by Kevin | Apr 3, 2018
The Sketch
So having run out of MTVO series to work on, we were left with almost an entire day to fill, as the hotel breakfast finished at 9 am and we hadn’t got to be in Calais until 8:30 pm. It’s a long way, but it’s not a 12 hour way. So we thought we’d spend the day colouring in a load of new French Departments.
I’d been toying with this idea before we arrived, and began to toy with again once we had a sniff of finishing the big series early. We’d already completed Somme, Oise, Val d’Oise and Paris on this trip, adding four more to my existing 16 from previous trips to France. So why not see how many more we could do on the way back?
Before the trip I’d toyed with doing some of the Paris sub-urban ones on Saturday (parkrun day) as we’d have to drive through them anyway, but the (self-imposed) pressure of trying to finish the MTVO series drew us away from that plan. As of now though, we had essentially a full day. If we counted a trip towards central Paris as not being particularly far out of the way, and if we took a slightly broader route back to Calais, I determined we had an good chance of completing a further 5 Departments.
The Suburbs
The first was the sub-urban (well, city really) Department of Seine-Saint-Denis, which as its name suggests is sort of on the Seine, and incorporates the city of Saint-Denis. It’s about as different from Paris as Gateshead is from Newcastle. A bit more modern maybe, but basically all tower blocks, tight streets and small urban parks. It’s also a pain in the butt to get to between 9 am and 10 am on a workday when the SNCF has a strike on.
The small Parc de Saint Ouen was the home of the two caches we attempted, after luckily finding a streetside car parking spot and paying a Euro to park there for an hour. One done. Tick.
Next up was another sub-urban one – Hauts-de-Seine – which forms a sort of horseshoe shape around the centre of Paris proper. This one covers a few of the meanders in the Seine downstream from the Bois de Boulogne, and is basically all urban. It’s home to the city of Nanterre and Paris’s main financial district ( La Défense ). It’s also home to the Parc Pierre Lagravère, with it’s extremely long car park full of caches. Two done. Tick. Back onto one of Paris’s urban motorways for the final time to make a break from the city.
Out of the City
Third up was the Department of Yvelines. The Prefecture of this one is in Versailles, but we opted for the somewhat less glamorous location of a shopping centre car park at Flins-sur-Seine. Well, we didn’t want to spend too much time, and the cache was very easy to find. Three done. Tick.
Our fourth Department was Eure – a mainly rural area to the south of Rouen on the south side of the Seine. Our chosen cache was at the motorway service station at Vironvay. Well, why not ? It’s on a main road, at a location where we could easily stop and have some lunch, because Vironvay is one of the “proper” service stations that has restaurants and fuel and stuff. Lunch was quite nice by the way. The cache involved a bit of a scramble over some concrete barriers where lorries normally drive, but most ones in French service stations involve a bit of that. At least it was there. Four done. Tick.
A Familiar City
Our final stop was the Department of Seine-Maritime – another mainly rural one but also home to the city of Rouen. We’d been there before a few times on the way to holidays elsewhere in France, but never as cachers. We’d never really been there during the day either. We parked up close to Rouen’s fairly impressive Rouen Cathedral and headed towards the Seine for our first cache. It took a little while, and while we were there it started to rain.
The rain got worse and we were losing the will, but we managed to drag ourselves up for a quick look around the inside of the cathedral and a fairly half-hearted attempt at gathering information for an earthcache there, before deciding that enough was enough, and we just wanted to go home.
Ami therefore negotiated our way through the maze of roads in Rouen to get us on the right one for Calais. By this time the rain was pretty heavy and driving conditions were poor.
We made one final stop for a cache that was a travelbug hotel. It was located in one of the “no services” service stations. They are just picnic areas with dodgy public toilets to be honest. Getting wet whilst doing this one was the final nail in the coffin of caching.
Off we go then
The rain continued raining all the way up to Calais and we arrived ages before our scheduled train, however the automatic check-in offered us the option of an hour earlier for no cost. This still left more than an hour in the terminal building, during which we stuffed our faces. Once all that was done we thought we might as well try to blag our way forward by one more train, so we drove off to the loading lanes before we’d actually been called.
On the French side they segregate cars according to which train they have a ticket for. So we got directed away from the train that was in the process of being loaded. We pulled up in a queue behind 3 cars that were even more keen than us. We switched off the engine and prepared ourselves for the potential 45 minute wait, especially as our train had somehow managed to acquire a 15 minute delay already. Within less than 5 minutes though, they evidently decided that the train in front of us wasn’t going to get full with people who’d paid for it, so they opened up our lane and let us get on. Excellent. And it must have been a very empty train, because we were nowhere near the back of it.
All of this put us back into the UK nearly 90 minutes earlier than planned, which meant it as still light and we had a possibility of getting home by 9 pm. We actually made it too, mainly because traffic was light and for once there was no queue at the Dartford Tunnel. Can’t be bad. In fact, we were home before Kas got home with Izzy.
A Summary of the Week
So over the seven days we’d been away we’d found 639 caches in total. We’d added 9 new French Departments to the “completed” list. And we’d walked 110 km as measured by the GPS on the major walks. That doesn’t include the parkrun, or the little bits of walking done in and out of the car. Total distance covered on foot was therefore more likely to be 130km. Everything ached, and we were both tired as.
by Kevin | Apr 2, 2018
The Sketch
Our final full day found us needing a mere 134 finds to complete the series, a number which prior to this trip I would have regarded as a very significant challenge, however in the context of this trip 134 finds would be a short day compared to the previous one. 17 fewer caches than yesterday, that’s nearly an hour, that is. Most of the remianing ones were in and around Valmondois.
I didn’t think we had time to be complacent about it though. We were going to the location furthest away from the hotel, and were attempting a group of caches whose layout looked, well, unappetising compared to earlier days. Lots of heavy walking across fields and up and down hills. If we were going to finish we were going to have a busy day. We’d need to walk our way around roughly 95 caches and then finish the remaining 40 in the car. That’s as many as we’d walked on any day on this trip. Plus, this 95 were over worse terrain than the previous 95. At least the weather had stayed good though.
In Valmondois
We started down in Valmondois, parking at a “backup” location after discovering that my chosen car park was full. This area started off through urban landscapes on an old railway line. It then headed off up some hills and out onto the agricultural plateau where most of the series was to be found. We had a bit of a problem at the start because the GPS was playing up. I eventually realised that this was because the memory card had come slightly loose. This happened during the process of changing the batteries at some point since the previous evening. Once that was fixed, we were rockin’ and rollin’ again.
On this first walk of the day we covered 10.75 km in 3 hours 20 minutes. We found 42 caches while we were at it. Quite slow going by the standards of this trip, but some of the terrain around Valmondois was harsh.
From here there was a group of about 9 caches that could be done in the car. We did those next, if only to give our feet a rest for half an hour.
Nesles-la-Vallée
When back from there we parked up at the side of the road in Nesles-la-Vallée (to the north of Valmondois) to have a crack at what was hopefully the final significant walk of the holiday. This walk was 9.6 km long, took 3 hours and yielded 41 finds. When we got back to the car we were sick of walking though. Both of us had quite a lot of pain in our feet. We really just wanted to get the walking boots off in favour of something more welcoming. Still, we’d finished 92 of the 95 caches in the area. And we’d established that the remaining 3 down here could be done in the car, which is what we then did. Excellent. 95 of 134 made and it was only 4:30 pm. The game was still very probably on.
Next we had a short series of walking-only caches (7 only) to complete in Vallangoujard and a further 32, all of which appeared to be by the roadside and hence possible to complete in the car.
Drive-Bys
The first 6 drive-bys were down a fairly unsafe bit of two-lane road where I really didn’t enjoy stopping. We then did the 7 that required a walk, leaving us with 28 more to do in the car. These started in Vallangoujard and headed westwards along a pretty quiet road, and the first 15 of them proved to be very easy to do again. Excellent – only 13 left.
The final 13 were more troublesome again because they were along a two-lane road that had a few blind corners and not many places to pull a car off the road. Some of them were not as close to the road as we would have liked. And it started raining. But finish them we did. 602 caches on the series plus assorted others that we were passing anyway, completed in 3 full days and 2 long halves. That’s pretty impressive, in my opinion.
We didn’t celebrate much whilst in the car though, because we’d got a bit wet. We really just wanted to get back to the hotel for a final night of logging caches, eating unlimited puddings and packing dirty clothes into suitcases. I think we got back to the hotel just before 7:30 pm. We set ourselves an aggressive target of showering, packing the cases and getting into the restaurant inside an hour. It took 20 minutes longer but the restaurant staff were happy and completely unsurprised to see us again.
The Reckoning
by Kevin | Apr 1, 2018
The Sketch
Day 5 began with the usual hotel breakfast. We were contemplating the fact that we’d completed 318 of 602 caches on the series. Technically, we’d used less than half of the available time. We’d had two “short” days and one full day. We still had two full days and as much of Tuesday as we needed to see how many more we could do. We were planning to head to Jouy-le-Comte, and I started to think about the serious possibility that we could complete them all by Monday night. This would leave Tuesday for a relatively lightweight day of driving (and of not wearing walking boots anymore).
To achieve that we were going to have to do at least 282 caches in 2 full days. Whilst that may seem a lot, it’s worth remembering that so far we’d had some crackers so far. We had one day where we’d made 120 finds despite not starting until 11:20 am. And another where we’d made 129 finds whilst taking an hour off in the afternoon and giving up early (ish). This lead us into some feelings of confidence. A day in which we found 150 was more than possible. We still had big areas of the circuit where the caches were all grouped in tightly packed circular walks. Jouy-le-Comte was one of these two.
So we set out with the specific intention of caching until we fell over. The more we could get done on this day, the fewer we’d have to do on Day 6 and hopefully we could make an empty day for Day 7 (aka “going home” day).
Off we go
We also set out a bit earlier than we had done on previous mornings, as we’d got a little bit further to drive and didn’t quite know how long it would take to get there.
We started in the village of Jouy-le-Comte, which is apparently so insignificant that it doesn’t have a wikipedia page of its own. It does have quite a pretty church though, as do most of the settlements in the area.
Our first cache was signed at 9.25 am. There was a run of about 15 caches up a drivable road with a car park at the top. Much of the road was through the village, but it was the morning of Easter Sunday, and there were so few people around that I didn’t think we’d be causing many problems.
The first 15 took us about 45 minutes. Then it was on with the walking boots for our first little stroll of the day. This first walk was 7.5 km in length, took a shade over 2 hours, and resulted in 30 more finds. Not bad so far then. 45 finds and only just midday.
Next we parked up at the church in Jouy-le-Comte to complete the “bottom half” of the caches on the eastern edge. On this walk we spent a further 100 minutes, walked 6 km and found a further 21 caches. Happy days – not yet 2 pm and we’d already found 66 caches. The day was going pretty well by most measures. We decided to celebrate our success for 10 minutes by resting our feet. We had a drink and attacked our last remaining pack of chocolate mini-eggs we’d bought from the UK.
Mopping Up
From here it was a question of deciding which areas to focus on. We’d got a whole raft of caches on long walks in the areas of Valmondois and Nesles-la-Vallée, and a bunch of potential drive-bys and short walks to the north of Nesles-la-Vallée, leading back to Frouville and Hédouville. And then there were still a bunch of drive-bys to the west of Valangoujard. Decisions, decisions !
Our choice was to spend the rest of the afternoon “mopping up” some of the scrappy-looking areas, and to leave the two substantial-looking walks for Monday. This meant we headed into Nesles-la-Vallée and got ourselves into drive-by mode. In the next 3 hours or so we completed a further 40 caches alternating between drive-bys and short walks. After this we drove into Frouville to attempt a more reasonable lengthed walk from there.
