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 :
Today was a day in which the ladies of the house would be posting a blog page called “Not a Lot Happened”, or something similar to that. I had it pencilled in as a caching day, so I was far from inactive. Other things I was “far from” for periods of the day included “comfortable”, “home” and “enthusiastic”, although apart from “comfortable” none of the others lasted the whole day. I was mainly uncomfortable as a result of getting myself sunburned the previous afternoon. I’m not a clever bunny sometimes.
The day’s exploits began with Kas dropping me off on the far side of Santa Cristina, at some random junction with an old railway line that’s been converted into a biking trail and has subsequently been littered with lots of tupperware, spaced at approximately 180m intervals. Ideal. I was carrying a large quantity of beverages and some sandwiches in my bag as well as spare caches, pens and camera, so I was feeling a bit weighed down, and the bag was chafing against my hurty back, so I was a bit of a miserable bunny when I set off, but not miserable enough to stay at home and mope. The caching was quite slow going, partly because of the heat and partly because they were proving more difficult to find than the listed difficulty (in my opinion). My route took me along the old railway into Santa Cristina town (with a short diversion up a hill for three very creative caches). At one of these (just on the edge of town) I got spotted by the CO’s teenage daughter and she came outside to say hello and see if I needed any help. I didn’t, but it’s always nice to meet up with people.
As I passed through the town the first time I stopped to buy spare batteries. I think the rechargeable in the Garmin is starting to lose its oomph, especially when being used in bright light. There was a local newsagent that stocked the requisite. From here I headed around the south of the town (and the other side of the motorway) through a golf course and some new housing before ending up on the south side of Santa Cristina again. There was another series running along the southern edge of town, which proved to be good fun, before I walked back to the northern side to join the old railway line again. By this time I’d been out for 6 hours or so and had drunk plenty but not eaten much. I tend not to get hungry in hot weather. I’d found time for an ice cream though. Eventually I got back to the north-east corner of town, from where the railway line cut a sharp southwards turn towards Sant Feliu.
Ami had mentioned she might like to walk the final couple of miles into town with me, so I called Kas and they arranged to meet me at a little parking spot at 4pm, from where Ami and me would have about an hour’s walk to get home. She bought more drinks, which were very welcome.
The walk in was slower than expected, with a few more tricky ones and a couple of missing ones. We also overshot in an effort to get to the very end of the series, and then had over half a mile (mainly uphill) to get back to the apartment again.
By the time I got home it was well past 6pm and I was thoroughly exhausted. I’d found 75 caches in total, which is not a bad haul, but in UK conditions I might have expected to that many in two hours fewer. Nevertheless, it was a new overseas personal best for me, and I was (eventually) happy about it, especially once the multiple pastas and multiple beers we had for tea had settled in properly. The beer-based “rehydration” continued for some time, although I was alternating with non-beer too, just to make sure I got some benefit from all the drinking. The sunset was rather nice too.
I logged 75 geocache finds on the day. They were :
For our fourth day we decided to go and see what was on offer in the big city. Well, we sort of knew what was on offer, so on this day we decided to go and buy a bit of it.
We left home at around 10:15 after Kas had been for her run. The drive into Barcelona was pretty uneventful and Cynthia did a grand job of taking us along the main coastal road rather than through the middle of town. We parked up in a massive car park on the side of Montjuïc. I then decided I didn’t like where I’d parked, so I did another lap of the car park and parked somewhere I thought more acceptable. The problem was caused by the fact that it wasn’t obvious whether you were supposed to pay to park or not.
Anyway, back at the plot, on the top of Montjuïc there’s a castle which has been kept in pretty good order and which was surprisingly cheap to get into. We had a good old walk around the inside, taking lots of photos of both the castle and the views over the city. Of the three things I expected to be able to see from a high vantage point in Barcelona ( the Camp Nou, the Sagrada Familia and the Olympic Stadium) we only managed to spot one from up here. The Camp Nou was hidden in buildings and we didn’t know which direction it was in, and the Olympic Stadium is at the foot of the mountain hidden behind a load of tees. The Sagrada Familia stands out a mile from its surroundings. I think the surrounding buildings are being deliberately kept at a low height so that the cathedral stands out more.
After a while we found ourselves in an inner courtyard with what looked like a load of tea towels hanging out to dry. Turns out they are full of profound questions. The only question we had at this point was “is there a cafe in here?” and we found a member of staff to answer it for us. “No”, she said. “But there’s some vending machines in room 10 that contain cold drinks.” Well that’ll do us, because we had sandwiches and crisps in the backpack anyway.
Back outside after lunch we went for a walk around the path on the outside of the walls, partly for more views and partly to do a few geocaches dotted along the way. Some of these ones were actually there.
After walking all the way round we took the cable car down to the bottom (lazy, I know, but we’d have to come back up again at some point, and it’s part of the experience, innit ?
From the bottom of the cable car it’s about a third of a mile walk along flat ground to get to the Olympic Stadium. They very nicely keep this open at one end so you can enter on the mezzanine level and get some good photos around the stadium. There’s also a souvenir shop and a cafe inside. Excellent. Time for an ice cream then.
From the stadium we dropped down a level onto the big open spaces they built for the Olympics. There were a few more caches down there as well as a load of extra Olympic venues that were closed.
By the time we’d done all this it was getting a bit late, so we headed off home, via a drinks stop at the same service station we’d used on Saturday.
When we got home we decided to go out for dinner again and walked down into Sant Feliu, where we found a rather average pizza place after having wandered most of the town centre looking for something other than the rather samey tapas bars that the town centre is filled with.
The walk back up the hill was quite slow after a long day, and once we got home Kas and Izzy went straight to bed while Ami and me sat up for a while reading.
“If you’re going to have one, have a big one” is what I often say. I’m not sure why, but to be honest that’s not important right now. I do say that, and I say it quite often. By the normal scale of things, this was the very biggest of the big. A new personal best, in fact. I’m not sure I was planning for it to be a new PB, but it was a nice summer day and the walking (and caching) at the start was fast and furious, albeit without Vin Diesel. I’d returned to the site of previous monster days for a walk around the villages of Orwell and Eversden.
There was so much caching involved that there’s not a lot I can say about the day. I didn’t take my camera and generally didn’t hang around at any point during the day.
On the radar were (at least) the Eversden Extravaganza and Orwell Orbital series, with a few general outliers and a couple of drive-bys at the end to get me over the PB line.
Walking the Walk
It was a long old day.
I parked in Orwell in the same car park I used when I set my previous PB, and headed off through the Orwell Clunch Pit again. Anyone would think the local COs had simply replaced one series with another.
I bumped into a bunch of other cachers going the other way around at one point. I’d gone armed with a bunch of spares, having previously asked the CO if he minded me replacing the disabled ones, but in the end I didn’t have to replace any of them, because this bunch of guys started earlier than me and had already done the doings on all of the missing ones. Result.
When I’d finished adding everything up, I’d completed a pretty spectacular 114 finds. They were :
A quick dash through MK on a Friday night chasing after a puzzle series that appeared recently.
I’d got all of them solved by this time, and as the higher numbered ones are all in Tattenhoe, I’d also already been to find those ones. The lower numbered ones start all the way up near the concrete cows and run right through the heart of the town’s western side, through the near-continuous line of parkland from North Loughton Valley Park, through Wymbush, Loughton, South Loughton Valley Park, The Bowl, Furzton and Emerson Valley into Tattenhoe.
In essence, that’s a route where I needed someone to drop me off and then I could walk home. Kas provided the “dropping off” service and I set off walking at about 6:30pm. It was early July, so the light would be good until well after 9pm, I thought.
Walking Highlights
It was a pleasant night and most of the walk was though public parks, so it was all good. One highlight was undoubtedly having to skirt around a burst water main just north of Loughton. It probably wasn’t a highlight for people who had no water, or for people who had to come out and fix it, but it was a highlight to walk past.
