by Kevin | Nov 18, 2016
For ages and ages I’d been attempting and failing to arrange a “lads weekend” away somewhere with Kipper, Jimmy and Stevie. That makes it sound like me attempting to do the organizing and the other three doing the welching. Not really. We’ve just had several Friday or Saturday night “beers and curry” trips where we’ve mumbled through a drunken stupor about really needing to get something sorted and have then either conveniently forgotten, or decided it was all too complicated or expensive to actually do. So we didn’t do it.
Well not this time.
We started off talking about going to South Wales but then Jimmy interjected with a request to go to North Wales too, which I was initially not in favour of until it became clear that someone else would be driving all weekend. Buggrit then ! Why should I worry about the mileage if I’m not going to have to drive ?
Why wasn’t I going to have to drive ? Because Kip was just going to pick up his new car a few days beforehand, and he and Jimmy fancied a bit of a flash-car group test kind of a thing. Suits me. It’s extremely rare that I get to go away on holiday for 4 days and don’t have to drive at all. It is even rarer that I get driven around in a top-notch sports car. The cars in question were the rather stunningly good looking Porsche 911s shown the the photo. The white one is Jimmy’s. The blue one is Kipper’s.
The weekend began on Friday morning with me having to go up to my dentist to get the rough edges polished off a crown I’d had replaced the previous weekend. OK, that wasn’t part of the weekend away, but it was something I had to do on Friday morning.
The weekend away began with the chaps turning up in the flash motors at my house in the middle of the morning. This part was quickly followed by a fuel and coffee stop and then a fairly slow meander up the M40 in the direction of Birmingham. This turned into a moderately fast chunter up the M54 to the Telford Services, where we stopped for coffee, snacks, and a bit of caching. There is a massive old steam hammer in the car park which is host to an Earthcache called Shropshire Iron. It’s also home to a traditional cache, but the logs seemed to indicate that some climbing was involved in finding it. Personally, I’m not very agile, but also I wouldn’t have placed a cache on such a monument if it was necessary to climb on it. I searched all the areas I could reach without climbing and didn’t find it. If it does involve climbing, they’re welcome to it. Not a game I would play.
On returning to the cars we decided on a swap around, with Stevie riding shotgun in Kip’s car and me with Jimmy.
The drive up from here was slightly more interesting than the motorways earlier in the day, mainly involving the A5 until just before Betws-y-Coed. This involved passing through Llangollen, the scene of an earlier adventure this year at the UK Mega Geocaching Event (see Llangollen Mega).
Our hotel was up a bit and along a bit from there, a few miles shy of Conwy. We were staying at the Groes Inn, a quite famous and extremely old coaching inn.
We arrived there with just enough daylight left to go for a quick gander around Conwy town. There wasn’t a lot to see, to be honest, as more or less everywhere seemed to be closed. I guess it isn’t tourist season and because the light disappears at 4:30pm it’s likely everyone had packed up for the day and had relocated to whatever form of activity goes down on a Friday evening. We did get some fresh air and a bit of a leg stretch though, but not very many decent photos, as the light was disappearing at, well, the speed of light.
Once darkness had properly arrived we decided that it was officially allowed to be beer o’clock, so we headed back to the Groes Inn and settled into the bar for the evening. It was one of those excellent bars where despite the fact that they weren’t, technically speaking, open to the public at the point when we arrived, the barman was perfectly happy to serve us a pint while they were waiting to open, what with us being guests at the hotel. And in the bar was more or less where we all stayed until bed o’clock, with the exception of a couple of dashes out to grab cards and risk.
Breakfast was a fairly lardy effort by all four of us. I was ready a few minutes early so I took the opportunity to dash 200 yards down the road to find This Daughter became a Conwy Valley tour guide and to take a couple of photos. It was quite a nice morning.
After we checked out of the hotel we headed off for Jimmy’s “main event” for the weekend, which was the drive around the Evo Triangle, which starts a little way back along the A5 from where we’d been the previous night. While we were having breakfast there had been a couple of hail showers and the remnants of it were still lying around on the ground. This, combined with Kip’s understandably tentative driving (in a car he’d only had for three days) meant that my ride around was somewhat more leisurely than Jimmy and Steve’s. The first stretch is really quite narrow and twisty. You can see why Evo Magazine tests cars up there, but I could also see why Kip wasn’t really testing his.