We’d neglected the fact that it was evening on a religious holiday. As a result, the car park at the church was full. Ho-hum! There was another one a bit further along the way. This was the starting point for our third (and final) significant walk of the day. This one was 4.7 km long, took 90 minutes, and yielded 16 finds. Quite slow by the standards of the week, but we were getting a bit tired.
Enough
When we got back to the car it was around 7 pm, and we knew we had at least another hour of reasonable daylight left, and we felt that at usual rates for drive-bys we could get another 20 finds in. We eventually completed 22 more and still had some light left, but decided we’d done enough for one day, so we gave up and drove back to the hotel.
When I got the day’s activity loaded up onto the PC I was surprised to discover we’d managed a frankly ridiculous 151 finds in the day, 150 of which were from the MTVO series. By my reckoning that meant a fairly easy sounding 134 to find on Monday.
The Reckoning
Isn’t it pretty when you show them all on a map like this? Jouy-le-Comte is on the right-hand side of this map by the way. The name is hidden under all the smiley faces.
by Kevin | Mar 31, 2018
The Sketch
Day 4 promised to be slightly more special than the other days, and so it proved to be, in some ways which were expected and some others which most definitely were not expected. We were planning to cache around Hérouville, but we had an early morning appointment in Paris before that.
Driving to the City
The first special activity involved what we pretty much always do on a Saturday morning – Saturday is parkrun day. The nearest one to us was at Bois de Boulogne – a mere 25 km away on the outskirts of Paris. The drive there involves a brief flirtation with everyone’s favourite road, the Boulevard Périphérique, which is somewhere in between a massive car park and the world’s largest dodgem attraction. Even at a shade before 8am on a Saturday at Easter it was a bit frantic. At least I’d pre-planned the route and knew what signs to look for and which lanes I’d need. I had Ami operating Google maps on my phone, just in case I made a wrong turn at any point.
Anyway, Google reckoned it would take much longer than it actually did. We were there sat in the car park at just after 8am. We sat there for quite a long time wondering when the run director would actually turn up. I hadn’t checked average statistics for this parkrun to see how many people normally turn up. If I had done so I would have been less worried about the apparent lack of competitors and marshalls at 8:45. A few people did eventually appear, and so a parkrun was duly constituted and deemed to be quorate.
Wot, no French People?
The French apparently abandon their capital city at the first sniff of a public holiday. So we were entirely unsurprised to find most people speaking in unaccented English, or at least, in accents belonging to native English speakers. There was a family from Poland, a handful of French, and probably half of the field were British. The field was 48 strong by the way, including the tail runner, who had a North American English accent. One of the British groups was a family from Leicestershire who normally run our “adopted second home” parkrun at Conkers. How weird is that ?
The run itself was good – the course is quite wide and has no significant gradients, so despite having spent three full days on our feet we managed to finish in a very creditable 29:30 with 32nd and 33rd places. We set off quite fast but Ami soon realised that her head was making promises that her legs couldn’t deliver. The post-run cafe was a small roadside affair on the other side of the Bois de Boulogne. It’s fair to say that the place would struggle to cope with demand if any more people went.
Wot, no khasi?
When we got back to the car it was approaching 11am and we had some caching to get on with. So we drove back to the hotel for a quick change of clothes and to pick up the caching gear. While we were there we encountered one of the unexpected surprises for the day. The toilet in our room wasn’t refilling properly or flushing. That, unfortunately, required a visit to reception to sort out. Unfortunate in the sense of it taking some time, but not in terms of the outcome.
The guy on duty came upstairs for a look, and poked and prodded a couple of things before deciding to offer us a different room. I said fine so long as they had a similarly sized one on the same floor. He went to sort it out. Ami and me stuffed everything into our suitcases and got ourselves out of the one room. When the receptionist did return he placed us into the room right next door. All we had to do was to wheel in all the bags and then jump straight in the car to start the caching. Result !
Shall we go caching then?
For caching we parked up in Hérouville to attack the difficult looking southern loop. Part of the reason why it looked difficult was that it involved a long stretch at the end that we’d already walked along on Thursday. There was no way to avoid walking that section again. I’d checked the bus timetable and there weren’t any on a Saturday. We’d just have to live with it.
As an interesting, and slightly strange, anecdote, the place I parked my car for this walk, the Château d’Hérouville, was the primary location for the recording of David Bowie’s album Low in 1976. Elton John recorded three albums there, including Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and the Bee Gees recorded two of the three big-selling singles from Saturday Night Fever there too.
Our walk took us on a big clockwise route through woodland down to Auvers-sur-Oise and then back across slightly more open but still hilly countryside back through Ennery and Livilliers, where we ran out of caches. We’d also run out of energy, enthusiasm and drinks by that point, but had a mandatory walk of nearly 4 km to get back to the car. By the time we had finished that stretch we were both completely exhausted. We’d walked 20.25 km in just over 6 hours and had found 74 caches. Thankfully we now knew that the drive home was quick and easy, and we took the opportunity to stop at a garage on the way back and buy drinks for the following day.
Dinner was an in-hotel affair again, although I have no recollection of what we actually ate.
The Reckoning
by Kevin | Mar 30, 2018
The Sketch
A day off in Paris? What’s that about then ?
Ami and I were spending a week or so exploring the countryside to the north of Paris searching for bits of tupperware, however it was Ami’s first time near Paris, so we had to take at least one day out to go to the city and do some touristy stuff.
This was that day.
We began fairly early in the morning with a substantial breakfast at our hotel before dashing down to Pontoise Station to catch an RER C into the big city. We managed to get tickets that allowed unlimited travel on RER trains and metros, which is good. It took so long to buy them meant that we missed a train by 2 mins. So we had to wait a further 28 minutes for the next one. After all, it was Good Friday. There weren’t so many trains.
Up the Tower
Our first stop was the Champ de Mars station, which RER C goes directly into, so we could attempt to get up the Eiffel Tower. I say “attempt” because their website sold out of tickets for both levels of lift several months in advance. We were gambling with availability of the “on the day” tickets. Everyone had to queue up for a security check before being let underneath the tower itself for the ticket offices. We decided to go for the tickets that force you to walk up to the second level and then queue for the lift up to the top. The decision was based mainly on the length of the respective queues.
So all in all it took us about an hour to get to the point where we were actually walked up the tower. We decided to go up to the second level as soon as possible and queue for the lifts to the very top. When we got there, we found a remarkably short queue for the top level lifts.
The view from the top is quite impressive. The tower is considerably taller than any other structure in Paris, and the view is quite spectacular. It was a little chilly though, as it was quite windy at the top. While we were up there we found the office containing the waxwork model of Gustav Eiffel so that we could claim a virtual geocache ( At the top of the Eiffel tower ).
The lift down was quite uninspiring. From the second level we attempted to count the steps down to ground floor. After about 400 or so Ami and I managed to get out of step so I gave up counting. Ami counted a shade over 700 steps.
Walking Around a Bit
By this time it was nearly midday, so we availed ourselves of some fizzy drinks and unhealthy snacks under the tower and went over to the riverside to eat them. From here we crossed the bridge into the Trocadéro, where we found a couple of cunningly hidden geocaches as well as another virtual ( VIRTUAL REWARD 2017-2018 : TOUR EIFFEL ). This one requires you to pretend to be taller than the tower, and therefore involves the photography sitting on the floor to get the right angle.
We hadn’t really planned much for the day other than “walking around a bit” and I had it in my mind we might be able to walk all the way along the Seine to Notre Dame, so with this in mind we set off walking upstream towards the Pont de l’Alma, the site of another virtual cache ( Liberty’s Flame ). At this one it’s necessary that you post a photo of yourself with the flame. It also requested that you give yourself a moment of quiet contemplation. It’s at the location where (in the tunnel beneath) Diana, Princess of Wales was involved in the car crash that resulted in her death. The monument called Liberty’s Flame was not originally built in her memory, but has become a bit of an unofficial memorial to her.
From here we crossed the river and walked along to Les Invalides, where I’d solved a couple of wherigo caches. We didn’t bother with going inside though. It’s a big site and neither of us is really a museum kind of a person.
Notre Dame
The distance around to Notre Dame looked a bit much for walking all the way, so we decided we’d get a bit more value out of our all day metro tickets rather than walking the 3km between there and where we were.
We appeared out of the Cluny_–_La_Sorbonne_(Paris_Métro)Cluny – La Sorbonne Metro Station and headed north towards the river. Before crossing we thought we’d earned ourselves a short break. We sat for 20 minutes in a totally stereotypical streetside cafe. We got ourselves fleeced for the value of a coffee, a sprite and a piece of Apple Tart. They were nice though, and we needed a rest for a bit.
If we thought the queues and the security checks at the Eiffel Tower were long, those at Notre Dame were a whole new world of pain. We were really, really glad that we weren’t bothered about going inside. We’d have been there for hours. All we in fact wanted to do was to get a photograph of our own feet for another virtual geocache. There’s a metal disc in the floor which marks the point from which all distances to Paris are officially measured.
This was about as much as we could stand at this particular location. It was absolutely heaving.
Georges Pompidou and Les Halles
From here we made our way further north in the general direction of the Pompidou Centre and then on to the Forum Les Halles. This had been changed somewhat (OK, “completely”) since my previous visit. They added a massive new canopy roof over the top. Most of the insides seem to have been reworked too, and the character of the shops had completely changed. In the late 1980’s early 1990’s, when I previously visited, it was a series of little boutiques. It can now be described as being pretty much like any other shopping centre in Europe apart from being underground, and in Paris. It did have quite a cunning geocache for us to find though.
The Louvre
The next stop on our whirlwind tour was to be the Louvre museum, so we could peer at the big glass pyramid. Obviously, once again, we had neither the time nor the energy to actually go inside. It was also “heaving”. On the way there we got rained on, but it was quite a short shower, and when it finished we were greeted with a bright blue and near cloudless sky for the first time since we arrived in France. This made for a very pretty couple of photos of the wet cobbles with the sun reflecting off them.
Just along from here there were another couple of virtual geocaches ( VIRTUAL REWARD 2017-2018 : LE LOUVRE and Who is She? (Paris) ), which took our tally of virtuals for the day up to 6. The one at the Louvre requires you to stand in such a position that you can see all the way along the straight line from the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, across the Place de la Concorde, through the Arc de Triomphe and on (eventually) to the Grande Arche de la Défense.
The rest of the day from here got increasingly wearisome the longer it went on.
We’d sort of planned to walk through the Tuilleries and then along the Champs-Élysées towards the Arc de Triomphe, taking in some dinner on the way, before heading home. We were both getting quite tired and our feet were aching, but neither of us was hungry.
Home we go
As we were walking along the last bit of Champs-Élysées we decided we’d rather go and look for pizza a little closer to home rather than stay out in Paris. So we continued our slow hobble up to the Charles de Gaulle – Étoile station and grabbed an RER A train. This was much quicker than the RER C we’d taken in the morning, but dropped us off at the somewhat less than glamorous Cergy Préfecture station. Nothing especially wrong with it, I suppose. It’s just that it’s in the middle of a concrete monstrosity of high-rise housing.
Nearby was a little pizza place that we decided we go to for dinner. Aside from the lack of alcoholic beverages it was fine.
The walk back to the hotel was somewhat less than fine. The concrete high-rises were a bit of an urban jungle and both of us felt distinctly uncomfortable walking through them. When we did emerge onto a road it was one which couldn’t make it’s mind up whether to have footpaths. We blindly followed google maps and made a couple of probably quite dangerous jumps over concrete barriers to get to where we needed to be, and eventually we made it back to the hotel none the worse, albeit rather tired. We’d been out of the hotel for 13 hours, so all we wanted to do was to get some sleep.