Back at the plot, some of the caches were quite tricky to find and the series is quite spread out, which meant progress was a little slow. It was already after 8:30 when I reached the side of Furzton Lake, and by the time I left Furzton Lake looking for #19 it was getting distinctly gloomy. I DNF’d #19 and then exprienced a series of DNF’s before eventually jacking it in and going home. It really was getting quite dark, and I had some work to do to prepare for the following day.
So all in all I found 20 of this MK puzzle series on the evening. I’d done a couple of the others already (in lunch breaks) and was able to finish remaining one over the next couple of weeks. The full set were :
Ye Olde Survey Monuments (GC45CC) was a travelling geocache that was owned by outforthehunt. The cache moved around the country and you could be looking for a specific survey monument, pillar, surface block, rivet or bolt. Groundspeak decided in 2017 or so that this type of cache was no longer welcome in the fold, so the cache was archived, which is a shame.
Finding a YOSM was little like trigpointing (see www.trigpointinguk.com) except you could only log ones where the owner of the cache had randomly moved the YOSM cache to it.
It was moved a couple of times each month though, which was many more than I was ever going to get around to finding, especially seeing as the chosen locations were literally at all ends of the country.
At the point when the geocache was archived, I had attempted the following Survey Monuments in the series :
When it was archived the random trig pillar was in Cornwall, and as a result most statistics sites show me having found a cache in Cornwall, even though I haven’t.
I set out with the great aspiration of completing two of my missing counties on the UK & Ireland map. I’ve been five short of the proverbial “full English” for a couple of years now and haven’t really bust a gut to do anything about it. Well, today was the day. I was going to Suffolk, but only just, because I was going to its border with Essex. This would allow me to do two of the five, the others being somewhat further afield. It turned out to be a rather frustrating and disappointing day, for various reasons.
I had chosen a likely looking loop around the village of Glemsford but ended up parking on the rather pretty main street in Cavendish, partly because I’d had enough of driving and partly because there were loads of parking spaces as I was driving through. This would allow me to join my chosen loop at about three-quarters of the way around the numbered sequence. Before joining that loop there was a multi-church micro, for which I found the information but then didn’t find the cache. This sort of set the tone for the rest of my day.
Legging It
Once onto the chosen series, I ended up having a very similar experience to my bad day in Thrapston (see Thrapston Crapston). Maybe it was a bad day for the same reason. It was June, and we’d had lots of warm damp weather through April and May, so the proverbial undergrowth was now overgrowth, especially the nettles. Anyway, whatever the reason, I had a bit of a nightmare.
The length of the series and the number of caches available meant I was planning to do about 50 caches and then, if time allowed, maybe hack my way around another series which leads from Cavendish over to Clare. This second series crosses the River Stour and therefore takes you over into the northern edge of Essex. I didn’t get anything like that far though.
Glemsford
The Glemsford series was posted as about 8 miles of walking, which with 46 caches I would expect should take me around 4 to 4.5 hours. I actually walked nearer to 12 miles than 8, and I only managed to find about two-thirds of the caches. I think I DNF’d 18 of them – and by halfway around it was apparent that I was going to have a rubbish day. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to just give up and go home. Sadly, at the point where I lost the will to live I was as far away from the car as I was going to get. I basically figured I might as well keep limping my way around the series and attempting some of the caches, as I’d got to do the walking anyway.
So why did I miss so many? Well, the nettles and general undergrowth was one reason, for sure. Another was that many of the caches were in the category of “very small cache hidden on a very large item.” I struggle with these at the best of times. Partly because I can’t see the point of leaving a micro the size of my little finger end in an ivy-covered oak tree the size of Wales. Especially when that tree is a couple of miles from the nearest human habitation. I regard that as a near-criminal waste of a perfectly reasonable location for a large container. That’s a part of it.
Misrepresentation
But seriously, when I’m faced with the prospect of looking for a tiny cache on a massive ICT several times in a row my enthusiasm drops off quite quickly. I can’t say they are bad caches – to each his own – but it’s not what I like doing. And I personally wouldn’t put such a thing as a Difficulty 1.5 or 2, which most of these were. As far as I’m concerned, a Difficulty 1.5 should be bleedin’ obvious. A needle in a haystack should be at least a D3 so that you’ve got some warning. I specifically chose this series because it was 8 miles of low difficulty caches. Maybe they’re easier in the winter.
I also had an issue with the terrain rating on a couple of them. Two of the caches were tree climbs. One was rated as Terrain 4.5, which ought to need special equipment, but this one didn’t. The cache was only 15 feet up and the tree had branches the size of telegraph poles. The other climbing one was rated as Terrain 3.5, and therefore ought to be easier than the first. I spent ages looking for it on the assumption it should be lower down than the previous, but it wasn’t. Once I read the logs I picked up the hint it was higher. Indeed it was higher. I’d estimate probably 35-40 feet from ground level. And it was up a tree which was comparatively feeble looking, especially for someone of my size.
And then, to make matters worse, I dropped a full bottle of drink at one of the caches and so was left with only a few swigs to survive the back half of the walk.
Anyway, all of that sounds like moaning. And it is. But I’ll get over it eventually.
Back at the Motor
By the time I got back to Cavendish, it was time to head home, which meant that I’d have to find some other way of getting a cache in Essex. I didn’t want to drive to just one out of the chosen series, as that would be a waste, so I checked out the villages on the way home, as I’d noticed some signs for Essex on the way in.
Sure enough, Sturmer was just inside the Essex border. I missed the assigned parking for the cache I was trying to find (one from a short series) so I pulled off in the entrance to a long drive to weigh up my options. The easiest option seemed to be to find the cache I’d parked next to. I could see it from inside the car. So that was Essex coloured in. I might go do it properly one day, but for now it’s coloured in and I’m done with it.
Summary
So that was all a bit cack because I was out caching (i.e. not driving there and back, just the caching part) for nearly 7 hours, and I managed to find just 32 caches.
OK, so I was really, really struggling to come up with some kind of funny pun on a Kentish theme. Oast with the Most was the best I could come up with. Get Dover it! Deal with it! Don’t turn it into more Thanet needs to be.
It was kind of a short-notice decision anyway, so little time to plan anything funnier. In fact, I decided on Wednesday evening that I was going to an event in Kent on Saturday. That middle bit rhymes, you know.
Anyway, while we’re on the subject of things I always do, due to a lack of intelligence, creativity or enthusiasm (delete as appropriate, or just leave all of them there if you want), here is the obligatory picture of the QEII Bridge. When I crossed it on this day it was still dark (just) and it was still free (just). But more of that later, like in the next paragraph.
The plan for the day, such as it was, was to go to the 2017 Kent Mega event. It was being held at its normal location of The Hop Farm. It’s Kent’s premier family day out and home to the world’s largest collection of Oast Houses. Well, it’s Kent’s premier day out if you’re a cacher and you’re there on the day of the Kent Mega. It must be popular because it has brown signs up on the M20. Anyway, that sounds like I’m extracting the Michael, which is not my intent. It’s a great location for a caching event. It has masses of open space for eventing, caching and parking.
Drive Time
This particular part of Kent is at least 2 hours drive from home, even at the crack of sparrow-fart. So it was either going to be a full day of caching, or I wasn’t going to go at all. I took this decision at some point after getting home on Wednesday night. I’d been on a business trip to Munich. I had to agree the plan with Senior Management before deciding upon a more detailed schedule.
The event was scheduled from 10 am to 4 pm. So any serious caching would have to be done either before or after the event (or both). I opted for “before” with a decision to set off really early. I planned to do a load of caches, and then chill out a bit at the event in the afternoon. Any further finds made after visiting the event would be regarded as a Brucie Bonus. This meant an early start, and the early start meant I was going alone. Well, the kids have been out caching on more than one occasion in April anyway. And my late decision pretty much assured that all the other cachers I know had already made plans.
So, back at the plot, I was in my car at a very fresh (bordering on downright cold) 4:15 am, heading off down the motorway after first stopping to fill up both the car and myself. I didn’t really buy anything for lunch though, just breakfast and travelling snacks. Anyway, I’m not a great fan of the supermarket sandwich. It promised to be a long day, especially if you don’t like puns.