From here we hadn’t really got much of a plan other than to start heading south. We started by picking our way south through Blaenau Ffestiniog in the general direction of Portmeirion, where we stopped to refuel the cars. Blaenau Ffestiniog has some tourist trade associated with the slate mining industry, but this is fairly quiet in November. It also has the dubious distinction of being an island of non-park within the middle of the Snowdonia National Park. The village is surrounded (and completely dominated) by spoil heaps from the now defunct slate mines, which gives it a somewhat otherworldly feel. The National Park has a nice mix of colours, especially in Autumn, with grass, trees, coloured buildings, and so on. Blaenau Ffestiniog is predominantly grey in colour.
We’d sort of half planned to drive down the coast road from Portmeirion through Harlech to Barmouth but as we glanced at our watches while filling the cars up we decided instead that we ought to get a few more miles done while the driving conditions were good (i.e. while it was sunny and the roads were dry). So we just headed back up the main road and followed a series of winding A-roads all the way down to Aberystwyth. At one point we passed the now decommissioned Trawsfynydd nuclear power station – the only nuclear station ever built in the UK that’s not by the sea. This being Wales, they concluded that the lake they constructed to hold the cooling water would never empty enough to cause a problem.
I’m not sure what I expected to find in Aberystwyth, because I’ve never been there before. I was somehow expecting it to be a much bigger place than it was. It basically only has a couple of shopping streets in the middle with some housing estates around the outside and the rather large Aberystwyth University. The place is apparently a very long way from anywhere else, by UK standards, with the closest large settlements of note being Swansea (70 miles), Telford (75 miles) and Wrexham (80 miles). We stopped to have some lunch (well, coffee and cake) and a bit of a leg-stretch through the castle and down the sea front a little bit. At the castle I managed to sneak in an Earthache called Aberystwyth stone circle earth cache.
The important distance (from our perspective) in that list of places above was “Swansea (70 miles)”, or in our case, Gower Peninsula (86 miles). By the time we left Aberystwyth it was well after 3pm, so we were in for some driving in the dark. We picked our way down the coast initially through a seemingly endless succession of small villages, all of which were in the bottom of a steep hollow, followed by a steep climb out. I guess there’s a village here at every point where a stream flows out into the sea.
We eventually turned off the coast road and followed a bunch of smaller (but still A graded) roads down to Carmarthen. By the time we got there it was all but dark. At least there we picked up a decent dual carriageway that took us a good chunk of the way. By the time we got back onto the country roads leading into the Gower it was completely dark, and it was also chucking it down with rain. Methinks that both drivers were having a slight sense of humour crisis and just wanted to get parked up and get the beers in. I don’t blame them. They’d both been driving for about 5 hours over the course of the day.
We were staying at the King’s Head Inn at Llangennith, which proved to have some very nice bedrooms but a public area that was somewhat more basic than the Groes Inn, where we’d been the previous night. It wasn’t bad, it was just more of a pub than a restaurant.
We’d reserved a table for dinner for 7:30, but ended up in the bar well before 6 and started merrily helping ourselves to beer and food pretty much as soon as we got there. Stevie kept disappearing up the car park to fetch games out of Jimmy’s car. There was some cards and risk involved. And that was pretty much it for Saturday.
Breakfast at the hotel started unusually late (at 8:30am), and we decided we couldn’t even be bothered with that early, so we went for 9am. The highlight (cough) was undoubtedly Kip’s discovery that Laver Bread doesn’t contain either bread or molten rocks. Basically, it’s boiled, mushed-up seaweed. It didn’t look very appetising. I reckon it’s one of those things that hotels put on the menu in a tourist area safe in the knowledge that some poor unsuspecting soul will try it just because it’s supposedly a local delicacy. I reckon the locals don’t even eat it themselves – they just like to wind up tourists by pretending they do.
Back at the plot, Sunday was supposed to be “my” day, in that it involved some walking and a few geocaches. I have to say that I managed to make a complete pucky-acky of the whole thing, starting with the discovery that my GPS had been switched on in Kipper’s car on Saturday afternoon, followed by the disappointment of finding that I’d failed to put the charger cable into my caching bag, and finishing with the disgrace of discovering that at some point between Thursday night and Sunday morning the geocaches I’d very carefully loaded onto it had somehow got deleted. The GPS was therefore reduced to the level of being a heavy and slightly unreliable (but at least waterproof) map. Any caching would have to be done on my phone. It’s a good job I’d only planned for us to do 8 or so anyway.
