do as drive-bys didn’t have anywhere to park. I mooched about for half an hour before I eventually found a bit of hard-standing just off the road that was vaguely near where I wanted to be. Vaguely near in the sense of needing a half-mile walk over rough fields to get back again. At least once I’d done those I found five caches in quick order on the way back.
And that was more or less my doo-dah for the day. There was a Sunday roast calling ever louder. Not a bad day out.
The Finds
Minions Part 1 yielded a total of 91 finds on the day.
by Kevin | Aug 23, 2020
A Bit of Background
In the early part of August I was sitting at the PC one night and I got round to thinking about geocaching. I hadn’t done any for ages (not since March, just before the COVID lockdowns started). OK, I’d been a bit busy trying to fix up the back garden over the summer, and by mid-August I’d got quite a lot done. But there had been plenty of opportunities to go caching and I hadn’t. I lost my mojo, couldn’t be bothered with it, and generally felt a bit “Meh!” about the whole thing. So I got round to pondering on why that was. Whilst pondering I thought I’d attempt the Oceania and Asia loops of the Flags of All Nations series, to see if it got me back in the zone.
Two things sprang to my mind. One of them was that it was a continuation of the previous year, when despite not doing much over the summer I made a (relatively low) 650 finds in the year. A part of that was the absence of nearby mega-series. A part of it was the lack of GeoNord event in Northern France. I did drive up to Aberdeen for the 2019 UK Mega, and I enjoyed it, but that was definitely the highlight of my caching year.
So what to do?
I guess I’d got a bit weary. That had combined with a general sense of antipathy in the rest of the family. They weren’t quite trying to persuade me not to go, but equally they showed no interest in discussing it with me when I came back.
2019 was probably my first year when no others members of the family came with me apart from our family holiday. Even on the holiday I made most of the finds alone. So 2020 was a continuation of that, combined with the general misery of being in COVID lockdown and theoretically not being able to travel far, nor go caching with anyone outside the family. That wasn’t good.
The second reason was one that is more or less the reason for this post. It occured to me that I had started to think about geocaching almost totally in the context of maintenance trips I would need to do around the Flags of All Nations series. Once we were allowed to restart caching again I would have commit at least six full days to doing maintenance of those. At 2020’s rate of progress, six full days equated to the rest of the year. So, and I know this is not in the general spirit of geocaching, that the reason for my lack of enthusiasm was the perceived burden of having to spend time doing maintenance. There are, sadly, only two ways to address that issue – archive them, or adopt them out.
Cult Following
I’m never one to blow my own trumpet, but since I started work on them the Flags have developed a bit of a cult following, not just around Milton Keynes but across the whole of Southern England and beyond. I guess they are an easy way to score lots of puzzle finds in short order. I sensed therefore that there’d be a bit of a backlash if I just archived them all. They are still highly active. People still like them, so it would be a shame to get rid of them completely. That left me with the option of adopting them out. It’s a big series, so I contemplated approaching a number of local cachers, but then one night I was exchanging messages with Pesh and he pretty much volunteered to take them all off my hands. He apparently needs loads of places to walk his dog.
So in the middle of August a transfer was effected, and the Flags of All Nations were no longer mine.
I did still have a lingering sense of ownership (on the negative side). But then also found myself with a whole stash of new caches on my doorstep that I’m allowed to go and find. No armchair logging, you understand. I’m genuinely planning to walk all the way around every one, and as a gift to Pesh I will take a bag full of spare containers and logs whenever I do.
I’ve got previous
I’m afraid to say it’s not the first time I’ve done this. I’ve shed previous series at Stowe National Trust for much the same reason. The truth is that I quite like owning caches, and I like setting them, but I hate maintaining them. The only solution to that really is for me to stop setting them, and instead focus on finding more, but also on being a good citizen and maintaining those I find where they are in need of it.
All of the above is, then, a very long preamble into the point of this post. I went caching around a part of the Flags of All Nations series. And I enjoyed the experience of doing so.
The Beginning of the End
It was a Sunday and I’d obviously decided I needed a rest from laying paving slabs. It was a warm and humid afternoon, with a little cloud and a bit of breeze. Ideal for caching, you would think. Not too hot, not too cold, not too wet.
I decided to have a go at the “Oceania” loop and also the smaller (eastern) “Asia” loop. These are centred around the village of Whaddon, but as I knew I was doing both loops I parked in my customary spot on the edge of a housing estate on the west side of MK. I was surprised when I parked up that what had been fields when I set the original caches was now a full-on housing estate.
OK, not a total surprise because I’d reset the Oceania loop 18 months previously when it became apparent that the original route was no longer good. I placed the first of the Oceania loop in a hedge in the middle of nowhere. It’s now overlooked by a large house that’s no more than 20m away. Oops! This side of Milton Keynes is one of the two current areas of rapid growth. One week it’s a field, and the next it’s a housing estate.
Oceania
I started by walking the Oceania loop in number order, but actually starting the walk from #249 because Pesh also placed a multi nearby and I wanted to know where the end of it was. I kind of guessed, to be honest, because there’s not exactly a lot of cache-free real-estate around here, but I started with that and then moved to Flags of All Nations #225. The Oceania loop is mainly urban, skirting down the edge of Tattenhoe Park. A lot of it runs alongside MK’s famous redway system, on sections that are also close to a main road. It’s therefore not the most peaceful part of the series, but it’s one of the fastest to walk round and it is accessible all year regardless of the weather. That was a good thing, because it rained a lot and I was getting wet.
So back to the plot. Once you’ve done the redways there’s a section where you cut through some woods and onto some open fields. About a year earlier I had an issue in this area because an old gate had been replaced with a fence, and a supposed route into the woods had become so overgrown, and blocked with barbed wire, that it wasn’t passable. On the very day I went to rearrange the caches on that part I discovered that the farmer had fitted two spangly new kissing gates and the footpath was now properly accessible all the way across again. Irritating on the day, because the maintenance was unneccesary, but very handy when trying to find them because the integrity of the original route is preserved.
Asia
After this section there’s a brief walk out onto a road and then back into another problem cache. A problem because the hedge it’s in borders a field which often has cows. I don’t like cows unless they are accompanied by pepper sauce and chips. Or Yorkshire puddings. I think they understand this, so they don’t like me either. On this day there were no cows in this field, but two fields along there were some. They looked intent on getting in my way, so I had to back-track around a 2km loop to avoid walking through 400m of field. At least there were no caches in that field though.
This bit leads to the outskirts of Whaddon village, from where I joined a bit of the Asia loop to get me back home again. The whole course for the day made sort-of a figure-of-eight shape, if you look at it in a certain way. I was getting a little tired, because it was warm and I was running out of drinks. My speed over the ground reduced, but I was still finding the caches easily enough.
There’s one on this stretch that disappears very regularly, so I replaced it. Where this stretch joins the old North Bucks Way, which forms the boundary of Milton Keynes at this point, there was another cache where essentially I’d moved the final location, changed the puzzle, and then went to the old location and found a cache. What the actual? I had to go check everything when I got home and a couple of days later I went back and removed the old one and signed the new (proper) one.
The Finds
Along with these Flags caches there was a smattering of others that Pesh had laid nearby. So by the end I’d made a creditable 42 finds. Not a bad afternoon out. I’d walked just over 13 km in 4 hours to find them.
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