Short Circuit
My first stop for caching was a part of jazzyjessups’ COE series (“Counties of Europe”), which seem very new and were therefore likely to have been put out specifically for the event. These consist of a couple of hundred caches of varying types.
This first batch were mainly traditionals with a couple of multis thrown in for good measure. This first loop was just to the north of East Peckham, beginning at the redundant St Michael’s Church. I’d measured this stretch at something less than 4 miles and with a total of 22 caches. At normal caching speed for me, that means about 2 hours.
I think I signed my first log at just after 6:30 am. As it turned out, 2 hours was quite generous, and I was back at my car at 8:10 am, having found everything pretty much without incident. That’s a good start.
Long Haul
From there I drove down to another bit of East Peckham and set off on a somewhat longer loop, having done a couple of drive-bys on the way through. This second loop was supposed to be somewhere between 8 and 9 miles and contained 58 caches or so. In the end, it turned out to be 10 miles, mainly because I didn’t execute my walking plan very well. I found myself at the end of all the caches but with a mile to walk back to my car.
Anyway, by the time I drove down to the event site I’d got 82 finds on the board and it was only 1:30 in the afternoon. I now see how people manage to do silly numbers like 200 in a day. I’d made 82 finds in a little under 7 hours and if I’d pushed it I could have started at least an hour earlier. At this time of year on a sunny day, it’s tolerably light until after 8 pm. Maybe one day over the summer, huh?
At the Event
Back at today, I did a trad stuck to the back of a sign on the way into the event site and then meandered up to the actual event. The event tent was very quiet compared to some I’ve visited. I guess lots of people were out doing caches. Anyway, I bumped into the Happy Hunter at the chip van (sounds like a cue for a song), and took note of the locations of the lab caches. They were across a field and in a small wooded area. They were quite good fun, as these things go.
Then back at the chip van, I bumped into the Happy Hunter again, this time along with Miss Chief and Nigel. As they were having a quick snack I joined them for a bit. My little legs were ready for a sit-down, and anyway it was warm. The lunchtime queue had gone, so my restorative tray of chips with mayo and fizzy drink were served up in double-quick time.
Wherever I go, so does me go
Feeling somewhat refreshed it was then time to have a crack at the interesting looking Wherigo they’d placed at the event site ( Count to Five (HHCIB) ). The idea of this game is that you have to walk 100m or so out along each of five different footpaths trying to establish which is numbered 1, then 2, then 3, etc. Which number represents which path is determined randomly for each player as they start the cartridge, and at any point if you get your numbers out of sequence you have to go all the way through from #1 again.
I started off walking randomly with Miss Chief and Nigel and as it turned out, the first place we walked was #1 for me but not for them, as a result of which we then split up to complete the task. Having found my #1 I then had 4 shots at finding #2. It took me all 4 before getting the correct one, hence four trips back to my #1 point. When I eventually found #2 I then had a one-in-three choice for my #3 and as luck would have it I chose correctly first time. Three down, two to go. Except I managed to guess correctly for my #4 as well. So I was done apart from actually walking into my #5 zone to end the cartridge and get the cache coordinates.
I then stood around for 20 minutes extra waiting for Miss Chief and Nigel (OK, mainly Miss Chief) as they managed to get every single choice incorrect – 5 attempts at #1, then 4 attempts at #2, then 3 attempts at #3, etc. – each time having to return to their start point to work all the way through again. It was truly impressive to watch.
Too Early for Giving Up
By the time they’d done the event had officially finished, so we walked across the field to grab the actual Wherigo cache box and then returned to the event hall before parting ways. By this time I was sufficiently close to 100 finds that I couldn’t contemplate giving up. In fact, I was toying with the idea of heading for a new PB at 112 finds.
I left the event site and managed to find 5 more in pretty quick order. They were in effect just off the event site and were accessible by car. After this, I picked my way along towards Laddingford and a couple of puzzles that I’d managed to acquire the solutions for, but by this time I was rapidly losing my enthusiasm, even though it wasn’t even 6 pm. I reckon a keen person could have kept caching around here through all the hours of daylight and got very close to 200 finds.
By the time I got home and added up all the doings, I’d found 100 “normal” caches plus the 10 lab caches, for a very handy total of 110 in the day. I started driving home at 6pm because I’d really had enough for one day. I got home at about 8 pm, including a stop for Chinese takeaway on the way in. And I then proceeded to drink far too much wine far too quickly whilst typing up logs and waiting for Match of the Day to come on. The football was rubbish, but it had been a good day of caching.
Another trip up to the Peterborough area to continue my good month. In fact, it was already my best caching month ever, but on April 22nd there’s still at least two weekends of the month left, so why not go for a really big month. This time our target was a poshrule special called the Lutton Lambada.
On this trip, I was accompanied by Daughterus Minimus while the other one stayed with the good lady wife at home.
We made the obligatory stop on the way out to get breakfast and provisions before heading up the A421 and A1 to get to our destination, which in this case was the small village of Lutton. It’s one of those villages that isn’t really sure which county it’s in (and I suspect it has been in several different ones through the ages). It currently finds itself in Northamptonshire.
Shall We?
The series consists of 30 caches plus 4-5 extras over a fairly short course across countryside. Quite a bit of it was on roads, making the walking fairly fast. It was sufficiently fast that we were back at the car after just under 3 hours, having already found 35 caches. That’s quite a rate.
I had in my mind that we’d go and do another walking series after the Lutton Lambada, but in the eventuality, Izzy’s legs weren’t up to it. Instead we decided just to hack around in the car and clear up a load of the non-series “stragglers” that this area has dotted around its roads. We did a bunch of these before deciding fairly early in the evening to come back home again. A part of this was that Izzy had done enough, but the major part of it was that we needed dinner and I had an appointment with an aeroplane at Heathrow at some ridiculous time the following morning.
The caches we found over the course of the day were :
So this day was, fundamentally, our last one in Belgium. We had to go home. “Boooooo!” and “Hisssssss!” and all that. It started with a quick hack around Bruges and ended up at a big white nose.
We had some breakfast at the hotel again and then fetched some more money from the bank. The previous night’s restaurant didn’t take credit cards.
Which left the small question of what to do about caching for our final day.
Animation
One of the newly released series for the Mega Event was the “Cartoonwonders” series. It was over on the east side of town. It seemed to have 20 caches, designed to be easy for kids, with a few add-on extras for good measure. We didn’t really have time for a long series. To be honest after Sunday’s exploits we didn’t really have the legs either.
We parked up as per the guidance and began our quest for the day. The brief said it was pretty much hard paved all the way round, so we took the decision to not bother with walking boots. That proved to be a good decision. Relaxed feet and free ankles. Mmmm! I really must try getting some boots that actually fit my feet.
Back at the plot, we couldn’t find the first one. And we couldn’t find the second one either. But then we caught up with a local couple who literally lived right next to where we parked. They gave us some pointers on the first two. We then spent the rest of the series either walking with them, or catching up / leaving them. It was like a “with you, but not really with you” thing. We exchanged some pointers on the cartoon characters that were required for the bonus. They also helped us quite a lot (maybe we helped each other) with finding info for the accompanying multi. I would not normally have done a multi with 9 waypoints, but we were sort of walking around them anyway, so I thought we might as well.
The series proved to be much as described – flat, fast walking, and mainly paved. We thought we’d boo-booed with the bonus codes because we hadn’t been writing down the numbers associated with each character in each cache, but shhh, don’t tell the locals, you didn’t actually need any of them apart from the last, which was good. Anyway, it was located much where I expected. There was a suspiciously large looking gap between the first two caches.
To the Cachemobile
So with the add-ons that put us back at the car having done 21 caches in three hours. Slow going caused by the multi, but a decent series nonetheless.