Our plan was to walk from Llangennith over to Rhossili and on to Worm’s Head an then back again – a distance that ought to be about 5 miles each way. Time was an issue all day because the causeway to Worm’s Head is only accessible for a 5 hour period around each low tide, and the only available low tide window during daylight was due to start at 2pm. That’s not a great equation if your walk onto the head and back takes at least 90 minutes and then you’ve got over four miles to walk home across country on a day where darkness arrives at about 4:30pm. Still, what could possibly go wrong, huh?
The first stage of our walk took us from Llangennith over Rhossili Down (where we found 2 normal caches, one YOSM and a completely random bit of tupperware that’s logged on a competitor geocaching website.
The highlight of this stretch (at least for the other three) was watching me slide over not once, but twice, on the wet slope coming down into Rhossili village. I got dirty.
We grabbed a church micro geocache in the village and then made our way to the National Trust office to confirm the tide times. It was about time for a break too, so we retired to a nearby cafe for coffee and cake while I washed my hands and gently shed the layers of drying mud off my trouser legs and onto the floor. Hmm!
From here we made the walk down to the Worm’s Head causeway, stopping to do a further 2 traditional caches and another Earthcache and we found ourselves sitting at the bottom of a cliff waiting for the tide to go out. There were quite a few other people doing the same. They seemed all to be in the “silver surfer” category, not that any of us are exactly spring chickens, but I got the distinct impression that we were among the youngest of those waiting. We had to sit there for a good 40 minutes or so while the water dropped away. The official word was that you’d be able to cross at 2 pm. Some of the old geezers started to make their way down and across at about ten to, so we obviously packed up and followed them.
The walk out along Worm’s Head was quite challenging. The initial causeway was only just draining as we walked across, so we had to keep rerouting to find a dry way through, plus the rocks themselves were rather jagged. Beyond a certain point, the rocks got a bit easier and we were mainly skipping through smaller rocks encrusted with barnacles and surrounded by loads of little mussels, which made the underfoot conditions much more grippy. At the first island, it was a straightforward walk around the grass. Kip and Stevie took the hardcore option of walking over the top rather than around the side, obviously.
At the far end of the Inner Head the walk becomes quite tricky as you have to scramble over some very rough rocks that are full of deep crevasses. The rocks themselves are sedimentary and have been folded such that the cleavage lies at a 70% angle to the flat. This makes it extremely uneven to try to walk over, and quite slow going.
From there you go around the middle head and arrive at the Devil’s Bridge – a naturally formed bridge in the limestone that’s the site of an Earthcache called Little Bridges #886 Devils Bridge. When I was planning the walk, this was as far as I thought it was reasonable to try to go, but of course opnce you’re out there it’s very tempting to go further, so we did. We made it all the way out onto the Outer Head. Kip and Stevie attempted to climb up to the highest point (they didn’t quite make it) while me and Jimmy decided that time was marching on and that we had gone far enough already to claim we’d “done it”, so we turned and started going back. It had taken most of an hour to get to the Outer Head from dry land, so we estimated that turning around and returning would put us back on land just before 4 pm. We didn’t want to leave it too late because we didn’t fancy trying to cross the causeway in failing light, even if the tide was well out.
As it happened, Kip and Steve caught up with us again (and overtook me) going back across that rocky ridge again and then surged ahead over the causeway to get back well ahead of me. In any case it took us a good 15 minutes less to get back than it had to get out. The causeway had become a good bit easier.
Back at the cafe, we decided to grab a quick drink and snack to keep us moving. Somehow, whilst standing in the queue in the cafe, I turned around and the end of my walking pole (which poking out of the top of my bag) managed to surgically remove a flatbread from the top of a bowl of kedgeree without causing the waitress to drop the bowl of kedgeree. I bet I couldn’t do that again if I tried. I decided it wouldn’t be a great idea to suggest that the “five second rule” applied, so I apologised as politely as I could manage and went to stand outside in disgrace. The poor waitress seemed at a bit of a loss for what to do before eventually deciding to go back and do another flatbread. Sorry! I didn’t realise you were there.
So after a quick drink we started the remaining couple of miles back home. For this leg, as it was now getting fairly gloomy, we decided we’d walk along the raised beach under Rhossili Down rather than going back over the top. It looked safer and easier to follow in the dark. I learned later that it’s not a raised beach, it’s a solifluction terrace caused by slumping of the cliff above during a previous era when the cliff face was subjected to regular freeze-thaw cycles. This has been made to look like a raised beach as the sea now is gradually undercutting it as it forms the rather lovely Rhossili Beach.