As we drove back out past this road in the morning we saw where the footpaths actually went………
Anyway, over the course of the day, the geocaches we completed were :
by Kevin | Mar 29, 2018
Early Morning Irritation
Day 2 began with a significant amount of breakfast at the hotel. We didn’t start particularly early because it had been a long day the previous day. I didn’t have the heart or the energy to force Ami to get up early. When the alarm went off I switched it off for 45 minutes to let her sleep a bit longer. We were planning to start the caching in Livilliers, more or less the closest part of the circuit to the hotel.
We got out of the hotel at around 10 and were parked up in our chosen destination, Livilliers, by about 10:15. It really wasn’t very far. I wish I could have this many caches to find this close to home. I suppose I used to have exactly that, until I found them all.
Back at the plot, we parked behind the church in Livilliers and I had a few scares while we were getting ready because somehow the car alarm kept setting itself off. I think it must have been some dodgy combination of button presses that I’ve never before done. There was a point where I was thinking we should sit still for 15 minutes to see if it happened again.
We decided not to wait, as we’d got some caching to do.
A Long Walk
On the radar today was a loop on the MTVO series that contained about 95 caches. If it went well, we could do a load more as drive-bys afterwards. Like complete numptys we’d failed to acquire any soft drinks beforehand. So we set off without carrying anything to drink apart from various half-bottles from the previous day. Given the length of the walk this sort of concerned me for the first couple of hours. As time marched on though, it concerned us a lot less. We just weren’t getting either tired or thirsty until nearly the end.
My main problem was that I was getting very dry skin on my hands from handling caches. I think one of them had some agricultural “stuff” on it which drained all the moisture out. Anyway, I was getting very cracked skin on my fingers. More of that later.
The walk was 19.25 km long and took us 6 hours, during which we found 95 caches. All bar two of them were from the series.
A Break, and Some Driving
At this time we decided we really needed a drink break and to go buy something for my hands. We spotted a shopping centre near Génicourt which appeared to fit the bill, so we spent 5 minutes driving there and parking. Once there, we got drinks, cakes and some hand cream. We spent about an hour there before deciding to go attack a few more in the car. For drive-bys we headed through Livilliers up towards Vallangoujard, where we found a few more that required a park-and-walk strategy.
Just before 7 pm it started to rain a bit, so we finished off the stretch we were on and headed back to the hotel. It was a little earlier than the previous night. We’d completed a total of 128 caches. Another personal best. The caches found near Livilliers were:
by Kevin | Mar 28, 2018
The Sketch
This was going to be a bit of a monster post, as I hadn’t taken enough photos for there to be sufficient visual interest to sustain a blog post per day, and anyway I thought most of the days would just be along the lines of “got up, did loads of caching, ate dinner, went to bed”, which wouldn’t be particularly interesting. When I sat down and thought about it though, I ended up doing one a day anyway. So here’s the first day, which we spent caching around Frouville.
So the objective of this rather substantial sortie into northern France was a massive series of puzzle caches called the Mystery Trail du Val d’Oise (or MTVO for short), which lie just to the north-west of central Paris above the new town of Cergy-Pontoise. There’s just over 600 caches plus a few outliers. Together they form a geo-art picture of a big heraldic shield.
I allowed a week to do them, arranging to travel down very early on a Wednesday and return last thing at night the following Tuesday.
My caching buddy for the trip was Ami. As she’s getting older she’s more able to cope with being away for longer. She’s also more useful in the front of the car for navigating and paying motorway tolls, which is handy. In this case, she’s never really been to Paris and she was on Easter break, so we could afford to take our time. Easter seemed a good idea because I know the French like to abandon their capital to tourists during the holiday. This meant we could get in 7 days of holiday whilst only taking 3 days off work.
An Early Start
The morning began very early, with Ami and me having tried to sleep downstairs on the new sofabed and failing miserably. A part of that was excitement. Another part was that Izzy had been ill. Kas took her to the walk-in clinic on Tuesday night. They got back home at a time when Ami and me were just getting settled into bed.
The alarm was set for 2:30am, which meant we’d got just under 4 hours to get up, drive to Folkestone and check in for our journey through the Channel Tunnel. I always allow this much time, as you never know if there’ll be traffic issues, but as is often the case we found ourselves at the Eurotunnel Folkestone Terminal well in advance of our train. So far in advance, in fact, that we were offered a train 30 minutes before I booked. We played my now usual early-morning game of driving through passport control well before we’d been called. We were safe in the knowledge that the Folkestone terminal doesn’t really segregate incoming cars according to the train they have a place on. More often than not you can bump yourself forward another train.
Driving Through France
All of this placed us in France at about 7:45am French time, over an hour earlier than expected. We’d planned to make a stop for breakfast at the Aire de la Baie de Somme, near Abbeville and we got there before 9am. This place had been a source of much amusement in the past. We deliberately mispronounced the name as Air Dilly Bay Dilly Somme (Dilly). It wasn’t quite what I remembered from a previous visit, however we managed to extract a decent breakfast sandwich and coffee from them and also managed to find our first cache of the trip. It was also our first ever in the Somme Department. We didn’t manage to grab any drinks or snacks for the day though. The shop looked poor and the petrol station was being rebuilt.
We were therefore forced to stop at the Aire de Hardivilliers, about 60 km further on. I didn’t mind stopping though, because it also had a cache and was also a new Department ( Oise ). I took the opportunity to fill up with diesel while we were at it. It was a much better service station.
From here we were pretty much into the caching zone. We had a further 50 km to drive to reach Méru, from where we got off the motorways and headed into the countryside. I hadn’t really completely decided where to start caching, so we pulled over at Amblainville to complete a puzzle cache I’d solved and to make a decision. We decided to attack the north-east corner and have a go at some driving and walking caches near to Frouville. This was the first obvious bunch to hit, as it was closest to our arrival point.
Into the Zone
We started with 15 or so done as drive-bys down the access road to Frouville. In the village, we parked up by the church to have a bit of a walk. It proved to be a bit of an epic walk. We did take drinks and chocolate mini-eggs with us, which proved to be a good thing. When we got back to the car after 5 hours we’d found about 60 more caches. We also managed to get completely and utterly soaked in a massive downpour and then get dried out again in the subsequent stiff breeze.
By the time we got back to the car it was after 5pm. We’d already completed many more caches than I thought we would, but we were far from finished. We decided to head off for a few more in the car. A “few more” turned out to be 42 more. The drive-bys were really very easy, and this became a running theme for the trip. We were able consistently to hammer out masses of caches with minimal effort at the end of each long walking day.
At about 7:30 we decided enough was enough, so we got Google maps to give us a route to our hotel – the Campanile in Cergy-Pontoise – and we were relieved to see it was predicting just a 15 minute drive. We were therefore checking into the hotel at 7:45 and made an immediate decision to eat in the hotel. It had been a long day and I didn’t want to go out again.
Enough
The room was right up on their third floor, but we realised pretty quickly that the third-floor rooms were the biggest ones. We dived in for a quick shower and change of clothes and then headed for some well-earned dinner.
The restaurant was functional and did about 5 daily specials as well as a small “standard” menu. It also had this excellent idea of “unlimited starters” and “unlimited desserts/cheese” that you could help yourself to from the salad bar. Ami had steak and unlimited puddings. I had a chicken dish of the specials board and unlimited cheese. I also had too much beer, but you don’t really need to know about that part.
After this, I tried to start processing caching logs on my little laptop in the restaurant. It wasn’t having any of that though. So I ended up doing them in the hotel room afterwards while Ami got an early start on some sleeping.
In the final reckoning, we’d somehow managed to do 120 caches in total, including a fantastic 117 from the MTVO series. This was by far and away a new personal best for us both. The caches we found near Frouville on this day (in the approximate order that we did them) were :
by Kevin | Mar 28, 2018
The Sketch
This was going to be a bit of a monster post, as I hadn’t taken enough photos for there to be sufficient visual interest to sustain a blog post per day, and anyway I thought most of the days would just be along the lines of “got up, did loads of caching, ate dinner, went to bed”, which wouldn’t be particularly interesting. When I sat down and thought about it though, I ended up doing one a day anyway. So here’s the first day, which we spent caching around Frouville.
So the objective of this rather substantial sortie into northern France was a massive series of puzzle caches called the Mystery Trail du Val d’Oise (or MTVO for short), which lie just to the north-west of central Paris above the new town of Cergy-Pontoise. There’s just over 600 caches plus a few outliers. Together they form a geo-art picture of a big heraldic shield.
I allowed a week to do them, arranging to travel down very early on a Wednesday and return last thing at night the following Tuesday.
My caching buddy for the trip was Ami. As she’s getting older she’s more able to cope with being away for longer. She’s also more useful in the front of the car for navigating and paying motorway tolls, which is handy. In this case, she’s never really been to Paris and she was on Easter break, so we could afford to take our time. Easter seemed a good idea because I know the French like to abandon their capital to tourists during the holiday. This meant we could get in 7 days of holiday whilst only taking 3 days off work.
An Early Start
The morning began very early, with Ami and me having tried to sleep downstairs on the new sofabed and failing miserably. A part of that was excitement. Another part was that Izzy had been ill. Kas took her to the walk-in clinic on Tuesday night. They got back home at a time when Ami and me were just getting settled into bed.
The alarm was set for 2:30am, which meant we’d got just under 4 hours to get up, drive to Folkestone and check in for our journey through the Channel Tunnel. I always allow this much time, as you never know if there’ll be traffic issues, but as is often the case we found ourselves at the Eurotunnel Folkestone Terminal well in advance of our train. So far in advance, in fact, that we were offered a train 30 minutes before I booked. We played my now usual early-morning game of driving through passport control well before we’d been called. We were safe in the knowledge that the Folkestone terminal doesn’t really segregate incoming cars according to the train they have a place on. More often than not you can bump yourself forward another train.
Driving Through France
All of this placed us in France at about 7:45am French time, over an hour earlier than expected. We’d planned to make a stop for breakfast at the Aire de la Baie de Somme, near Abbeville and we got there before 9am. This place had been a source of much amusement in the past. We deliberately mispronounced the name as Air Dilly Bay Dilly Somme (Dilly). It wasn’t quite what I remembered from a previous visit, however we managed to extract a decent breakfast sandwich and coffee from them and also managed to find our first cache of the trip. It was also our first ever in the Somme Department. We didn’t manage to grab any drinks or snacks for the day though. The shop looked poor and the petrol station was being rebuilt.
We were therefore forced to stop at the Aire de Hardivilliers, about 60 km further on. I didn’t mind stopping though, because it also had a cache and was also a new Department ( Oise ). I took the opportunity to fill up with diesel while we were at it. It was a much better service station.
From here we were pretty much into the caching zone. We had a further 50 km to drive to reach Méru, from where we got off the motorways and headed into the countryside. I hadn’t really completely decided where to start caching, so we pulled over at Amblainville to complete a puzzle cache I’d solved and to make a decision. We decided to attack the north-east corner and have a go at some driving and walking caches near to Frouville. This was the first obvious bunch to hit, as it was closest to our arrival point.
Into the Zone
We started with 15 or so done as drive-bys down the access road to Frouville. In the village, we parked up by the church to have a bit of a walk. It proved to be a bit of an epic walk. We did take drinks and chocolate mini-eggs with us, which proved to be a good thing. When we got back to the car after 5 hours we’d found about 60 more caches. We also managed to get completely and utterly soaked in a massive downpour and then get dried out again in the subsequent stiff breeze.
By the time we got back to the car it was after 5pm. We’d already completed many more caches than I thought we would, but we were far from finished. We decided to head off for a few more in the car. A “few more” turned out to be 42 more. The drive-bys were really very easy, and this became a running theme for the trip. We were able consistently to hammer out masses of caches with minimal effort at the end of each long walking day.