After this we decided to revert to “drive-by” mode so that we could stop whenever we felt like it and scoot over to Calais for the train home. So we made our way around central Bruges for the last time and followed a quiet country road westwards, stopping every few hundred metres for another cache. We did about 16-17 this way before deciding that we better get a shift on. It was also time for lunch.
Lunch was had a the Mannekensvere services, and this time we included some fuel. I guessed I’d need €40 to fill up. I guessed a bit under, but at least that meant I didn’t have to go back into the shop to get a refund of the surplus. It was close enough anyway.
Cap Blanc Nez
From here we bashed our way across the motorways until we were at Calais and found ourselves with two and a half hours before our scheduled train departure. We had catered for this possibility by allowing for a bit of time up at Cap Blanc Nez, a cliff just to the west of Calais from which you can see Dover, and see the continuous trail of ferries crossing the Channel. It was a clear day, so the White Cliffs of Dover were clearly visible on the other side.
There’s a big monument on the top of the hill dedicated to the Dover Patrol, and this was the setting for a virtual cache. We did a few traditionals around here too before deciding we’d had enough and heading back to the Tunnel Terminal for the trip home. We arrived an hour before our scheduled departure but we couldn’t get on an earlier train. That proved to be a good thing because if we had got an earlier one, we’d have missed it as a result of having to queue for so long to buy something to eat in the terminal. Eventually, though we did get some food, and we did the necessary toilet trip, and dashed off to join the train loading lanes. As it happens we did get put onto one train earlier than we’d booked. That saved us a whole 12 minutes (according to the schedule).
Back in Blighty
Once we got to the UK again the drive home was boringly easy. That’s just how I like it to be, and we got back home at around 9:45 pm. Ami had slept much of the way back through England.
When I did all the final counting over the following days, having typed up all the field notes, we’d logged 208 regular caches and 19 lab caches, which I think is a decent return for four days. Ami was along mainly for the ride, so I didn’t do as much caching as I might have done if she’d not been there. To be honest, on the longer days of Friday and Sunday we’d done over 60 caches, and I regard that as plenty if you’re out for a 4-day burst. Eventually, even I got bored and want to stop.
I managed to eek it up by one more cache because the two virtuals we did at Cap Blanc Nez allowed us to claim a challenge we’d done in Kent the previous weekend (see Greenhithe). I was happy with that total.
Our third day in Belgiumshire began with another hotel breakfast followed by a trip to a local bank (because the restaurant on the previous night didn’t take plastic and so cleared me out of Euros cash) and then to a Carrefour Local supermarket to grab some essentials for a day of caching, namely drinks, pastries and Pringles. We had an appointment with an event on a beach, and then a walk around the wonderfully-named Knokke Heist.
Down on the Beach
Our first target for the day was to head for an event on the beach near Zeebrugge that had been organised by a friend from the Beds, Bucks & Herts geocaching group. He’d been to the Mega too and needed to attend an event beginning with a “Z” to help complete a challenge cache he’s working on. Obviously there was some scuttling around the dunes to collect caches before the event. And there was an obligatory photo at the webcam cache on the beach.
While we were at the event we also managed to (cough) acquire the codes for the 6 Mega Event lab caches that we hadn’t managed to get the previous day, from a bunch of Polish blokes. Result. Full house. Except now I’ve found 99 lab caches (because Brugse Beer broke with convention by not doing lots of ten). I will now have 99 lab cache finds for the foreseeable future. And my number of lab finds will continue to end in a 9 unless I attend an event and deliberately throw the result by only logging one of them.
Knick Knacky Knokke Heist, Knicky Knacky Noo!
Sorry about that, but I just had to do it! It might equally well have been called “Knicketty Knacketty Knokke Heist”, but anyway, that’s by-the-by. It’s out of my system now. I can move on. Anyway, we had some serious cachin’ to get done.
Anyway, from Zeebrugge we made our way around to Knokke-Heist, or more particularly to Heist-aan-Zee, to begin our main walk of the day. This was the “Kalf” series. It runs in a big loop to the south of the town and quite close to the Dutch border. It was quite a long walk and the weather was warm. By the end of the 4 hours we spent doing it we’d had enough. We had done fifty-something caches by that time though. We’d walked along a variety of terrains, most of which were pretty quick to walk over.
So by the end of the walk it was most definitely ice-cream o’clock. I stuck another couple of Euros into a parking meter and we retired to a nearby bar. I had a giant coke and Ami had a vanilla milkshake, and we shared a rather fantastic strawberry coupe. It contained strawberry and vanilla ice creams, squirty cream, strawberry sauce and a handful of fresh strawberries. You get the picture. Strawberry flavour. Lots of it.
Border Posts
We sort of toyed with the idea of doing a few drive-bys in Knokke-Heist but eventually, we decided that we’d found a decent enough quantity already, so we were off home for an early finish. Before going back though, we popped over the border into the Netherlands at Sint Anna Ter Muiden to do a single cache that celebrates the most westerly point of the European part of the Netherlands. Obviously there are some other bits of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Caribbean, but Sint Anna Ter Muiden is the most westerly bit in Europe. The geocache we did there was based specifically around the mistaken view of many Dutch that the most westerley point is up on the coast near Heist-aan-Zee, but it isn’t. It’s here.
There are a couple of boundary marker posts at the roadside here. One yielded the necessary information for the geocache, and another (the most westerley itself) nestles conveniently in the formal garden at the front of a restaurant/bar, which is entirely in Belgium apart from its conservatory and its car park. As with all border points on this trip, it’s a non-entity. There’s signs by the roadside advising you that the speed limits are different, but that’s about it.
The way back proved more challenging. I tried to get Ami to navigate on Google Maps. That wasn’t the problem though. The problem was that they were building a new motorway around the south of Zeebrugge. Google Maps got its knickers in a twist.
When we got back to Bruges we were quite early, so we chilled in the hotel room for an hour (tending to our suntans) before heading out in the car to try out the pizza place we’d failed to get into on Friday night. We succeeded this time, but only because we agreed to sit outside.
So the day arrived of the main event. We had travelled over specifically to attend the Brugse Beer VII event. Funnily enough, the seventh iteration of an annual event in Bruges. However it’s not named after beer. It’s named after a bear. What? Well it’s Flemish here, so beer is bear not beer, because beer is bier, not beer. The bear is the symbol of the city of Bruges. And beer is also a symbol of Bruges too, but not the symbol of Bruges. That’s a bear, which is a beer if you’re Flemish. I’m getting confused now. Let’s move on.
Event day started with breakfast at our hotel. Technically, I suppose it started with getting out of bed and getting dressed, but you know what I mean. The hotel breakfast was a fairly modest affair of the continental variety, including cheeses, cooked meats, bread and a few cereals, but it was also of the “unlimited” kind, so Ami did her best to eat them out of mini pains-au-chocolate while I had a crack at some bread rolls with pâté and then croissants with chocolate flavoured honey. Nice! It felt a bit expensive at €12 a pop, but then I realised I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, and I wasn’t going to get a filling breakfast for both of us anywhere else for less than €24, so fair enough. It had the advantage of not needing to go out, anyway.
One-Day Eventing
From here we headed off to the event. I took the car up and we arrived plenty early at about 9 am, although the car park was already three-quarters full. I think they were doing a welcome breakfast, so obviously a few people turned up early enough for that. They were only just getting the event stalls set up when we arrived.
We picked up our goody bags and realised that we’d actually just got a bunch of tickets for going elsewhere. One-stop was to get a GPX file downloaded onto my GPS that contained all the new caches they were releasing for the event. These were also printed in the event book, of which we obtained two copies in “Engels, dank u wel.”
From here we wandered through the event site finding the locations of a few of the lab caches and the cafe. We had a quick nosey around the various geocoin shops. The event was being held at the very nice looking VIVES Hogeschool Campus in Bruges, which was about a kilometre from our hotel. The weather was rather warmer than the previous day, and I was glad I’d picked up my hat.
