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Up and Atom, Fallout Boy!

So the day arrived of the main event. We had travelled over specifically to attend the Brugse Beer VII event. Funnily enough, the seventh iteration of an annual event in Bruges. However it’s not named after beer. It’s named after a bear. What? Well it’s Flemish here, so beer is bear not beer, because beer is bier, not beer. The bear is the symbol of the city of Bruges. And beer is also a symbol of Bruges too, but not the symbol of Bruges. That’s a bear, which is a beer if you’re Flemish. I’m getting confused now. Let’s move on.

Event day started with breakfast at our hotel. Technically, I suppose it started with getting out of bed and getting dressed, but you know what I mean. The hotel breakfast was a fairly modest affair of the continental variety, including cheeses, cooked meats, bread and a few cereals, but it was also of the “unlimited” kind, so Ami did her best to eat them out of mini pains-au-chocolate while I had a crack at some bread rolls with pâté and then croissants with chocolate flavoured honey. Nice! It felt a bit expensive at €12 a pop, but then I realised I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, and I wasn’t going to get a filling breakfast for both of us anywhere else for less than €24, so fair enough. It had the advantage of not needing to go out, anyway.

One-Day Eventing

From here we headed off to the event. I took the car up and we arrived plenty early at about 9 am, although the car park was already three-quarters full. I think they were doing a welcome breakfast, so obviously a few people turned up early enough for that. They were only just getting the event stalls set up when we arrived.

We picked up our goody bags and realised that we’d actually just got a bunch of tickets for going elsewhere. One-stop was to get a GPX file downloaded onto my GPS that contained all the new caches they were releasing for the event. These were also printed in the event book, of which we obtained two copies in “Engels, dank u wel.”

From here we wandered through the event site finding the locations of a few of the lab caches and the cafe. We had a quick nosey around the various geocoin shops. The event was being held at the very nice looking VIVES Hogeschool Campus in Bruges, which was about a kilometre from our hotel. The weather was rather warmer than the previous day, and I was glad I’d picked up my hat.

Lab O’Clock

The lab caches were quite good fun, partly because of the variety and partly because the physical ones were quite creative. One involved completing a circuit on one of several variations of mad cycles, with either eccentric wheels or dodgy pedal configurations. Another involved the proverbial curly-wire-with-electrical-contacts game. Yet another involved finding the one and only stuffed bear in a heap of 500 or so stuffed toys. A couple of others involved solving or doing things printed in the event book, so we completed those whilst sitting down mid-morning with a refreshing drink. On the day we managed to obtain the answers to 13 of the 19 they’d set. I won’t say we “solved” 13, let’s just say that we acquired 13 answers by various means. Norfolk12 would have been proud. Ami enjoyed the daft bikes though.

After we’d had our drink we schmoozed a bit further and met up with a family from our Beds, Bucks and Herts area who were attending the same event. We also bumped into a bunch of cachers from Essex that we’d met the previous day in Adinkerke, and a Flemish couple we’d also met in Adinkerke, and the German guy who’d been biking around the same series we drove around the previous afternoon. Small world, innit?

Is It Lunchtime Yet?

At some point I noticed also that the GPX file hadn’t downloaded correctly onto my Garmin, so we went back for another go, and this second time they managed to get it sorted.

We’d also spent quite a while walking up and down the car park collecting trackable numbers. Might as well. There are some challenge caches that require you to have logged a certain number. Otherwise I’m not really bothered, especially when the CO has just put a list of codes in the back window of their car. It’s just as well there’s LogThemAll to help out with bulk logging too, otherwise I just wouldn’t have the patience.

Back at the plot, it had worked its way around to being lunchtime. We grabbed the traditional Belgian snack of frietjes met mayonnaise from the lard wagon and sat on the grass. The lard wagon in question was staffed by members of a local motorcycle gang, apparently. They did good chips.

Let’s All Go on a Tupperware Hunt

After lunch, we decided it was time to break free from the event and do a bit of caching. We went for a walk around to the north of the event site, collecting about 7-8 caches on the way, and then noticed that a lot of the new caches for the event were in the Sint Michiels district, just north of our hotel. We’d both had enough of walking the previous day so we decided to drive around Sint Michiels collecting some of the caches. It was quite easy-going. Basically, every time we saw a bunch of people standing in the street, we stopped and signed the log. I think we did about 13 that way.

A Night on the Town

By the time we’d done a few of those it was getting quite late and we had an appointment up in the old town to find the information for another of the Lab Caches, so we got ourselves cleaned up and poshed up (a bit) and caught a bus “up the toon”. We completely failed to register the necessary information about buses back again, but more of that later.