At about 7:30 we decided enough was enough, so we got Google maps to give us a route to our hotel – the Campanile in Cergy-Pontoise – and we were relieved to see it was predicting just a 15 minute drive. We were therefore checking into the hotel at 7:45 and made an immediate decision to eat in the hotel. It had been a long day and I didn’t want to go out again.
Enough
The room was right up on their third floor, but we realised pretty quickly that the third-floor rooms were the biggest ones. We dived in for a quick shower and change of clothes and then headed for some well-earned dinner.
The restaurant was functional and did about 5 daily specials as well as a small “standard” menu. It also had this excellent idea of “unlimited starters” and “unlimited desserts/cheese” that you could help yourself to from the salad bar. Ami had steak and unlimited puddings. I had a chicken dish of the specials board and unlimited cheese. I also had too much beer, but you don’t really need to know about that part.
After this, I tried to start processing caching logs on my little laptop in the restaurant. It wasn’t having any of that though. So I ended up doing them in the hotel room afterwards while Ami got an early start on some sleeping.
In the final reckoning, we’d somehow managed to do 120 caches in total, including a fantastic 117 from the MTVO series. This was by far and away a new personal best for us both. The caches we found near Frouville on this day (in the approximate order that we did them) were :
Early Morning Irritation
Day 2 began with a significant amount of breakfast at the hotel. We didn’t start particularly early because it had been a long day the previous day. I didn’t have the heart or the energy to force Ami to get up early. When the alarm went off I switched it off for 45 minutes to let her sleep a bit longer. We were planning to start the caching in Livilliers, more or less the closest part of the circuit to the hotel.
We got out of the hotel at around 10 and were parked up in our chosen destination, Livilliers, by about 10:15. It really wasn’t very far. I wish I could have this many caches to find this close to home. I suppose I used to have exactly that, until I found them all.
Back at the plot, we parked behind the church in Livilliers and I had a few scares while we were getting ready because somehow the car alarm kept setting itself off. I think it must have been some dodgy combination of button presses that I’ve never before done. There was a point where I was thinking we should sit still for 15 minutes to see if it happened again.
We decided not to wait, as we’d got some caching to do.
A Long Walk
On the radar today was a loop on the MTVO series that contained about 95 caches. If it went well, we could do a load more as drive-bys afterwards. Like complete numptys we’d failed to acquire any soft drinks beforehand. So we set off without carrying anything to drink apart from various half-bottles from the previous day. Given the length of the walk this sort of concerned me for the first couple of hours. As time marched on though, it concerned us a lot less. We just weren’t getting either tired or thirsty until nearly the end.
My main problem was that I was getting very dry skin on my hands from handling caches. I think one of them had some agricultural “stuff” on it which drained all the moisture out. Anyway, I was getting very cracked skin on my fingers. More of that later.
The walk was 19.25 km long and took us 6 hours, during which we found 95 caches. All bar two of them were from the series.
A Break, and Some Driving
At this time we decided we really needed a drink break and to go buy something for my hands. We spotted a shopping centre near Génicourt which appeared to fit the bill, so we spent 5 minutes driving there and parking. Once there, we got drinks, cakes and some hand cream. We spent about an hour there before deciding to go attack a few more in the car. For drive-bys we headed through Livilliers up towards Vallangoujard, where we found a few more that required a park-and-walk strategy.
Just before 7 pm it started to rain a bit, so we finished off the stretch we were on and headed back to the hotel. It was a little earlier than the previous night. We’d completed a total of 128 caches. Another personal best. The caches found near Livilliers were:
The Sketch
A day off in Paris? What’s that about then ?
Ami and I were spending a week or so exploring the countryside to the north of Paris searching for bits of tupperware, however it was Ami’s first time near Paris, so we had to take at least one day out to go to the city and do some touristy stuff.
This was that day.
We began fairly early in the morning with a substantial breakfast at our hotel before dashing down to Pontoise Station to catch an RER C into the big city. We managed to get tickets that allowed unlimited travel on RER trains and metros, which is good. It took so long to buy them meant that we missed a train by 2 mins. So we had to wait a further 28 minutes for the next one. After all, it was Good Friday. There weren’t so many trains.
Up the Tower
Our first stop was the Champ de Mars station, which RER C goes directly into, so we could attempt to get up the Eiffel Tower. I say “attempt” because their website sold out of tickets for both levels of lift several months in advance. We were gambling with availability of the “on the day” tickets. Everyone had to queue up for a security check before being let underneath the tower itself for the ticket offices. We decided to go for the tickets that force you to walk up to the second level and then queue for the lift up to the top. The decision was based mainly on the length of the respective queues.
So all in all it took us about an hour to get to the point where we were actually walked up the tower. We decided to go up to the second level as soon as possible and queue for the lifts to the very top. When we got there, we found a remarkably short queue for the top level lifts.
The view from the top is quite impressive. The tower is considerably taller than any other structure in Paris, and the view is quite spectacular. It was a little chilly though, as it was quite windy at the top. While we were up there we found the office containing the waxwork model of Gustav Eiffel so that we could claim a virtual geocache ( At the top of the Eiffel tower ).
The lift down was quite uninspiring. From the second level we attempted to count the steps down to ground floor. After about 400 or so Ami and I managed to get out of step so I gave up counting. Ami counted a shade over 700 steps.
Walking Around a Bit
By this time it was nearly midday, so we availed ourselves of some fizzy drinks and unhealthy snacks under the tower and went over to the riverside to eat them. From here we crossed the bridge into the Trocadéro, where we found a couple of cunningly hidden geocaches as well as another virtual ( VIRTUAL REWARD 2017-2018 : TOUR EIFFEL ). This one requires you to pretend to be taller than the tower, and therefore involves the photography sitting on the floor to get the right angle.
We hadn’t really planned much for the day other than “walking around a bit” and I had it in my mind we might be able to walk all the way along the Seine to Notre Dame, so with this in mind we set off walking upstream towards the Pont de l’Alma, the site of another virtual cache ( Liberty’s Flame ). At this one it’s necessary that you post a photo of yourself with the flame. It also requested that you give yourself a moment of quiet contemplation. It’s at the location where (in the tunnel beneath) Diana, Princess of Wales was involved in the car crash that resulted in her death. The monument called Liberty’s Flame was not originally built in her memory, but has become a bit of an unofficial memorial to her.
From here we crossed the river and walked along to Les Invalides, where I’d solved a couple of wherigo caches. We didn’t bother with going inside though. It’s a big site and neither of us is really a museum kind of a person.
Notre Dame
The distance around to Notre Dame looked a bit much for walking all the way, so we decided we’d get a bit more value out of our all day metro tickets rather than walking the 3km between there and where we were.
We appeared out of the Cluny_–_La_Sorbonne_(Paris_Métro)Cluny – La Sorbonne Metro Station and headed north towards the river. Before crossing we thought we’d earned ourselves a short break. We sat for 20 minutes in a totally stereotypical streetside cafe. We got ourselves fleeced for the value of a coffee, a sprite and a piece of Apple Tart. They were nice though, and we needed a rest for a bit.
If we thought the queues and the security checks at the Eiffel Tower were long, those at Notre Dame were a whole new world of pain. We were really, really glad that we weren’t bothered about going inside. We’d have been there for hours. All we in fact wanted to do was to get a photograph of our own feet for another virtual geocache. There’s a metal disc in the floor which marks the point from which all distances to Paris are officially measured.
This was about as much as we could stand at this particular location. It was absolutely heaving.
Georges Pompidou and Les Halles
From here we made our way further north in the general direction of the Pompidou Centre and then on to the Forum Les Halles. This had been changed somewhat (OK, “completely”) since my previous visit. They added a massive new canopy roof over the top. Most of the insides seem to have been reworked too, and the character of the shops had completely changed. In the late 1980’s early 1990’s, when I previously visited, it was a series of little boutiques. It can now be described as being pretty much like any other shopping centre in Europe apart from being underground, and in Paris. It did have quite a cunning geocache for us to find though.
The Louvre
The next stop on our whirlwind tour was to be the Louvre museum, so we could peer at the big glass pyramid. Obviously, once again, we had neither the time nor the energy to actually go inside. It was also “heaving”. On the way there we got rained on, but it was quite a short shower, and when it finished we were greeted with a bright blue and near cloudless sky for the first time since we arrived in France. This made for a very pretty couple of photos of the wet cobbles with the sun reflecting off them.
Just along from here there were another couple of virtual geocaches ( VIRTUAL REWARD 2017-2018 : LE LOUVRE and Who is She? (Paris) ), which took our tally of virtuals for the day up to 6. The one at the Louvre requires you to stand in such a position that you can see all the way along the straight line from the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, across the Place de la Concorde, through the Arc de Triomphe and on (eventually) to the Grande Arche de la Défense.
The rest of the day from here got increasingly wearisome the longer it went on.
We’d sort of planned to walk through the Tuilleries and then along the Champs-Élysées towards the Arc de Triomphe, taking in some dinner on the way, before heading home. We were both getting quite tired and our feet were aching, but neither of us was hungry.
Home we go
As we were walking along the last bit of Champs-Élysées we decided we’d rather go and look for pizza a little closer to home rather than stay out in Paris. So we continued our slow hobble up to the Charles de Gaulle – Étoile station and grabbed an RER A train. This was much quicker than the RER C we’d taken in the morning, but dropped us off at the somewhat less than glamorous Cergy Préfecture station. Nothing especially wrong with it, I suppose. It’s just that it’s in the middle of a concrete monstrosity of high-rise housing.
Nearby was a little pizza place that we decided we go to for dinner. Aside from the lack of alcoholic beverages it was fine.
The walk back to the hotel was somewhat less than fine. The concrete high-rises were a bit of an urban jungle and both of us felt distinctly uncomfortable walking through them. When we did emerge onto a road it was one which couldn’t make it’s mind up whether to have footpaths. We blindly followed google maps and made a couple of probably quite dangerous jumps over concrete barriers to get to where we needed to be, and eventually we made it back to the hotel none the worse, albeit rather tired. We’d been out of the hotel for 13 hours, so all we wanted to do was to get some sleep.
As we drove back out past this road in the morning we saw where the footpaths actually went………
Anyway, over the course of the day, the geocaches we completed were :
The Sketch
Day 4 promised to be slightly more special than the other days, and so it proved to be, in some ways which were expected and some others which most definitely were not expected. We were planning to cache around Hérouville, but we had an early morning appointment in Paris before that.
Driving to the City
The first special activity involved what we pretty much always do on a Saturday morning – Saturday is parkrun day. The nearest one to us was at Bois de Boulogne – a mere 25 km away on the outskirts of Paris. The drive there involves a brief flirtation with everyone’s favourite road, the Boulevard Périphérique, which is somewhere in between a massive car park and the world’s largest dodgem attraction. Even at a shade before 8am on a Saturday at Easter it was a bit frantic. At least I’d pre-planned the route and knew what signs to look for and which lanes I’d need. I had Ami operating Google maps on my phone, just in case I made a wrong turn at any point.
Anyway, Google reckoned it would take much longer than it actually did. We were there sat in the car park at just after 8am. We sat there for quite a long time wondering when the run director would actually turn up. I hadn’t checked average statistics for this parkrun to see how many people normally turn up. If I had done so I would have been less worried about the apparent lack of competitors and marshalls at 8:45. A few people did eventually appear, and so a parkrun was duly constituted and deemed to be quorate.
Wot, no French People?
The French apparently abandon their capital city at the first sniff of a public holiday. So we were entirely unsurprised to find most people speaking in unaccented English, or at least, in accents belonging to native English speakers. There was a family from Poland, a handful of French, and probably half of the field were British. The field was 48 strong by the way, including the tail runner, who had a North American English accent. One of the British groups was a family from Leicestershire who normally run our “adopted second home” parkrun at Conkers. How weird is that ?