Lab O’Clock
The lab caches were quite good fun, partly because of the variety and partly because the physical ones were quite creative. One involved completing a circuit on one of several variations of mad cycles, with either eccentric wheels or dodgy pedal configurations. Another involved the proverbial curly-wire-with-electrical-contacts game. Yet another involved finding the one and only stuffed bear in a heap of 500 or so stuffed toys. A couple of others involved solving or doing things printed in the event book, so we completed those whilst sitting down mid-morning with a refreshing drink. On the day we managed to obtain the answers to 13 of the 19 they’d set. I won’t say we “solved” 13, let’s just say that we acquired 13 answers by various means. Norfolk12 would have been proud. Ami enjoyed the daft bikes though.
After we’d had our drink we schmoozed a bit further and met up with a family from our Beds, Bucks and Herts area who were attending the same event. We also bumped into a bunch of cachers from Essex that we’d met the previous day in Adinkerke, and a Flemish couple we’d also met in Adinkerke, and the German guy who’d been biking around the same series we drove around the previous afternoon. Small world, innit?
Is It Lunchtime Yet?
At some point I noticed also that the GPX file hadn’t downloaded correctly onto my Garmin, so we went back for another go, and this second time they managed to get it sorted.
We’d also spent quite a while walking up and down the car park collecting trackable numbers. Might as well. There are some challenge caches that require you to have logged a certain number. Otherwise I’m not really bothered, especially when the CO has just put a list of codes in the back window of their car. It’s just as well there’s LogThemAll to help out with bulk logging too, otherwise I just wouldn’t have the patience.
Back at the plot, it had worked its way around to being lunchtime. We grabbed the traditional Belgian snack of frietjes met mayonnaise from the lard wagon and sat on the grass. The lard wagon in question was staffed by members of a local motorcycle gang, apparently. They did good chips.
Let’s All Go on a Tupperware Hunt
After lunch, we decided it was time to break free from the event and do a bit of caching. We went for a walk around to the north of the event site, collecting about 7-8 caches on the way, and then noticed that a lot of the new caches for the event were in the Sint Michiels district, just north of our hotel. We’d both had enough of walking the previous day so we decided to drive around Sint Michiels collecting some of the caches. It was quite easy-going. Basically, every time we saw a bunch of people standing in the street, we stopped and signed the log. I think we did about 13 that way.
A Night on the Town
By the time we’d done a few of those it was getting quite late and we had an appointment up in the old town to find the information for another of the Lab Caches, so we got ourselves cleaned up and poshed up (a bit) and caught a bus “up the toon”. We completely failed to register the necessary information about buses back again, but more of that later.
There was general apathy about what to do for dinner and we’d agreed we weren’t doing any more caching. We’d been at it hammer and tongs for most of two full days. So we wandered around a bit and I took a few photos in the still-lovely evening sunshine. We ended up in another restaurant on Waalplein, just over from where we’d eaten the previous night. It was a fairly basic affair. Basic meant a little cheaper though, so I wasn’t bothered apart from the fact that they didn’t take credit cards. They cleaned me out of cash. We both had lasagne, I think, then Ami had a pudding while I sampled another beer (bier, not bear).
Rick Shaw
It wasn’t quite dark when we’d finished, so we legged it off to the station in search of a bus, only to find (as ever) that all the day buses had finished and the first of the hourly night buses had just left (it was literally waiting at the traffic lights in a place we couldn’t get to safely). So this time rather than going for a motorised taxi again we saw some bike taxis. Basically, posh-looking rickshaws. The driver (rider/pilot/whatever) offered us a relatively reasonable price for the journey back home. In fact, he managed to get us back before the night bus would have because the night bus goes quite literally around the houses.
It was still, still light when we got back, but we were planning a busy day on Sunday, so we went straight off to bed to grab some ZZZZZZs.
The caches we found over the course of the day were :
A planned dash down to Kent to draw a big smiley face over a bit of marshland in the Thames Estuary just east of the QE2 Bridge in Greenhithe. The main focus of attention is the “Shrek” series, but we’d solved a bunch of other puzzles too. We had a fairly open agenda for once the Shrek series had finished. It depended on what the weather was like, how we were feeling and what the kids were up to.
We made the trip down with Happy Hunter HP20. He kindly volunteered to be chauffeur for the day in return for some less than healthy food, but more of that later.
Get your Shrek on
We began our walk in an area which, for a long term resident of Milton Keynes, seemed perfectly typical. It was a newly built housing estate with inadequately wide roads, insufficient parking spaces, and immaculately green public areas of grass. There were also a few caches.
The series began with a walk up a mound thingummy-bob that had a pointy, sticky-uppy pinnacle thing with a bent end on top. I should have been an author, you know. I’m wasted on this.
As we were walking round we were attempting to gather bits of information for an earthcache and a multi at the same time. Never a great idea. Eventually, we did manage to get all the relevant bits though.
We were heading generally west through the houses, but eventually we reached the riverside and got a fine view of the QEII Bridge before turning downstream/east to start looping back to where we’d begun. By the time we reached the ninth one of the series (and our fourteenth in total) we’d been out nearly two hours and decided it was time for a short lunch break. Conveniently #9 of the series was right next to the car, so we had the perfect opportunity to stock up on unhealthy food and repack the bags to carry some drinks and snacks before heading off into the wilderness for the rest of the series.
The Afternoon
It wasn’t initially as much of a wilderness as imagined. They’d built a new road for accessing the new housing estate. It’s not on Google StreetView or GoogleMaps yet. It was definitely there though. Some geezer in a bright yellow Ferrari was driving along it.
We turned off the new road up the side of an industrial facility and found ourselves walking up an isolated road which is apparently where Eastern European lorry drivers go to sleep before braving the motorways of the UK (or before heading home – who knows). Eventually, we got to somewhere rather less urban and spent a few caches walking a series of mainly well-maintained pathways surrounded by varying types of vegetation on a mainly “wetland” theme. Well, the series is called a “Marshland Wander”, so that kind of fits the bill.
Eventually, we got back to the side of the river and started walking upstream towards the bridge and the car again. On the way past, you walk underneath one of two absolutely massive electricity pylons which carry some power lines over the top of the Thames here. I guess they have to be at least as far up as the road deck of the bridge. That would be 65m above the water, so you can imagine the size of the things. The second one is on the other side of the river, in Essex, by the way. A quick wikipedia check confirms the lines are at least 76m up. And it’s called the 400kV Thames Crossing. The towers are chuffing high.
Motorised
After this we got back to the car, having found 39 caches and having eaten most of the pringles. It was time for a sit-down and a bit of planning. The girls decided they were done with walking, so we spent the rest of our caching afternoon in the car. We hopped between various puzzles we’d solved. By the time we’d been doing that for two hours, we’d found another 17 caches, had been rained on and had decided enough was enough, so we treated ourselves to a random drive around Dartford before eventually finding a petrol station and a McDonalds, which were conveniently co-located. A couple of them were at Bluewater Shopping Centre, which was a pain because there was nowhere to park.
So various liquids were acquired and used to fill things, and I dare say there was some turning round of bicycles while we were there, and then we were off on our way home through the tunnel. We eventually got home at around a quarter to 8, about 11 hours after we’d left. Kas was gone. She was away in Manchester for a running event. So I walked around to the local shop with Izzy to buy wine and more unhealthy snacks. And then I settled in for a night of getting showered, eating rubbish and typing up caching logs. A drinking wine.
A good day’s caching by the end of it, given the distance required to be driven. 56 finds is about the kids’ tolerance limit anyway, especially Izzy’s. We arrived home feeling tired, achy and wind-burnt. Both kids had been wearing new walking boots too, so both had slightly sore feet.
Another weekend, another day caching, this time near Hauxton in Cambridgeshire.
I toyed with the idea of driving over to Clare so I could colour in my caching map for both Essex and Suffolk on the same day, but eventually decided save that for a weekend later in the year when there’s a bit more daylight. If I have to spend over 3 hours in my car then I want a good day. I want to have enough daylight to be getting 80-100 finds, to be honest. I don’t want to drive that distance and only have time to do 35.