There was general apathy about what to do for dinner and we’d agreed we weren’t doing any more caching. We’d been at it hammer and tongs for most of two full days. So we wandered around a bit and I took a few photos in the still-lovely evening sunshine. We ended up in another restaurant on Waalplein, just over from where we’d eaten the previous night. It was a fairly basic affair. Basic meant a little cheaper though, so I wasn’t bothered apart from the fact that they didn’t take credit cards. They cleaned me out of cash. We both had lasagne, I think, then Ami had a pudding while I sampled another beer (bier, not bear).

Rick Shaw

It wasn’t quite dark when we’d finished, so we legged it off to the station in search of a bus, only to find (as ever) that all the day buses had finished and the first of the hourly night buses had just left (it was literally waiting at the traffic lights in a place we couldn’t get to safely). So this time rather than going for a motorised taxi again we saw some bike taxis. Basically, posh-looking rickshaws. The driver (rider/pilot/whatever) offered us a relatively reasonable price for the journey back home. In fact, he managed to get us back before the night bus would have because the night bus goes quite literally around the houses.

It was still, still light when we got back, but we were planning a busy day on Sunday, so we went straight off to bed to grab some ZZZZZZs.

The caches we found over the course of the day were :

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A Cunning Plan

Our third day in Belgiumshire began with another hotel breakfast followed by a trip to a local bank (because the restaurant on the previous night didn’t take plastic and so cleared me out of Euros cash) and then to a Carrefour Local supermarket to grab some essentials for a day of caching, namely drinks, pastries and Pringles. We had an appointment with an event on a beach, and then a walk around the wonderfully-named Knokke Heist.

Down on the Beach

Our first target for the day was to head for an event on the beach near Zeebrugge that had been organised by a friend from the Beds, Bucks & Herts geocaching group. He’d been to the Mega too and needed to attend an event beginning with a “Z” to help complete a challenge cache he’s working on. Obviously there was some scuttling around the dunes to collect caches before the event. And there was an obligatory photo at the webcam cache on the beach.

While we were at the event we also managed to (cough) acquire the codes for the 6 Mega Event lab caches that we hadn’t managed to get the previous day, from a bunch of Polish blokes. Result. Full house. Except now I’ve found 99 lab caches (because Brugse Beer broke with convention by not doing lots of ten). I will now have 99 lab cache finds for the foreseeable future. And my number of lab finds will continue to end in a 9 unless I attend an event and deliberately throw the result by only logging one of them.

Knick Knacky Knokke Heist, Knicky Knacky Noo!

Sorry about that, but I just had to do it! It might equally well have been called “Knicketty Knacketty Knokke Heist”, but anyway, that’s by-the-by. It’s out of my system now. I can move on. Anyway, we had some serious cachin’ to get done.

Anyway, from Zeebrugge we made our way around to Knokke-Heist, or more particularly to Heist-aan-Zee, to begin our main walk of the day. This was the “Kalf” series. It runs in a big loop to the south of the town and quite close to the Dutch border. It was quite a long walk and the weather was warm. By the end of the 4 hours we spent doing it we’d had enough. We had done fifty-something caches by that time though. We’d walked along a variety of terrains, most of which were pretty quick to walk over.

So by the end of the walk it was most definitely ice-cream o’clock. I stuck another couple of Euros into a parking meter and we retired to a nearby bar. I had a giant coke and Ami had a vanilla milkshake, and we shared a rather fantastic strawberry coupe. It contained strawberry and vanilla ice creams, squirty cream, strawberry sauce and a handful of fresh strawberries. You get the picture. Strawberry flavour. Lots of it.

Border Posts

We sort of toyed with the idea of doing a few drive-bys in Knokke-Heist but eventually, we decided that we’d found a decent enough quantity already, so we were off home for an early finish. Before going back though, we popped over the border into the Netherlands at Sint Anna Ter Muiden to do a single cache that celebrates the most westerly point of the European part of the Netherlands. Obviously there are some other bits of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Caribbean, but Sint Anna Ter Muiden is the most westerly bit in Europe. The geocache we did there was based specifically around the mistaken view of many Dutch that the most westerley point is up on the coast near Heist-aan-Zee, but it isn’t. It’s here.

There are a couple of boundary marker posts at the roadside here. One yielded the necessary information for the geocache, and another (the most westerley itself) nestles conveniently in the formal garden at the front of a restaurant/bar, which is entirely in Belgium apart from its conservatory and its car park. As with all border points on this trip, it’s a non-entity. There’s signs by the roadside advising you that the speed limits are different, but that’s about it.