The run itself was good – the course is quite wide and has no significant gradients, so despite having spent three full days on our feet we managed to finish in a very creditable 29:30 with 32nd and 33rd places. We set off quite fast but Ami soon realised that her head was making promises that her legs couldn’t deliver. The post-run cafe was a small roadside affair on the other side of the Bois de Boulogne. It’s fair to say that the place would struggle to cope with demand if any more people went.
Wot, no khasi?
When we got back to the car it was approaching 11am and we had some caching to get on with. So we drove back to the hotel for a quick change of clothes and to pick up the caching gear. While we were there we encountered one of the unexpected surprises for the day. The toilet in our room wasn’t refilling properly or flushing. That, unfortunately, required a visit to reception to sort out. Unfortunate in the sense of it taking some time, but not in terms of the outcome.
The guy on duty came upstairs for a look, and poked and prodded a couple of things before deciding to offer us a different room. I said fine so long as they had a similarly sized one on the same floor. He went to sort it out. Ami and me stuffed everything into our suitcases and got ourselves out of the one room. When the receptionist did return he placed us into the room right next door. All we had to do was to wheel in all the bags and then jump straight in the car to start the caching. Result !
Shall we go caching then?
For caching we parked up in Hérouville to attack the difficult looking southern loop. Part of the reason why it looked difficult was that it involved a long stretch at the end that we’d already walked along on Thursday. There was no way to avoid walking that section again. I’d checked the bus timetable and there weren’t any on a Saturday. We’d just have to live with it.
As an interesting, and slightly strange, anecdote, the place I parked my car for this walk, the Château d’Hérouville, was the primary location for the recording of David Bowie’s album Low in 1976. Elton John recorded three albums there, including Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and the Bee Gees recorded two of the three big-selling singles from Saturday Night Fever there too.
Our walk took us on a big clockwise route through woodland down to Auvers-sur-Oise and then back across slightly more open but still hilly countryside back through Ennery and Livilliers, where we ran out of caches. We’d also run out of energy, enthusiasm and drinks by that point, but had a mandatory walk of nearly 4 km to get back to the car. By the time we had finished that stretch we were both completely exhausted. We’d walked 20.25 km in just over 6 hours and had found 74 caches. Thankfully we now knew that the drive home was quick and easy, and we took the opportunity to stop at a garage on the way back and buy drinks for the following day.
Dinner was an in-hotel affair again, although I have no recollection of what we actually ate.
The Reckoning
The Sketch
Day 5 began with the usual hotel breakfast. We were contemplating the fact that we’d completed 318 of 602 caches on the series. Technically, we’d used less than half of the available time. We’d had two “short” days and one full day. We still had two full days and as much of Tuesday as we needed to see how many more we could do. We were planning to head to Jouy-le-Comte, and I started to think about the serious possibility that we could complete them all by Monday night. This would leave Tuesday for a relatively lightweight day of driving (and of not wearing walking boots anymore).
To achieve that we were going to have to do at least 282 caches in 2 full days. Whilst that may seem a lot, it’s worth remembering that so far we’d had some crackers so far. We had one day where we’d made 120 finds despite not starting until 11:20 am. And another where we’d made 129 finds whilst taking an hour off in the afternoon and giving up early (ish). This lead us into some feelings of confidence. A day in which we found 150 was more than possible. We still had big areas of the circuit where the caches were all grouped in tightly packed circular walks. Jouy-le-Comte was one of these two.
So we set out with the specific intention of caching until we fell over. The more we could get done on this day, the fewer we’d have to do on Day 6 and hopefully we could make an empty day for Day 7 (aka “going home” day).
Off we go
We also set out a bit earlier than we had done on previous mornings, as we’d got a little bit further to drive and didn’t quite know how long it would take to get there.
We started in the village of Jouy-le-Comte, which is apparently so insignificant that it doesn’t have a wikipedia page of its own. It does have quite a pretty church though, as do most of the settlements in the area.
Our first cache was signed at 9.25 am. There was a run of about 15 caches up a drivable road with a car park at the top. Much of the road was through the village, but it was the morning of Easter Sunday, and there were so few people around that I didn’t think we’d be causing many problems.
The first 15 took us about 45 minutes. Then it was on with the walking boots for our first little stroll of the day. This first walk was 7.5 km in length, took a shade over 2 hours, and resulted in 30 more finds. Not bad so far then. 45 finds and only just midday.
Next we parked up at the church in Jouy-le-Comte to complete the “bottom half” of the caches on the eastern edge. On this walk we spent a further 100 minutes, walked 6 km and found a further 21 caches. Happy days – not yet 2 pm and we’d already found 66 caches. The day was going pretty well by most measures. We decided to celebrate our success for 10 minutes by resting our feet. We had a drink and attacked our last remaining pack of chocolate mini-eggs we’d bought from the UK.
Mopping Up
From here it was a question of deciding which areas to focus on. We’d got a whole raft of caches on long walks in the areas of Valmondois and Nesles-la-Vallée, and a bunch of potential drive-bys and short walks to the north of Nesles-la-Vallée, leading back to Frouville and Hédouville. And then there were still a bunch of drive-bys to the west of Valangoujard. Decisions, decisions !
Our choice was to spend the rest of the afternoon “mopping up” some of the scrappy-looking areas, and to leave the two substantial-looking walks for Monday. This meant we headed into Nesles-la-Vallée and got ourselves into drive-by mode. In the next 3 hours or so we completed a further 40 caches alternating between drive-bys and short walks. After this we drove into Frouville to attempt a more reasonable lengthed walk from there.
We’d neglected the fact that it was evening on a religious holiday. As a result, the car park at the church was full. Ho-hum! There was another one a bit further along the way. This was the starting point for our third (and final) significant walk of the day. This one was 4.7 km long, took 90 minutes, and yielded 16 finds. Quite slow by the standards of the week, but we were getting a bit tired.
Enough
When we got back to the car it was around 7 pm, and we knew we had at least another hour of reasonable daylight left, and we felt that at usual rates for drive-bys we could get another 20 finds in. We eventually completed 22 more and still had some light left, but decided we’d done enough for one day, so we gave up and drove back to the hotel.
When I got the day’s activity loaded up onto the PC I was surprised to discover we’d managed a frankly ridiculous 151 finds in the day, 150 of which were from the MTVO series. By my reckoning that meant a fairly easy sounding 134 to find on Monday.
The Reckoning
Isn’t it pretty when you show them all on a map like this? Jouy-le-Comte is on the right-hand side of this map by the way. The name is hidden under all the smiley faces.
The Sketch
Our final full day found us needing a mere 134 finds to complete the series, a number which prior to this trip I would have regarded as a very significant challenge, however in the context of this trip 134 finds would be a short day compared to the previous one. 17 fewer caches than yesterday, that’s nearly an hour, that is. Most of the remianing ones were in and around Valmondois.
I didn’t think we had time to be complacent about it though. We were going to the location furthest away from the hotel, and were attempting a group of caches whose layout looked, well, unappetising compared to earlier days. Lots of heavy walking across fields and up and down hills. If we were going to finish we were going to have a busy day. We’d need to walk our way around roughly 95 caches and then finish the remaining 40 in the car. That’s as many as we’d walked on any day on this trip. Plus, this 95 were over worse terrain than the previous 95. At least the weather had stayed good though.
In Valmondois
We started down in Valmondois, parking at a “backup” location after discovering that my chosen car park was full. This area started off through urban landscapes on an old railway line. It then headed off up some hills and out onto the agricultural plateau where most of the series was to be found. We had a bit of a problem at the start because the GPS was playing up. I eventually realised that this was because the memory card had come slightly loose. This happened during the process of changing the batteries at some point since the previous evening. Once that was fixed, we were rockin’ and rollin’ again.
On this first walk of the day we covered 10.75 km in 3 hours 20 minutes. We found 42 caches while we were at it. Quite slow going by the standards of this trip, but some of the terrain around Valmondois was harsh.
From here there was a group of about 9 caches that could be done in the car. We did those next, if only to give our feet a rest for half an hour.
Nesles-la-Vallée
When back from there we parked up at the side of the road in Nesles-la-Vallée (to the north of Valmondois) to have a crack at what was hopefully the final significant walk of the holiday. This walk was 9.6 km long, took 3 hours and yielded 41 finds. When we got back to the car we were sick of walking though. Both of us had quite a lot of pain in our feet. We really just wanted to get the walking boots off in favour of something more welcoming. Still, we’d finished 92 of the 95 caches in the area. And we’d established that the remaining 3 down here could be done in the car, which is what we then did. Excellent. 95 of 134 made and it was only 4:30 pm. The game was still very probably on.
Next we had a short series of walking-only caches (7 only) to complete in Vallangoujard and a further 32, all of which appeared to be by the roadside and hence possible to complete in the car.
Drive-Bys
The first 6 drive-bys were down a fairly unsafe bit of two-lane road where I really didn’t enjoy stopping. We then did the 7 that required a walk, leaving us with 28 more to do in the car. These started in Vallangoujard and headed westwards along a pretty quiet road, and the first 15 of them proved to be very easy to do again. Excellent – only 13 left.
The final 13 were more troublesome again because they were along a two-lane road that had a few blind corners and not many places to pull a car off the road. Some of them were not as close to the road as we would have liked. And it started raining. But finish them we did. 602 caches on the series plus assorted others that we were passing anyway, completed in 3 full days and 2 long halves. That’s pretty impressive, in my opinion.
We didn’t celebrate much whilst in the car though, because we’d got a bit wet. We really just wanted to get back to the hotel for a final night of logging caches, eating unlimited puddings and packing dirty clothes into suitcases. I think we got back to the hotel just before 7:30 pm. We set ourselves an aggressive target of showering, packing the cases and getting into the restaurant inside an hour. It took 20 minutes longer but the restaurant staff were happy and completely unsurprised to see us again.
The Reckoning
by Kevin | Feb 26, 2018
A full day together in Tokyo after the previous day’s exertions.
We started with a trip to the Starbucks over the road for a relaxed breakfast, because you can’t rush into stuff the day after a marathon, and then we headed off for our first tourist job of the day. That makes it sound like there was a plan, when to be honest there was no such thing. It was a “winging it” sort of a day. The first tourist thing of the day was to take the free lifts up to the observation desk of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, which was just up the road from the hotel. It took a little time to find the correct access point, but we got it eventually. This part of Tokyo definitely exists in all three dimensions and it’s very easy to find yourself on totally the wrong level for getting where you’re going. There’s more than one road level, for a start, and then a number of levels of walkways, underpasses and tunnels.
Once we found the right door I was expecting there’d be a bit of a queue, but we obviously got lucky because there really was nothing. I think we waited less than five minutes before getting in the lift. At the top you get a pretty impressive view across the city and in particular of all the tall buildings around the Shinjuku area. We spent a while up there walking around and taking photos before spending ages in one of the souvenir shops but leaving empty-handed as they wouldn’t take a credit card. Ho hum !
From here we decided to go for a bit of an exploratory walk through the suburbs to the Meiji Shrine, which proved somewhat entertaining. There were a couple of stretches where I felt a bit out of place, although I suppose they are probably fairly used to European tourists in most of Tokyo. We found a couple of caches though this section and ended up entering the park where the shrine is located from the north side.
Whilst still being rather busy, this one didn’t feel as busy as the Sensō-ji site that we’d visited on Saturday. Maybe that was partly because it was Monday and partly because it’s a lot more spread out. Wikipedia says that the site covers 70 hectares. The actual shrine forms a very small part of the site, most of which is taken up by trees of some 365 different varieties.
The shrine is apparently popular as a place to get married, and we were treated to a wedding procession through the outer courtyard while we were there.
Next we headed southwards in the general direction of Shibuya so we could go and have a gander at the famous scramble crossing, which is supposedly the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world. It was very interesting to sit and watch for a few minutes from the nearby Starbucks, and quite an experience just to cross it a couple of times.