So I picked an apparently very new series at Hauxton (it had only been released 4 days previously) and headed off with Ami for company, planning to get somewhere in the region of 50 finds. We had to drop Izzy off with Kas after parkrun before we could set off, so with that, and with the need to stop for breakfast and provisions on the way, it was more or less 11am by the time we parked up to begin caching.
The Hauxton Walk
The designated parking for the series was alongside the A10 in what was actually a bus stop with a very long run-in. Probably not. The bit I parked in had white dashed lines instead of the solid yellow lines of the bus stop, so it must have been OK. By the time we got back there were about 5 cars parked behind me anyway. So “not my fault guv – not me causing the blockage”.
The walk took us on a grand clockwise loop from Hauxton across some fields and then around towards Harlton. We included a small offshoot to go find an obelisk on the top of a hill. There was a cache there too, so it wasn’t a wasted climb.
When we got to the village of Harlton we found ourselves following another pair of cachers around. We caught up with them in the village. But then we got lost trying to find one they’d already done previously and they got away from us. We did catch up with them again later on and walked around the last five of the loop with them. It was “flamingo chaser”, although there were two of them. At around the same time we met local cache-setting junkie poshrule walking with Kev from Lorri-Ann & Kev. They were walking around anti-clockwise. They obviously like to live dangerously.
As we were getting back towards the car it was starting to get a bit wet, so we decided to give our legs a bit of a rest and do a few drive-bys near Hauxton, Harlton and Newton. This took us back down a bit of road we’d previously walked, but ho hum !
Foxton
We very shamelessly parked at a pub in Fowlmere and used their toilets before deciding we’d probably got enough daylight left to do another short series. Cunningly, there was one nearby. It involved walking out over 2-3 large fields and then back collecting numbers for a bonus cache. This series were mainly letterbox caches, so they added a bit extra sport.
Once we’d finished that walk the light was getting distinctly dodgy. We went back into drive-by mode and grabbed a couple more in Fowlmere and one in Harlton before deciding that it was time to head home. Having logged our first find at 10:50 we logged our last at 17:50. In that 7 hour period we’d logged 63 finds and 4-5 DNFs, which I thought was a pretty good total for a late-morning start in February.
Ami is going through a phase of being a little more accommodating. She’s been a little more willing to accompany me when it comes to caching days. In fact, she said on more than one occasion on this day that she should come with me more often. We were off for a series called the Keyston Kaper, up on the border between Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire.
The day concerned started early. It was still dark when we left home because I wanted to get a nice early start to ensure we had a good run at today’s target. The target in question was a series of fifty-something caches near the village of Keyston on the western edge of Cambridgeshire. It’s one of those places where you’re never quite sure what county you’re in, as it’s close to the boundary with Northamptonshire but also only a couple of miles from a tri-point with Bedfordshire.
We set off early without having had any breakfast. I’d promised Ami we’d stop for McDonalds nearby, and so we did. The pancakes were nice. The sausage I had with mine was a bit limp and didn’t really add to the experience though.
Some Caching
Back at the plot, we parked up in our target village after a bit of a diversion on the driving. We were outside looking for caches by just after 9 am. That’s probably as early as we can manage really. We’d driven up from Milton Keynes through Olney, which is quite a slow route, and it had taken nearly an hour to get there, despite it only being 35 miles as the crow flies.
The caching series is shaped somewhat like a massive triangle with a small rectangle sticking out at the western tip. There’s not a lot to say about the actual caching, as all the finds were pretty straightforward.
The weather was bright and sunny, which was good, and we both took the decision to wear a shirt and coat but no jumper, despite the early frost, because it was SO sunny. It was looking like the middle of the day would be warm, and so it proved.
My GPS measured our walking track at 18km (or 11 and a bit miles, if you’re that way inclined). That seems like quite a long walk for the number of caches involved. It’s only about 3 per kilometre, when some tight packing should be able to achieve 5 per kilometre, Or at least 4.
Keep Your Head Down
The highlight of the afternoon was most definitely the fact that we found ourselves at one point walking up a very wide strip of grass running down the edge of a field whilst listening to a tractor doing something or other just out of sight. I commented to Ami that the grass strip would be wide enough to land light aircraft, and as we were walking up the grass strip watching a couple of girls mucking about doing floor gymnastics in the grass we were suddenly aware that the tractor we thought we were hearing was, in fact, a small aeroplane. It was moving towards us at an alarming rate.
Thankfully we were able to reach safety by reversing ourselves right up against the hedge. The plane was already in the air when it passed us, but I have definitely never been that close to an aeroplane taking off without actually being inside it. It turns out that it’s a “proper” airfield. I guess it would be. I mean, you can’t go around landing and taking planes off from just anywhere. It’s known as Manor Farm, or Keyston Airfield.
By the time we got back to the car, we were getting tired. I persuaded Ami to walk to do the church micro and one other cache in the village before we set off home. Speaking of setting off, we squeezed in a couple of drive-bys on our way out of the village and then headed back the same way we’d come, including the confusing roads in Raunds.
Another day of trying to rediscover the elusive caching mojo. This time I walked two series near to home with Daughterus Minimus. One was at Thornborough and the other at Godington. In the morning, we were also joined by BingBongLong.
It was the first day after putting the clocks back, and therefore we’d had an extra hour in bed. But now, of course, it’s completely dark before 5 pm. If only we could have been bothered to get up earlier!
Anyway, BingBongLong suggested the night before that we could go and do the newer part of the PAT series, just to the south of Thornborough. I’d originally planned to start my day with Izzy over at the RAG series at Godington, but if I’m being honest it’s likely that Izzy wouldn’t have wanted to do the shorter loop at Thornborough second, after doing a longer loop in the morning, so I agreed to meet up with BBL in Thornborough at 9am and to do the shorter loop first.
It was quite easy going, albeit very warm for the time of year. I’d dressed in my big caching jacket (a ski jacket) and was ridiculously warm. I could easily have walked around in just a t-shirt.
Thornborough
We found all of the caches on this circuit apart from one. An undoubted highlight of the loop was the bridge to nowhere. A wonderfully crafted little bridge with styles at each end which, from a distance, appeared to cross nothing at all. It was only when you got quite close that you realised there was actually a stream with very steep and slippery banks.
About three-quarters of the way round we bumped into two other cachers we knew coming the other way. They appraised us of the relatively easy state of all the caches we’d got left. We told them about the one we’d missed. Later on in the day, we had to beg their help for the last one of the series. We had a facepalm moment when they explained. Then they embarrassed us further by finding the one we’d missed. Hmmm!
Anyway, for the second circuit, BingBongLong had scuttled off to do something else for the afternoon.
Godington
We parked up at Godington church at around 12:30, which gave us around 4 hours to walk 11km and find (supposedly) 40 caches. This meant we had to set a time limit, but thankfully pretty much all of them were straightforward finds. Several things that got in our way and attempted to slow us down.
One cache was supposedly in a big rotten tree, but we couldn’t see anything sensible at all.
One field had a herd of cows in, which we had to try to avoid. That didn’t work, so then we tried to shoo them away. Eventually we were forced to make a dash across the field hoping they wouldn’t follow us.
One cache that had been disabled when I uploaded to my GPS, but which I discovered when we got back to the car had been re-enabled, only about 30 yards away from the original. OK, this didn’t slow us down, but we could have done it if my GPS had been up to date.
Generally though, it was a good walk.
Back to the Motor
When we got back to the car I had just enough time to take a photo of the church while it was still light. While I was taking a photo of the church I was approached by a local woman (the owner of a nearby farm) and we had a long chat about caching.
She’s noticed a few people parking up for long periods outside the church and was a bit curious as to what it was all about. She seemed fine with the idea that all the caches are placed in unobtrusive places next to the footpaths, and she seemed mainly concerned about the fact that my car had been parked there for nearly 5 hours, which is rare in Godington. She was wondering if it had been nicked and dumped there, or if I’d had an accident while walking. It was pleasant to meet a local agricultural type who seemed friendly and welcoming. I have to say that my experiences with agricultural types over to the north and east of home have generally not been so welcoming.