The way back proved more challenging. I tried to get Ami to navigate on Google Maps. That wasn’t the problem though. The problem was that they were building a new motorway around the south of Zeebrugge. Google Maps got its knickers in a twist.

When we got back to Bruges we were quite early, so we chilled in the hotel room for an hour (tending to our suntans) before heading out in the car to try out the pizza place we’d failed to get into on Friday night. We succeeded this time, but only because we agreed to sit outside.

The caches we completed on the day were :

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What’s the Story?

So this day was, fundamentally, our last one in Belgium. We had to go home. “Boooooo!” and “Hisssssss!” and all that. It started with a quick hack around Bruges and ended up at a big white nose.

We had some breakfast at the hotel again and then fetched some more money from the bank. The previous night’s restaurant didn’t take credit cards.

Which left the small question of what to do about caching for our final day.

Animation

One of the newly released series for the Mega Event was the “Cartoonwonders” series. It was over on the east side of town. It seemed to have 20 caches, designed to be easy for kids, with a few add-on extras for good measure. We didn’t really have time for a long series. To be honest after Sunday’s exploits we didn’t really have the legs either.

We parked up as per the guidance and began our quest for the day. The brief said it was pretty much hard paved all the way round, so we took the decision to not bother with walking boots. That proved to be a good decision. Relaxed feet and free ankles. Mmmm! I really must try getting some boots that actually fit my feet.

Back at the plot, we couldn’t find the first one. And we couldn’t find the second one either. But then we caught up with a local couple who literally lived right next to where we parked. They gave us some pointers on the first two. We then spent the rest of the series either walking with them, or catching up / leaving them. It was like a “with you, but not really with you” thing. We exchanged some pointers on the cartoon characters that were required for the bonus. They also helped us quite a lot (maybe we helped each other) with finding info for the accompanying multi. I would not normally have done a multi with 9 waypoints, but we were sort of walking around them anyway, so I thought we might as well.

The series proved to be much as described – flat, fast walking, and mainly paved. We thought we’d boo-booed with the bonus codes because we hadn’t been writing down the numbers associated with each character in each cache, but shhh, don’t tell the locals, you didn’t actually need any of them apart from the last, which was good. Anyway, it was located much where I expected. There was a suspiciously large looking gap between the first two caches.

To the Cachemobile

So with the add-ons that put us back at the car having done 21 caches in three hours. Slow going caused by the multi, but a decent series nonetheless.

After this we decided to revert to “drive-by” mode so that we could stop whenever we felt like it and scoot over to Calais for the train home. So we made our way around central Bruges for the last time and followed a quiet country road westwards, stopping every few hundred metres for another cache. We did about 16-17 this way before deciding that we better get a shift on. It was also time for lunch.

Lunch was had a the Mannekensvere services, and this time we included some fuel. I guessed I’d need €40 to fill up. I guessed a bit under, but at least that meant I didn’t have to go back into the shop to get a refund of the surplus. It was close enough anyway.

Cap Blanc Nez

From here we bashed our way across the motorways until we were at Calais and found ourselves with two and a half hours before our scheduled train departure. We had catered for this possibility by allowing for a bit of time up at Cap Blanc Nez, a cliff just to the west of Calais from which you can see Dover, and see the continuous trail of ferries crossing the Channel. It was a clear day, so the White Cliffs of Dover were clearly visible on the other side.

There’s a big monument on the top of the hill dedicated to the Dover Patrol, and this was the setting for a virtual cache. We did a few traditionals around here too before deciding we’d had enough and heading back to the Tunnel Terminal for the trip home. We arrived an hour before our scheduled departure but we couldn’t get on an earlier train. That proved to be a good thing because if we had got an earlier one, we’d have missed it as a result of having to queue for so long to buy something to eat in the terminal. Eventually, though we did get some food, and we did the necessary toilet trip, and dashed off to join the train loading lanes. As it happens we did get put onto one train earlier than we’d booked. That saved us a whole 12 minutes (according to the schedule).

Back in Blighty

Once we got to the UK again the drive home was boringly easy. That’s just how I like it to be, and we got back home at around 9:45 pm. Ami had slept much of the way back through England.

When I did all the final counting over the following days, having typed up all the field notes, we’d logged 208 regular caches and 19 lab caches, which I think is a decent return for four days. Ami was along mainly for the ride, so I didn’t do as much caching as I might have done if she’d not been there. To be honest, on the longer days of Friday and Sunday we’d done over 60 caches, and I regard that as plenty if you’re out for a 4-day burst. Eventually, even I got bored and want to stop.

I managed to eek it up by one more cache because the two virtuals we did at Cap Blanc Nez allowed us to claim a challenge we’d done in Kent the previous weekend (see Greenhithe). I was happy with that total.