Back at the plot, we set off down a path that looked nice from above but proved to be a quagmire, so we backtracked a little and descended down a road that at least had hardcore on it until we got onto the level just above the beach. From here it was a flat walk (if somewhat long) to the other end of the beach and an entrance into the bottom end of a massive caravan park. We then had a seemingly very long walk through the caravans and then along a surprisingly long access road back up into Llangennith. By the time we got back home we’d walked nearly 12 miles and had been out for nearly 7 hours, although we weren’t exactly walking quickly for much of that. It was completely dark anyway.
We reconvened in the hotel restaurant (or was it the lounge) half an hour later, having done our best to wash away the dodgy smells. I managed to neck a pint of orange and lemonade in double quick time, ‘cos my mouth was drier than a pharaoh’s sock, and then we got into the now traditional evening activities of drinking beer, eating food and playing cards. In my case the beer went quite slowly, and I wasn’t very hungry. I ordered some onion rings and nachos and then picked my way through them with no great enthusiasm (and with much abuse from Kip, as I wasn’t eating the jalapenos, which constitutes a serious failing, apparently). I think I ended up leaving half of them. I just wasn’t hungry.
After a while, and after the boys had pudding, we retired to the bar (definitely a bar in the other side – there’s a jukebox, a pool table, and they let dogs in), for a couple more drinks and a journey through an eclectic mix of music on the jukebox courtesy of DJ Kip, while Stevie, Jimmy and me pretended we could play pool. Some of us were better at pretending than others were. It did feel a bit like being a student again though, especially when the barman told us not to put any more money in the pool table because he wanted to go home. It wasn’t even 11 pm though. They evidently don’t do late opening on a Sunday, even if you are staying there.
I spent the night tossing and turning and listening to the sounds of the world outside. The sound most of the world seemed to be making was that of a running tap.
We had breakfast at 8:30 after having swum down the car park from the hotel rooms. We then swam back up again and packed up the cars ready for the trip home. While we were still on the Gower it was sailing more than driving, to be honest. The M4 had a 50mph speed limit most of the way because of the awful visibility and all the standing water on the carriageway, but apart from that, and the fact that we stopped to refuel in Swindon, the trip home was a bit of a non-event for me. I was a bit knackered and Kip was doing a sterling job of driving through the rain without moaning, so I spent much of my time snoozing or playing with my phone. It didn’t seem like a great idea to try to engage Kip in a discussion anyway. It was the kind of driving weather where you really need to pay attention.
We made it back home at about 2 pm, in plenty of time for me to fart about with some photos on the PC before going to fetch Izzy from school. I’d been assuming all the way home that I’d be driving to fetch her, given the rain, but somehow I managed to catch a dry and sunny spell so was able to walk there.
And that was about it. It was a four day weekend during which I’d eaten far too much, drunk less than I’d expected I might, walked a bit, filled in two new counties on my caching profile and been driven around in two very nice motors. We’d managed to get good weather whenever we needed it (for driving round the Evo Triangle and for walking on the Sunday).
We might have to make a habit of having lads weekends away if they all end up being like that.
by Kevin | Jun 4, 2016
We got out of the log cabin quite early, having decided not to bother with parkrun. On the agenda today we had a bit more walking followed by a drive down to the East Midlands. First up though, we drove into Keswick to find a local sandwich shop and get ourselves tooled up for the day.
We drove from Keswick down the recently reopened A591. This was badly hit by the floods in December 2015, the result of which was the loss of significant stretches of the road on this section. It only opened about two weeks before we drove down it, and there were obvious signs of rebuilding everywhere.
We drove down into Ambleside and then headed up Langdale for our walking. On the cards was a walk up to Stickle Tarn and a potential climb up one or more of the surrounding peaks.
We parked up in a car park that I’m sure wasn’t there when Kas and I came in 2004, and headed off up the somewhat improved paths up the mountain.
It took us a while to climb up as it was pretty steep. We kept needing to take a break, however that was fine, because having a break means having to turn around and enjoy the scenery.
When we got up to the tarn it was lunchtime, so we found a good spot on the grass and ate the sandwiches we’d bought in Keswick earlier in the day.
After lunch we’d regained some strength and enough confidence to go for a climb up a mountain.. We weren’t quite sure how many mountains we’d manage, but we decided to head initially for Pavey Ark, and then see how we felt at the top. We had to walk all the way around the tarn to get to the path up the mountain. When we found the path it looked quite unappetizing. It was kind of steep and would be classed as a scramble rather than a walk. I didn’t enjoy looking back down, and I wasn’t particularly keen on walking back down that way either.