By this time it was mid-afternoon, so we figured we’d probably got one more location in us before nightfall. Sadly we’d failed to pre-plan and so were unable to go to the Imperial Palace, which is closed on Mondays, but we headed off in the general direction anyway so we could go take a look at the impressive outside of the Tokyo Station and its surrounding tall buildings. From here we wandered over to the edge of the Imperial Palace grounds and then southwards towards the Kasumigaseki Station, from which we’d ridden home the previous evening. This gave me a chance to grab a handful of geocaches that had been inaccessible the previous day when the marathon was on.
For dinner we found a small Japanese restaurant in the underground shopping centre that had more or less become our kitchen area for the trip, and then we settled in for an early night, as we’d got a flight at a ridiculously early time the following morning which meant us leaving the hotel practically before we’d gone to bed.
The flight home was uneventful apart from being a little late getting off the ground, and we spent most of the rest of that day watching bits of Russia and northern Europe drift by beneath us.
It had been an interesting and enjoyable trip and, much as expected, the kids were quite happy to see us when we got home.
by Kevin | Feb 25, 2018
Our third day in Tokyo, and the day that we were going to spend apart from each other, as Kas went off to run the marathon and I had a somewhat less taxing walk with a bit of geocaching planned.
Kas got up and set off quite early, and I decided to get moving fairly early too, if only to avoid getting pinned into Shinjuku until the runners had all left. The start of the marathon was literally a couple of hundred metres from our hotel and they’d been closing off various bits of road to traffic since well before daybreak.
I didn’t bother with breakfast anywhere, as I wasn’t really hungry. I sort of just wanted to go out and see how many caches I could find in Tokyo in the amount of time it took Kas to do the running. I’d got maybe 35-40 on the radar.
I began my walk by skirting around the north end of Shinjuku Station and after a quick find I began to get hit by the day’s first problem – poor GPS signal. Fair enough, there’s a lot of tall buildings around this area, so there’s not really a very clear sight of many satellites, but still, huh ? At the first cache I tried I gave up with the GPS when I was a good 50 metres away and just used the map and hint. At the second one I tried I wasn’t so lucky – I couldn’t get the GPS to settle at all and the hint didn’t give much clue as to where I should go. Likewise the third.
At the fourth I was supposed to be getting some information from a piece of street furniture, I think, but I couldn’t make sense of it and couldn’t get an answer. So that was a waste, and by this time I was starting to get a bit irritated by the whole idea. I really should learn to set lower expectations when I’m caching in towns and cities. It’s always hard work.
Anyway, I eventually found one and then picked my way down to the Shinjuku Gyo-en National Garden, where I found another whilst waiting at the gate for it to open.
The next half hour was spent rather in frustration as I tried to follow my way around a multi-cache but kept getting lost as the information trail just seemed to disappear about three-quarters of the way in. I tried three times before giving up. The gardens were pretty though.
And from here, then began the second major problem of the day – missing caches. Now I know that urban ones can be hard to find, but the particular problem here seemed to be that at least a third of the caches on my radar were known not to be present (from multiple DNF logs and/or disablement) and a third more had at least a couple of DNFs or were in areas with tall buildings. A consistent lack of useful hints wasn’t helping either.
By now it was getting on towards lunchtime (or at least it was lunchtime if you hadn’t had breakfast) so I decided I’d park my butt for a while and contemplate what was going on. I stopped at a small outlet belonging to a local coffee chain and had myself a sandwich and a latte flavoured with honey, which was nicer than it sounds. I was alongside the main road running through Yotsuya, alongside Yotsuya-sanchōme Station, I think. To be honest, if I hadn’t been trying to fill time before meeting Kas I’d have given up and gone home. I wasn’t really enjoying the caching very much and the walk along here was the part where I felt the most uncomfortable all weekend. Not unsafe, but I definitely felt like stood out a bit.
I progressed my way through a couple more suburbs in the general direction of the Imperial Palace and found myself at Kudanzaka Park, where I found another couple of caches that I couldn’t find, as it were. One was inaccessible due to building works (but wasn’t disabled) and one I just couldn’t find.
I was now really despairing at the state of caches in the city and time was starting to march on, so I started to progress my way through the Imperial Palace grounds, initially failing to find a cache again at the Nippon Budokan, and then entering the proper “palace” bit. I had to get to the far side of the palace from where I was to get to where I’d agreed to meet Kas, and even this proved frustrating as I didn’t have a map of where all the paths went and I ended up going a bit around the houses (or the gardens, to be accurate).
I eventually came out onto a main road where I just had to walk a mile or so to meet Kas. There were plenty of caches on the way but I felt I was out of time, so I left all of them apart from a wherigo that I was walking right past. I did start to wonder about how come the grass everywhere seems to die back and turn beige-coloured in the winter.
From the caching perspective it had been an appalling day. I’d been caching for the best part of 7 hours and had found an extremely disappointing 9 caches. I suppose I’d done a nice long walk through a strange city and had gone to a number of places that a non-cacher would never go to, but it didn’t suppress the overriding feeling of disappointment.
What did help was sitting in the gardens at the end of the marathon course and Kas turning up with a bit of a limp, a massive medal and a smile. It had been a decent run which had been fast enough to make a “good for age” in Chicago for 2019, so that’ll be up next.
It proved to be a very easy hole-in-one trip home from here by taking the Marunouchi Line from Kasumigaseki to Nishi-Shinjuku and then plodding along the subways to the hotel.
For dinner we took a short walk at street level to the place we’d been a couple of nights previously, and this time we ended up in a Japanese speciality cafe/bar, where we were treated to a veritable feast of hand prepared foods accompanied by some very nice locally made beer. The food was generally “tapas” style, but that worked well because they served things as soon as they were ready and we shared all of the dishes between the two of us.
Our night of sleep was ever so slightly disturbed by what felt like a general shaking of the floor. It turned out that there’d been an earthquake which, had it happened 24 hours earlier, would have resulted in the cancellation of the marathon. Thankfully it happened afterwards. So we can now both describe ourselves as “earthquake survivors”, which is not something I was expecting.
by Kevin | Feb 24, 2018
Day 2 of our jaunt to Tokyo, or possibly Day 3 if you count the day we travelled over (which I don’t).
On the plan today we’d got a bit of tourism. We wanted to go see a few things while we were here but obviously Kas wasn’t over-keen on masses of walking, given that she’d be having to run 26.2 miles the following day.
We started off our day by grabbing some breakfast in a nearby Starbucks while we agreed some sort of a plan.
Our first choice location was the rather large Tokyo Skytree, which is apparently the second tallest inhabited structure on the planet. You can’t quite get all the way up it, but you can get to a rather dizzying 450m above street level.
Anyway, to get there from our hotel we took the subway tunnels to join the Toei Ōed Line underneath the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building and caught a train to Kuramae Station. From here we needed to change for the
Toei Asakusa Line, which looks very easy on the tube map but in practice is a little more difficult. There are, in fact, two completely separate stations with a 350m walk down the street in between them. It must have been the first place in Tokyo we’d been to where there wasn’t a network of underground tunnels. Anyway, we found it eventually and caught another train to Oshiage Station, which according to wikipedia is “adjacent to the Tokyo Skytree Complex”. That’s a euphemistic way of saying that the station is at the bottom level of a seemingly 50-floor shopping centre that you have to walk through to get to the Skytree at the top. I exaggerate somewhat, but it did take a while. No doubt if you’re well versed in such things you can find a way of walking round the outside and straight into the tower.
The first rather excellent thing we noticed about the Skytree was that they have a separate entrance for foreigners. It probably costs more than being a local, but it means you get to jump the big queue and just queue up behind however many other non-Japanese were trying to get in. In our case that was about 15 people only, whereas the locals entrance was stacked up miles out of the door and around the corner. I’m all in favour of a bit of Tommy-Tourist bonus when you’re on a tight timescale, even if it does cost a bit extra. We were in the lifts inside 10 minutes of entering the building.
The lifts didn’t seem like lifts at all. There was a vague sensation of travelling upwards but nothing like what you expect for a lift that takes you up 350 metres in a minute. First stop on the lift is the platform at 350m, which is one that everyone has to go to, It was kind of busy when we got there so we proceeded pretty much straight away up to the second lift and the 450m platform, which was a little quieter and also quite a lot lighter. The floor on this level is a lighter colour. There’s a gently sloping walkway around on this platform which brings you out at a point a couple of floors above where you exit the lift. Most confusing if you’re not expecting it. In between those floors, and walking around the platform, you get some impressive views in all directions around the city, and also a quick gallery of various bits of Anime artwork.
We should also have been able to see Mount Fuji from this height, but as with the whole of the weekend, the atmospheric conditions meant there was too much haziness to see even across the city of Tokyo, never mind as far as Fuji.
After we’d had our fill of high altitude we sat at the bottom (outside) and had a drink whilst watching people muck about on an outdoor ice rink. It was still quite cold, despite (or because of) the sunshine. While we were sitting down we discussed some route planning for our afternoon. We wanted to go over to the Sensō-ji, which appeared to be about a mile away on foot. Having come up on the train and been standing more or less still all morning we agreed that it would be good to stretch our legs for a while rather than getting on trains. Anyway, the nearest station to Sensō-ji seemed to be half a mile away, so we were going to have to do some walking anyway.
On our way over there we grabbed a handful of geocaches and took a few arty photos of things we were passing. We stumbled across a little oasis of calm at the Ushijima Shrine and then crossed the river to a fairly busy riverside walkway where Kas sat for a few minutes while I was rummaging in the undergrowth looking for tupperware.
Sensō-ji wasn’t far from here. We entered the site from the (less preferred) north side and meandered our way into a bit of a crowd. Well, I suppose it was mid-afternoon on a sunny Saturday, but it was really very busy with lots of people doing various kinds of temple activity, much of which seemed to involve buying small offerings and then giving them away or setting fire to them.
There was an interesting mix of styles of dress too, with quite a few people choosing to adopt some very traditional Japanese dress when making their visit here. I’m not sure if this was genuine or just something for the tourists, of which there were plenty of others as well as ourselves.
The basic form here is that there are several traditional shrine / temple buildings all immaculately painted in red with gold decoration. We didn’t go inside because neither of us is religious nor do we understand the particular habits of this religion, so it would seem a bit of an insult. However, there was lots of activity going on outside which meant that a trip inside didn’t seem necessary.
From the temple there’s a long walkway heading south which is flanked by rows of tat stalls selling souvenirs of varying degrees of rubbishness, at the end of which is a formal gate which was also home to a geocache. That one took a little while to find, especially given that it was really busy.
Once past that gate, one was essentially back out into the open again, and all that remained was for us to find a metro station to get home. This was harder than it seemed, but eventually we found the right entrance for Asakusa Station. Before climbing aboard, we took the opportunity to stop for half an hour to grab a sandwich and a drink. It was only mid-afternoon and we were ready for a bit of a rest, plus Kas had expressed a desire from here for not doing much more walking, and going back to the hotel.
The sandwiches were nice and then we picked our way back home by more or less retracing our morning journey back to Tochōmae Station.
I left Kas here so that she could walk through the underpasses back to the hotel while I went for a bit of a walk to find a few of the geocaches in Shinjuku, with varying degrees of success.
By the time I got back to the hotel it had gone dark, so we made a quick turnaround and then headed out for some dinner. We got about half a block along the road towards Shinjuku Station before spotting a pizza/pasta restaurant at street level. We ordered a simple pasta dish each and then had our first experience of being told we absolutely couldn’t leave a tip, and after that it was time for an early night, because Kas had got some running jaunt to be getting on with in the morning.
by Kevin | Feb 23, 2018
OK, so this was a fairly long day by most people’s standards, mainly because by most people’s standards it was actually two days, however there was no bed involved in the middle, and therefore in my mind it was just one very, very long day.