After we left we had time to do a couple of drive-bys in the vicinity before total darkness descended.
Anyway, over the course of the day, Izzy and me walked about 19km and logged 59 finds. That’s about as much as it’s possible to manage in late October. There aren’t many hours of daylight and there aren’t many big stashes of caches close to home any more.
The two series are shown below – Thornborough on the left and Godington on the right.
I am truly sorry, but every time I go caching anywhere near Cockayne Hatley I am immediately reminded of the Viz character Finbarr Saunders and his double entendres. Fnarr fnarr, gnumph, snortle !
I’m glad I’ve got that out of my system. I just had to get it off my chest.
Sorry, I’ll stop.
I’ve been suffering from what can only be described as a loss of mojo recently. I think I may have dropped it one day whilst walking around the Hatley Heart Attack series. So generally over the summer I’ve been rather half-hearted about going out caching at all, and have only really done any serious amount on days (or weekends) when I was able to share it with someone else, such as the Valenciennes Mega, the Geolympix and the North Wales Mega. I’ve had a number of weekends where I just couldn’t be bothered with it. This was starting to grate a bit, so I decided this weekend go for it. I could take advantage of the ladies of the house being away.
My mojo wasn’t there on Saturday, and it looked like Sunday would also no good. But then just after 11 am the sky suddenly started to brighten up a bit. So I decided that if I wasn’t going out this afternoon I might as well jack it in altogether. So I decided to go and give it a go. I’d already lost a third of the available daylight, but hey, never mind. Me and Dr Evil headed off in a generally eastward direction, destined for a couple of newish series over in Hatley-Heart-Attack-land. My original plan had been to attempt four series here, but there was no way I was going to fit in that many, what with me not leaving home until 11:30.
Cockayne Hatley
The first series was at Cockayne Hatley, although it’s actually named after nearby Wrestlingworth. This is a circuit I have definitely done before, on May 30th, 2015. On that day I had Izzy with me. Obviously the owner got bored of that previous series and archived them. They were replaced in short order by someone else.
The new circuit is a roughly square series of 26 caches. It has a couple of extras on a little offshoot at the north-west corner. It took me just over two hours to do them, so you can tell it was fairly easy going. I was wearing a ski jacket over a t-shirt and this proved to be far too warm. But I survived and was soon back at the car.
Guilden Morden
After this my next move was to head towards a series in Steeple Morden, taking a stop off at Guilden Morden on the way to deal with a bit of unfinished business. On a previous day around the Heart Attack I’d ended up here with Ami after our day’s walk. That time we did the church micro, but Ami really needed the toilet, and there was nowhere to go. So we just went home instead, despite it being quite early in the day. It was three days before Christmas though, and we’d been out all day. It meant we’d left a perfectly good Village Sign and another Church Micro though, and they’ve been burning (well, smouldering) on the map ever since. Both were easy.
After taking totally the wrong road out of there I eventually ended up making my way around to the Steeple Morden Mosey series. This is another quick couple-of-hours kind of a series of 21 caches with a random church micro thrown in for good measure. These took me about a hundred minutes to do.
I was happy with that because it left me just enough time to do a couple of multis in the village of Steeple Morden too. I could have walked to these from the loop but decide not to for some reason. Anyway, I moved the car down into the village. I was expecting to have to do the research for the multis before finding them, but it turns out I’d previously managed to google the solutions to both, so I already had the final coordinates in the GPS, and both were quick finds, which was a bonus.
That’ll Do
By the time I’d done all that it was past 5 pm. I had an appointment back home with the rest of the family and some dinner. So, time to go home.
I count finding 54 caches in under 5 hours as recovering the mojo somewhat, so I was happy with it.
Late in 2007 sadexploration added a new cache at a church in Earlswood and started a bit of series.
There are now over 10000 Church Micros around the country.
These celebrate a cultural history that touches pretty much every community in the UK, and has lead me to a few lovely little churches that I might otherwise have missed.
It’s a great idea, and I’ve now placed a few of my own, photos of which are interspersed below with the photos of the ones I’ve found.
You can find out a lot more about them, including stats on who’s found how many, at the Church Micros Stats Page.
My first “proper” caching day in September. The girls were all out at a running event down in Leighton Buzzard as a result of Kas having volunteered to be a marshall, so I had the day to myself. I decided to do a few series in and around Poundon.
The weather was rather nice looking for September, so I packed the normal array of everything (to ensure it stayed that way) and headed off not long after 8 am in the general direction of Buckingham.
I’d got in my mind that I could have a pop at geoff&steph’s three series – one at Poundon, one at Hillesden and one at Thornborough.
I had to stop for some motion lotion on the way, after exhausting most of a tank full going to Bracknell on Monday and Warrington on Tuesday with my new job.
So it was quite an ambitious plan, but I had no particular time constraints and so far in September I’d only found 7 caches, so I was due a few.
The caching was mainly easy, aside from the field full of cows right at the start of the Poundon circuit. I don’t like cows. They don’t like me. Enough said. Well, I suppose if they’ve been suitably prepared, grilled a bit and served with mustard, chips and a salad. Then I quite like cows, but otherwise, you can keep them, thanks.
I didn’t quite make all three circuits. By the time I’d finished the second and sat in my car eating lunch it was nearly 4pm. I didn’t really have the time or the inclination for another couple of hours. So I decided to jack it in, via a handful of drive-bys.
So I politely retired for the day, having found over 60 caches. Less than I’d wanted, but as many as I could be bothered with.
Kas somehow got it into her mind that it would be a good-fun idea to run an ultra-marathon in Cumbria to finish off the summer holidays. The Grand Tour of Skiddaw, no less. 46 miles of “lumpy” terrain, with one rather massive “lump” in the middle. She must be mad.
Anyway, enough of that. What actually happened over the weekend then?
Kas and the girls had been away at Kas’s mum’s house in Whitburn all week and I travelled up on a very nice Pendolino from Milton Keynes to Carlisle on Friday afternoon to meet them. Technically, I’d been working all week. However I was in final throws of working out my notice with my employer, so both productivity and enthusiasm had been on the low side all week. Nana and Grandad were also driving over and were going to look after the kids on Saturday while Kas was racing. My plan was to follow Kas around a bit, essentially being alternately worried and bored, depending on how long I’d being sitting at each location.
On Friday night we had to go over to the event village at Lime House School, and this proved to be a highlight of the weekend, in a near-total-disaster sort of way. Google Maps thought it knew the way there, so we followed it. We ended up going down a road that was getting increasingly dodgy, and looked less and less like the correct direction. So at one point we stopped and turned the car around on someone’s drive. We’d been followed down there by a couple of other cars and it was a bit tight getting everyone around, so Kas tried to pull off the edge of the road to allow a descending car to get past us (there was no other way), but at this point we had a horrendous crunching noise as the car went over the top of a rock buried in the grass. Fair enough, further up the slope there was a line of rocks delineating a “don’t drive on my grass” zone, but where we were at the time there were no visible rocks. Should’ve got out to check, I suppose. The car essentially got beached on the top of it, and it took us a good half hour, and the help of a local resident (thankfully not the one who’s grass verge we’d just trashed) with a car jack to get us out. We had to lift the car wheel up off the ground far enough to dislodge the rock from underneath the skid-plate on the bottom of the car. Thankfully though, the rock was under the skid-plate and we hadn’t gone far enough through to get it trapped under any of the more delicate bits like the exhaust system. It wasn’t the best half-hour I’d ever had though.
Once we’d been through that, actually getting Kas’s running number and getting registered for the race was a piece of proverbial. We returned apparently none the worse to our hotel near Carlisle and met up with Nana and Grandad, and then quickly headed off towards central Carlisle to get dinner. Our first proposed port of call wasn’t open (and, in fact, didn’t open all night) so we continued right into the centre to walk around looking for a restaurant serving Italian food that wasn’t already fully booked for the whole night. It took us about 4 attempts, and we ended up in a nice little place called Gianni’s Pizzeria, right next to where we’d parked. It didn’t look inspiring from the outside, which is why we didn’t go in it straight away, but first impressions can be deceptive. It was pretty good.