It began at home in Milton Keynes, but not very much of it was spent there as we were out of the house before daylight on our way down to Heathrow. As is normally the case with early starts, we stopped on the way out of town to grab a takeaway coffee.
We were early enough that the traffic on the M1 and M25 was tolerable, and we were into the car park at Heathrow in under 90 minutes from home. I now see that as a very reasonable amount of time. It used to take a lot less than that but nowadays it’s quite rare in my experience.
We were bound for Heathrow Terminal 5, the home of most BA flights from the airport. We had a direct flight into Tokyo’s older but now somewhat jazzed-up airport of Haneda on one of Mr Boeing’s very finest 777 aircraft. The flight promised to be mindlessly tedious though, in the way that 13 hour overnight flights are. It was only lunchtime, but it’s one of those flights that crosses a sufficiently large number of time zones that you can’t really figure out what time (or even what day) it is until the day you come home again.
While we were flying eastwards in daylight we managed to eat our way through some lunch and take a couple of not-too-bad photos of bits of northern Europe drifting by beneath us. I quite like the one of the Gulf of Riga that I’ve included here. Unfortunately, I also decided that a good way for me to get some sleep on the plane would be to drink a lot. It didn’t work. All that happened was that I got a monster hangover while we were only halfway across Russia and it took me until lunchtime to get rid of it.
So in the middle of probably the worst bit of my hangover we landed at Haneda at what was, for Japan, quite early in the morning – before-the-start-of-work kind of early. It was a first experience of Japan for us both, and I’m not sure either of us was really sure what to expect. I guess we sort of expected, in true stereotypical fashion, that getting through the airport would be smooth and ruthlessly efficient. It was. Or at least, it was until we missed a sign and descended a staircase into the wrong bit of the bus station, which meant we had to climb back up and down again to cross a road.
Haneda is serviced by a really rather excellent idea of a bus which runs directly to a group of large hotels in the Shinjuku area, which is where we were staying. We bought our tickets and got directed to the correct bus stop by a nice lady in the arrivals hall, and then queued up for all of 10 mins before our “Limousine Bus” arrived. The bus itself didn’t have any luxury features that might make you think it was a limousine, but after brief stops at each terminal building it then proceeded directly through the Tokyo morning traffic to Shinjuku Station, a bus terminal, and a handful of nearby hotels (of which ours was the final stop). It took about an hour, I guess, but it was brainless and easy and not very expensive.
Our hotel was expecting us to arrive, which is always handy, but wasn’t expecting us to arrive quite so early. It was only 9am after all. Our booked room wouldn’t be available until 3pm, but they said if we didn’t mind upgrading our room (to a category where they’d got some available ones) then they could let us have a room at 10:30 (ish). We decided to go for it, partly because “holiday rules apply” and partly because we had other things to get done during the day, some of which required rearrangement of the content of the bags we were carrying. This left us with just over an hour to kill and a need for some breakfast, so we made our first (of many) visits to the Starbucks over the road. They had a familiar selection of coffee based beverages and some quite unfamiliar looking cakes and pastries. The chocolate chip scones were nice.
While we were in there we noticed a few other Europeans who were obviously there for the same reason that Kas was, and we took the opportunity to ask one couple how easy it was to get to the expo site. We needed to go there to get Kas’s number and she wanted to do it on the Friday so that we could have a full day of tourist activity on Saturday. It turned out to be quite easy from a logical perspective (one metro and one overground) but a little time consuming.
That’s all by-the-by though. First of all we had to go check into our hotel room. Our room was of the “superior” category, whatever that means, and was on the 19th floor, about halfway up, and had a nice view out in the general direction of where the marathon would be starting. All very nice apart from the push-back wood-and-paper screen thing that separated the sleeping area from the bathroom. It was possible to push the screen back whilst in the sleeping area such that you could see someone in the shower or bath (but probably not someone on the toilet). Weird. But enough of that. The room was big enough, clean, warm and had comfortable looking beds which we were both looking forward to trying out later in the day.
Before that we had the adventure of getting to the expo site in front of us. This involved getting the Toei Ōedo Line from Tochōmae to Shiodome and then the Yurikamome on to Kokusai-tenjijō-seimon. The only annoying part really was the fact that you had to buy a separate ticket as the two lines are operated by different companies. The Yurikamome is quite entertaining, as it’s an above ground line that’s essentially rubber-tyred vehicles running on concrete guideways. It’s driverless too and it goes over the fairly large and impressive Rainbow Bridge.
The expo was at the Tokyo Big Sight and it was fairly busy by the time we arrived. Unlike some other marathon expos Kas has been to, this one had most of the gory parts happening in a closed area that couldn’t be accessed by non-runners. I’m not really one for browsing round such things anyway, so while Kas had a good old expoing session I went out for a bit of a walk and a few geocaches. Well, Japan was a new country for me both in physical and geocaching terms, and Kas was kind enough to give me a good two hours of free time in an area that had quite a few caches nearby. The walk around here was also my first experience of being out on the street, I guess. This area was all perfectly easy to understand from the perspective of a European with no knowledge of Kanji (nor of Hirigana and Katakana). Everything is written in multiple languages on all the road signs, much like they are in Singapore, including some very Latin looking script. Anyway, I had my GPS, so at least I’d always know where I was even if I didn’t know where I was going.
My walk took me down onto what I think it as artificial island with a ferry terminal on the end. Well, I know it was an artificial island. I’m speculating about the ferry terminal part. Natural islands don’t have shorelines that are perfectly straight. Anyway, I digress. The walk down this part was not really one of Tokyo’s tourist highlights, but it did yield a handful of caches in quick order in a location that was fairly free of other people. By this time also the sun had come out and I was wondering why I was wearing quite so many clothes.
Once I’d finished the ferry terminal I walked down the artificial island that has the Tokyo Big Sight on it. There were a handful more down the side of this one, although a couple of them seemed to be missing.
This took me up to my assigned meeting time with the boss, and we duly met up and made our way back to the hotel via the par-two train system again. By the time we got back it was very nearly dark, which means we’d been out of bed for about 30 hours, but we still needed to sort out some dinner for the evening. We got all showered and cleaned up and went for a look at the various hotel restaurants, assuming that they’d be horrendously over-priced, which they duly were. This lead us to take a stroll up the street and discover an interesting feature of the Shinjuku area, namely that there’s a layout of streets at the top that cars and buses go on, and then there’s a layout of underground tunnels, subways and shopping malls (with restaurants) that are completely hidden from street. We walked into one random shopping mall and were greeted by a number of different restaurants offering a variety of different cuisines and all at somewhat lower prices than the hotel. They gave us reassurance that we’d be able to eat reasonably well throughout this trip without getting fleeced.
We chose a Thai restaurant and treated ourselves to a one-course quick meal, which was very nice indeed, before retiring to the hotel for a large quantity of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Before that we managed to raise the energy to take a few photos of lit-up skyscrapers out of the hotel window.
By the time we made it to bed we’d probably not seen a bed for 32-33 hours. I call that a long day. But definitely only one day.
by Kevin | Aug 26, 2017
Today was the day for going home. Boo. hiss, and grumpetty-grump, and all that. Our two weeks by the seaside had been rendered down into a large collection of memories and photos, and a requirement to make one final journey in the trusty Volvo.
We didn’t quite go straight home though. We got a little side-tracked on the way to the airport.
A week and a bit previously, when we’d tried to do our “Gaudí” day (see Not the Full Gaudi/), we’d been unable to get into the Sagrada Familia as a result of us not having thought to book tickets in advance. So we decided it would be a good thing to do on the way home, as we were being chucked out of the apartment at 10 am but weren’t flying home until 5 pm.
We had an 11 am appointment at said massive, half-built church, but we were all ready to go quite early, so we loaded up the car a little after 8 am and carried the last sack of rubbish down the hill whilst stalking the carrier in the car. We’d done most of the rubbish clearance the previous night, on the way down to the restaurant.
We stopped for some breakfast at the place we’d stopped on our day of arrival (only on the other side of the road). This allowed me to disappear under a bridge to find a lurking geocache. Might as well. We were parked within 30 yards of it.
When we arrived in Barcelona it was relatively easy to find the Sagrada Familia itself, but a little more time consuming to find a car park. What we eventually found was an underground one beneath an apartment block which was available for public parking as well as residents. It was a bit tight getting in though. I got Kas to get out and confirm I wasn’t about to scrape the car on anything, and I wasn’t looking forward to having to get back out again.
We walked a block or so down to the Sagrada Familia and discovered that there was no option to get in earlier than our tickets said, so we were left with three-quarters of an hour or so to waste. We used it wisely by checking out some touristy artwork and finding a couple of caches in the park outside.
We’d booked the self-guided tour with no tower-climbing, which meant we were free to pootle around at our own speed, reading the displays and admiring the architecture as we went. It really is a stunning building, and I’m sure it will be great when it’s finished. It’s weird to look at in some areas because some bits of it have been there so long that the rocks are quite significantly weathered, and these sit right next to chunks of rock that look like they were placed yesterday. The thing is constantly growing and developing too. It was considerably bigger and more complete than the picture I had in my mind from doing basic research in tour guides and on Wikipedia. The inside is particularly spectacular. OK, so I know that Gaudi’s fairly unique style is not appreciated by a lot of more traditionalist worshippers or students of ecclesiastical architecture, but my personal view is that if you’re going to believe in paying homage to an omnipresent super-being, this would be a pretty good place to be doing it. I can’t understand why people would rave over the massively detailed decoration on cathedrals in Milan, Rouen or Cologne and then lambast this one for being a bit over the top. Maybe I’m biased on the basis that it’s also a bit of a geological sensation, and I find that interesting. I find it inspiring the way that Gaudí wanted to use differing stones, as well as glasses, woods, coloured tiles and lights to impress the eye with a cascade of colour throughout the structure. And it is certainly unique. I have never seen another church that looks even remotely like this one.
Having had our fill of Sagrada Familia, we had a brief break to buy souvenirs and make some enormous bubbles before making our way to the airport, via a refuelling stop. We were hopelessly early for our flight but once we’d left the Sagrada Familia we’d all pretty much decided that the holiday was over, and it was time to go sit somewhere peaceful whilst waiting for an aeroplane.
We had a rather busy lunch of pizzas and pastas in the “pre-passport” zone before plodding through to our gate and sitting on the relevant airport spur watching planes going in and out.
There were a couple of huge ones parked up beneath us when we got there.
We also saw the King of Spain (no, not the King of Spin) land for his walk around central Barcelona with tens of thousands of others in memory of the people who’d lost their lives in the previous week’s terrorist attack on La Rambla.
Our flight home was nicely on time, but sadly Luton Airport wasn’t. It took flippin’ ages to get through, mainly because of a massive bottleneck in passport control.
The car was where we left it, but there was a bit of early grumping when we discovered one of the brakes had seized a bit and was making nasty clunking noises until the first time I really push the pedal hard. I suppose the car had been standing there for 15 days.
The house was pretty much where we’d left it, and Izzy and me made haste with the unloading while Kas and Ami very kindly went out to fetch curry and wine. It had been a long but very rewarding holiday, with many things achieved, including a bit of family bonding.
by Kevin | Aug 25, 2017
Today was a day of preparing ourselves for the inevitable end of the holiday and the looming reality that we’d have to leave the warm weather and the seaside behind.
The strain of it was all so much that we ended up doing nothing of any note. We offered the girls he option of a trip down to the beach, but neither of them could raise the energy and they were perfectly happy to stay at the apartment and play with their two new friends, both of whom were called Victoria.
I spent most of the day finishing off the book I’d started reading before mustering the energy to walk to the top of the hill to fetch a cache that had been winking at me all holiday. The view from the top was impressive, but possibly not good enough to offset the pain incurred when I brushed against a cactus and got covered in cactus barbs. I spent a chunk of the afternoon sitting very still while Kas pulled bits of cactus out of me with some tweezers, and I decided not to bother with attempting to recover either the shirt or the trousers. Both were riddled with barbs and I couldn’t be bothered to try to get them out.
In between all this, the four of us spent bits of time packing things away into our suitcases, as we had a fairly early start planned for the morning and we couldn’t afford much time for packing then.
By late afternoon we’d had enough, so we got cleaned up and took one final walk down to the seafront in Sant Feliu and revisited our favourite restaurant so far – called Meraki. It was excellent again.
The walk back up the hill would be our final time, and there was a lot of slightly miserable joking about everything being the “final” time. I certainly won’t miss that hill though.
We got tucked up in bed fairly early, as we’d got a long day in front of us.
by Kevin | Aug 24, 2017
We had a fairly slow morning before taking a leisurely drive towards Barcelona for our planned day out at Tibidabo.
We got there at around 11 am and then bought some tickets and went for a drink before attempting anything else.
After drinks, we went for a wander around the big church up there ( the Sagrat Cor ). The view from the top was quite impressive. Once down again we spent a frustrating few minutes searching for a fake padlock on a proverbial fence covered in padlocks. There was one that supposedly was a geocache. That’s a few minutes of our lives we’ll never get back.
After the church, we wandered around the upper levels of the park for a while before grabbing a seat and eating our lunch. We’d taken sandwiches with us, but the kids didn’t want to be limited just by that, so we found a restaurant where you were allowed to eat your own stuff too, and then we supplemented our apparently inadequate rations with some cold drinks and chips. Chips fix most things.
The lower levels at Tibidabo, below the church, are where all the rides are. The rides at Tibidabo were a bit variable, to be honest. None of them was very long and all bar a couple were a bit boring. I guess the park is designed for somewhat younger children. The Red Mountain rollercoaster and the log flume were OK but the rest of it was a bit dull, in my opinion, and because there were also some long queues for some of the rides it felt a bit like a waste of money. We did our best to eek it out for a while and had several goes on both the rollercoaster and the log flume before giving up and getting ice cream.
After this, we spent a little time taking in the view of the city from the top of the hill.
We drove back home at about 5 pm, which put us into the evening rush hour again.
Once at home we got changed quickly and walked halfway down the hill to the Guixols Cafe to have some beer and burgers. It was really rather good.
by Kevin | Aug 23, 2017
We’d written on the holiday plan for this week that we’d do a waterpark or similar during this week. The closest was Aquadiver in Platja D-Aro. It turned out to be cheaper to pre-book online to get one of their advance-purchase family deals, so we booked tickets the previous day and went there on this day.
The place was easy to find except for us missing the motorway junction on the first pass and having to drive a few miles in the wrong direction and then coming back again.
When we did get there the parking was a bit dodgy, but this seems to be endemic in Catalonia so there was nothing particularly surprising about it.
Entry via pre-paid tickets downloaded to the phone was easier than Easy Jack McEasy, so we avoided some quite long queues and decided to make a base camp under the trees and chuck our valuables into one of the lockers.
I have to say I wasn’t personally looking forward to this day as it’s something I didn’t think I’d really enjoy, but once we got into it a little bit it turned out to be one of my favourite days of the holiday.
We started off in the big wave pool (but didn’t stay long) and then headed to the big rubber-dinghy-slidey-thingy (name unknown). We went on doublers, which was a laugh except that Izzy came with me, so we weren’t exactly level in the water. It was a big slide though, so I’m not sure imbalance in the water was a big issue.
After this we moved up to the “business” end of the park, where there were some rather larger looking slides and rides. The queues were a bit variable all day, and after making the initial mistake of joining a long queue for something we fancied, we then started just going for the relatively short queues. This proved to be a much better option, although it did mean we went on the “kamikaze” quite a lot.
We took a lunch break at one point and then an afternoon ice cream break too, and ended up staying until all the rides had shut at about 6.45pm.
It was such a good day that I can’t remember what we did for dinner. Probably not very much.
by Kevin | Aug 22, 2017
Over the previous couple of days it had become more obvious that I was going to have to deal with a cracked tooth I’d picked up somewhere in the previous couple of weeks. I think a bit more had come off it, and it was pretty much at the point where it was grating really badly against my tongue. Something had to be done. Anyway, it wouldn’t be a proper holiday for us without at least one of us needing to see a doctor, dentist, or other medical practitioner. Normally that’s me, but occasionally it’s someone else.
So I googled for dentists nearby and phoned one first thing in the morning to find out the sketch. The sketch was that they could see me at 10:30. The dentist’s surgery was down on the harbour at Sant Feliu and it was very nice inside, albeit well hidden behind a very non-medical looking door to what I think was a block of apartments. The dentist decided she needed to hack out a bit of tooth and then fill it. The whole thing was done in half an hour and it cost me less than it would to have the same procedure done at home. In fact, it was so little that it was below the excess on the insurance policy, so I just paid it and wandered off without waiting for much in the way of documentary evidence. Because the plan for today said “Waterpark” I’d also scouted their website first thing. The Waterpark did good discounts on entry for people well organised enough to book online a day in advance, so I duly did that and then swapped “Waterpark” and “dad’s going caching” around on the day planner. Caching day then!
On the radar for this day was a long walk through woodlands up to a local viewpoint called Pedralta (“High Rock”) and then an equally long walk back down into Sant Feliu. Kas dropped me off at the end of a new and quite plush looking housing estate on the west side of town, through the back of the golf course I’d crossed on my previous caching trip ( see Santa Cristina ). In fact, it probably dumbs the place down rather to refer to it as a housing estate. I’m going to change my mind and go for “collection of substantial residential properties” – seriously, I don’t think they have a lot of poverty in the area. What they did have though was a lot of biting insects. Little scumbags. I got bitten twice while I was still switching the GPS on and finding a pen.
My walk took me through forested land in a downwards and then very steeply upwards direction, heading vaguely south and east. The caches were fairly close together for most of the way but they lacked hints and a few were well buried, so progress was a little slow. It was also very warm and the trees took away what little breeze there might have been. You get the picture. I was getting hot. Just as well I had an earth-shattering quantity of cold drinks in my bag then. The objective of all this uphill walking was the Pedralta, which, according to wikipedia, used to be the largest rocking stone in Europe. What there is up there is a little chapel, a big rock balancing precariously on a somewhat smaller one, and a big plateau with a viewpoint, from which you can see most of the surrounding area. It was a pretty decent view from up there.
Where the walk up had been all through forests and on rough paths, the route down followed a tarmac road, which meant that the walking became somewhat easier. The caches were a little easier to find too. I made pretty good progress back down the hill and soon found myself by the side of the new dual carriageway running round the western side of Sant Feliu. From here I followed cycle paths and wide footpaths around to the harbour (collecting more caches as I went). I eventually found myself at the old monastery in town (couldn’t find the cache there) and then found my way to the beach, where I found another cache and a place to buy ice cream.
There were two more caches at “our” end of the harbour that I grabbed on the way past and then walked back up the hill to rejoin the girls. The kids had decided they were having another “can’t be bothered” day, so the three of them had been at the apartment the whole time.
Tea for the evening consisted of a very welcome combination of pastas, sauces and beers. By the end of the day I’d found 43 caches. They were :
by Kevin | Aug 21, 2017
Today was the planned day for a bit of monk-on-a-mountain action.
It started (as ever) with Kas going for a run. She went early, which meant we were able to leave the apartment just after 9 am, albeit that we hadn’t had any breakfast.
We attended to the lack of breakfast situation by stopping at a random motorway service station. This also allowed us to fill up the trusty Volvo with some motion lotion.
Our target for the day was the monastery at Montserrat. We got there just before midday (we’d spent at least an hour having breakfast) and managed to find a parking spot quite easily, although at some distance away from the actual monastery. Meh! Walking is good for you.
Our first activity was to wander around some of the buildings trying to find a few caches and soak a few rays.
We gave up for a late lunch break at about 2 pm and had lunch in the onsite cafe. The food was actually quite good, which surprised me.
After lunch we adventured our way up the Funicular de Sant Joan for a walk around the top of the mountain. It was a warm day, so we’d already concluded we weren’t going to attempt any long stretches of walking, but up the top here we were able to trudge our way along a relatively flat path to visit a couple of little chapels. At one point, I had the direction arrow pointing to a cache but couldn’t see any way of getting there. At another point, we walked along a bit of path cut into an overhanging cliff and of a sufficiently small size that at least one of us couldn’t walk straight. And finally, there was one further cache at the top of what could be described as a rock staircase going upwards, if you were being generous. If not, then it would be better described as a bit rough. It was rough enough that Izzy didn’t fancy it, so Ami and I went over while Kas stayed with Izzy. There were some pretty spectacular views from up there though.
When we came back down to the bottom it was definitely time for an ice cream, which was consumed whilst sitting outside in the shade. After this Kas escorted the girls for the obligatory trip around the shop while I dashed off to find another cache that was some way below the incoming rack railway line.
By this time it was getting on a bit, so we did one final cache and photo stop at a rock outcrop near where we’d arrived in the morning, and then made our way down the road to the rather distant car park.
The drive back to Sant Feliu was duller than a dull thing. When we got there we made a quick stop to buy snacks and some things for breakfast before going back home to consume most of those snacks with some cold beer, whilst typing up the handful of caching logs that were due. It had been quite a long day.
While I had the PC out, I decided to pre-book some tickets to go around the Sagrada Familia. We decided we had time to go there in between leaving the apartment and needing to be at the airport on the day we were going home.
by Kevin | Aug 20, 2017
Every holiday has a day like this. The one where we don’t do anything of note.
The kids spent most of this one in the pool, while Kas went for a morning run and I spent much of the day doing the washing and staying out of the sun.
We had thought about going to the beach in the afternoon but then the girls decided not to bother, so we didn’t go.
In the evening we walked into Sant Feliu and found a nice cafe gastro-bar place which did excellent food and rather nice beer too.
While we were walking back up the hill to home we stopped in a bar to watch a bit of the Barcelona vs. Real Betis game on telly, but it was a bit dull and we’d missed the only two goals. On Saturday evening we’d toyed with the idea of buying tickets to go and see the match, but by the time we got onto the website it was going to cost about €65 a ticket to go, so we decided not to bother.
Such is life.
by Kevin | Aug 19, 2017
This day was our mid-point, not that we celebrated the event in any particular way other than figuring out how to use the washing machine at the apartments.
Kas went for a run, as ever.
The daily planner said we were having a day of not travelling far. We’d checked out a few local activity places and we decided to go for Parc Aventura just on the outskirts of Sant Feliu. It’s one of those places where you have to make your way across various assault-course things like tight-ropes, rope bridges and zip wires whilst being fastened to an overhead rope. However, unlike ones we’ve been to near home, this one is in the middle of some beautiful wooded hillsides, and with fantastic views back down over the town.
Parc Aventura has three or four different courses you can go on that have varying levels of difficulty. Kas, Izzy and Ami decided they were going round while I took the photos. They did the easiest route and then stepped up to the second easiest. Ami was going so quickly that she had time to step up to the third level too, which was good because it actually challenged her enough to have a scared moment.
When we’d finished all of this it was definitely ice cream o’clock. We ended up going all the way down into the sea front at Sant Feliu to find one. Thankfully we’d chosen to go on foot, which allowed me to swap my ice cream for beer.
For dinner we had a fairly simple affair of chicken in various forms accompanied by salads (in the kids’ case, you have to allow for ketchup being classed as a salad).
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I’d been toying with this idea before we arrived, and began to toy with again once we had a sniff of finishing the big series early. We’d already completed Somme, Oise, Val d’Oise and Paris on this trip, adding four more to my existing 16 from previous trips to France. So why not see how many more we could do on the way back?