Saturday morning saw me and Kas out of bed in darkness. It’s the first time I’d done that since last winter. Kas has been doing it every other day for months as part of her training schedule, but it was a bit out of order from my perspective. We were also far too early for breakfast at the hotel. Just as well we hadn’t paid for it. Kas had bought porridge and some cereal bars.
The drive round to Lime House School was uneventful (now we know the way) and we arrived bright and early for the event. Kas had forgotten to pick up her satellite stalk-a-racer gizmo the previous night but the event was small enough that the organisers could guess that she was one of three lady competitors who hadn’t done so, and she was therefore up and running before we really even got bedded into the place.
There were only 96 registered competitors and they were only expecting 88 of them to turn up, apparently, so it wasn’t exactly busy at the start area. We grabbed a coffee from the mobile pizza van and waited around, chatting to fellow competitors. Kas’s running buddy for the day, Paul, had also arrived. He wanted to “not go too fast” so had asked Kas if they could run together. Turned out to be a wise plan.
Anyway, by 8 am they were off. And by 8:15, so was I.
First stop for the runners was at Caldbeck, and I had an hour and a half or so to get there. That gave me plenty of time to grab three or four geocaches on the way. Kas and Paul came in somewhere in the back half of the field, had a quick drink and a photo stop and then disappeared off again.
From Caldbeck, I had decided not to try to meet them again at the car park at Latrigg, because we’d been up there a couple of times in May and I didn’t fancy trying to get Kas’s car up there, nor did I expect to be able to park there anyway. Kas’s car had already had enough adventure and excitement for one weekend. As well as it being a checkpoint for the GTOS there was a station for a different fell racing series in the same place on the same day. It was going to be busy.
So I decided to pick my way rather slowly round to Peter House Farm, which is all the way around at the access road going up to Whitewater Dash. This gave me an estimated 6 hours before Kas would pass me again, because from Caldbeck she’d got to run a further 8 miles into the fells, then up and down Skiddaw and then another 2 miles over the fields. I spent the first of those hours driving from Caldbeck and doing a handful more geocaches. I then got to Peter House Farm and waited 5 minutes in the middle of the road whilst waiting for someone else to vacate a parking space – it was one of the race organisers doing a tour round making sure the marshalls were ready. After I parked up the weather turned pretty foul, but it wasn’t predicted to get any better. It was windy and showery and quite cold. I decided to take the walk up to Whitewater Dash with my raincoat on, because I’d got plenty of time and there were a couple of geocaches up there. It was wet and windy all the way there, as I was walking into the weather. It was a little further than I thought too, but the views were great. The walk back was downhill and the wind was behind me too, so the world was much better. I also found a geocache that the previous three searchers had missed, so I felt a bit smug.
This still left me with a projected 3 hours of waiting before Kas might pass me. I’d rather shabbily not taken anything to eat or drink with me but I also didn’t want to leave just in case I couldn’t get back into the car park when I returned, so I decided to just wait and do some reading, whilst occasionally sponging use of a phone from one of the marshalls. Why? Because I had no signal, so the satellite stalk-a-runner device Kas had with her was no use at all to me. At third use of the marshall’s phone the painful truth had become apparent – I was going to be there for a couple of hours longer than Kas had predicted. She later told me this was because the weather up top was absolutely foul, and they were down to crawling pace, especially on the descent. Fair do’s. She does have a bit of previous where running down mountains is concerned.
Thankfully I had a big, fat book with me, and had also remembered to take my glasses. The book was Surface Detail, by my favourite science fiction author Iain M. Banks. I’d started reading it on the train up to Carlisle on Friday and was less than a quarter of the way through when I sat in the car to read it on Saturday. I was well past halfway when I stopped.
Kas and Paul eventually got to where I was at around 4:30 pm, looking somewhat dishevelled but in good heart. They stayed for a very short while and then scooted off again, leaving me to pick my way back round to Caldbeck for their next stop. This time I decided to go round slowly, and to stop for food. I’d spotted a cafe come art gallery in Uldale on the way in so decided to try it. The place was in an old school and I was a bit suspect as I walked in. It turned out to be really good, despite having no other customers at the time. Maybe it was good because they didn’t have any other customers. Anyway, I got soup, bread, a drink, and then a cream & jam scone and large coffee for not very much. I can live with loneliness for nice food at those prices.
My exit was delayed for a couple of minutes by some local bovine traffic passing by on the road, but I was still in plenty of time to meet Paul and Kas at Caldbeck again, this time looking somewhat more knackered than when they’d been there earlier. They arrived there between 6:30 and 7 pm, which gave them about 8 miles out of 46 left to do, with about 90 minutes of usable light at the most. They were going to finish in the dark. It’s a good job the kit list had head torches on. They didn’t stay long at Caldbeck this time – just long enough for a couple of biscuits and half a hot drink.
So off they plodded again. I watched them off and headed back to Lime House School to wait. During the course of the day the field they were using as a car park had transitioned from grassy to muddy, but there wasn’t really anywhere else to go given that Kas might be struggling to walk, so into the mud I went. I then spent another nervous hour and a half waiting for them, mooching about, trying to estimate where they were based on who else was finishing (not a reliable process over a 46 mile run) and reading a bit more of my book. Eventually it was too dark to read in the car so I went and sat in the sports hall amongst people who’d finished already.
After 8:30 I decided they couldn’t be much longer so I decided to just stand outside and wait, to make sure I was there when Kas actually finished. It didn’t take much longer and I was reassured by meeting a guy who’d been at Peter House Farm earlier, who told me he’d passed Paul and Kas just off the school site and they were probably under 10 minutes away. They were quite easy to spot coming down the hill into the finish, despite the total darkness, mainly because Kas’s headlight is about a foot lower than Paul’s.
They both looked surprisingly well for people who’d just run, walked and staggered 46 miles over rough terrain in less than pleasant weather, over a period of 13 hours. Fantastic effort, well done.
All that exertion required a bit of calming down, re-energising and refuelling though. Kas grabbed a massage, which also included a free lower leg clean, and then grabbed her free beer. We both needed to eat so we went and grabbed pizzas from the van outside. They were surprisingly good. And during the boring bits I did even more reading.
By the time Kas was ready to leave it was well after 11 pm, and we had to get out of the car park by taking a loop across the field to avoid the worst of the mud. We actually drove right around and crossed the start/finish line of the race. It was pretty much midnight when we got back to the hotel.
When we got up in the morning we were both in the mood to get full value out of a Premier Inn breakfast. We woke up a bit earlier than we thought we might and were ready early, so we dived into the restaurant and started on some eating whilst waiting for Grandad, Nana and the kids to come over. Actually, Grandad bought the girls over before him and Nana were really ready. We spent ages there and ate quite a lot.
Before driving home we made one more trip over to Lime House School to attend the awards ceremony. It was one of those “everyone who turns up gets a prize” jobs, but in a good way. Kas got a special award as a glamorous finisher.
The drive home looked initially looked like it was going to be a disaster. Someone at the event site told us that the M6 was closed near Preston. We toyed with the idea of crossing the Pennines and driving down the east coast, but as we travelled south we started noticing the overhead signs didn’t indicate much of a problem. Apparently they’d cleared it, and we were through the crash site after only 5 minutes or so of delay, so we were glad we chose not to divert. As it was a Sunday then we did hit some traffic further down, but it was on the section of the M6 south of Warrington where there’s always a queue. The always-a-queue was enhanced by the presence of some roadworks where they are “upgrading” the road to managed motorway (otherwise known as variable speed limit and speed cameras every 100 yards). It eventually took us the best part of 7 hours to get back, with me driving all the way, so by the time I got home I’d had enough of driving. I wasn’t finished though, because I had to drive the car back round to the Co-Op to buy wine.
Geocaches found over the course of the weekend were:
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!