At the top, the view was spectacular. You could see a long way as it was another clear and quite sunny day. It’s also quite a long way up.
Time was marching on so decided not to attempt any other mountains, but just to head back down instead. To get back down again we decided to follow a path that was marked on Kas’s Ordnance Survey app but wasn’t on my Garmin OS maps with Open Street Map overlay. Hmmm ! I think my maps won. There wasn’t a path there. Thankfully there was a series of gently sideways slopes we could walk down until we reached the stream bottom, and were then able to follow the stream around to the tarn and the place we’d headed off up the scramble on the way up. We know for next time, if there is a next time.
We failed to get ice creams at the NT property at the bottom of the mountain, so we decided to drive into Ambleside instead.
We parked up in a big car park near the centre and walked just a couple of hundred yards up into the town to grab an ide cream. There was a cunningly placed streetside wagon thingy selling locally made ice cream. Izzy also wanted to buy a souvenir. It was quite late in the afternoon so most places were shut already. The best we could manage was a small place right over the road. It didn’t stock very much, but Izzy eventually decided on a scarf (for some reason) and Ami didn’t really seem bothered about anything.
We drove home alongside Windermere and then past Kendal and straight home down the M6. We stopped at Knutsford Services on the way down for some tea and then drove round to my folks place in Measham to spend the night.
It had been a good week overall, especially with the weather. We’d got the kids interested in a new sport of walking up Wainwrights. Kas had done a few runs and I’d found a handful of caches in some lovely locations. It also reawakened my love of the Lake District after many years of not visiting.
by Kevin | Jun 3, 2016
Our last full day in the Lake District before having to head home, which was a bit of a shame, but the kids only get one week off, so we were scuppered from that perspective. We had to get back home and get some washing through the washing machine. Anyway, that’s all tomorrow.
Back at today, we set off fairly early because Kas wanted to go for a run to recce a bit of the course she is supposed to be running on some madder-than-a-sack-of-monkeys ultra marathon she’s doing in September. The part of the course in question was away on the west side of Skiddaw, so we drove her off there and then went for a bit of a drive looking for a few caches. Well, Izzy and me were looking. Ami was sat in the back of the car playing on her iPad, as she tends to these days. We found a couple of caches in pretty good locations. Here’s the view from one of them.
When it was about time, we drove round to our assigned pickup point and found a convenient parking spot but therein began the problems. We had absolutely no phone signal where we were parked and assumed Kas didn’t either, so we couldn’t see where she was on Glympse and nor could we phone her.
Anyway, we sat waiting for 15-20 minutes with me getting increasingly disturbed about Kas being late. There was some nervous pacing about going on. But eventually Kas rolled up, having discovered that fell running is a little slower than running on roads, due to the uneven terrain, and the having-to-navigate. She’d ducked a chunk of her planned route on the basis that she was taking far longer than planned, so she cut short and run up to meet us along the road, which was not a direction I was expecting her to come from.
We drove over to the The Old Sawmill Tearoom for a quick change and to grab a handful of cold drinks to take with us, and then we set off for our main event of the day – the walk up Cat Bells. This is more of a family-friendly mountain than some of the others nearby, being only modest in height and having a decent quality path most of the way up. It certainly is a well-trodden path.
When we reached the top it was well into lunchtime, so we sat for a break and some well earned nosh. It was another fan-dabby-tastic day for the weather and the view from the top is pretty darn good.
We were doing (well, I was doing) a few caches on the walk around – just those we passed within 100m of – which added up to eight or so on the walk. Most were easy. The one down the side of the hill in the ruined shepherd’s hut surrounded by bracken was not so easy. Ami came with me to that one. From the summit we lurched over the back a little bit and then descended a path down to the shore of Derwent Water. We’d been walking for a while so the first thing we did at the lakeshore was to whip our shoes and socks off and cool our feet down in the lake water. The water was refreshing.
By the time we got back to where we’d parked time was moving on a bit and the ice cream stand was shut, which we obviously count as a total failure. We therefore drove into the middle of Keswick, safe in the knowledge we’d find something there. What we found was the really rather nice Bar Metro. It was a very small but perfectly formed mock American diner, serving a selection of American favourites, plus beer and massive milkshakes. Perfect pick-me-up food after a day of walking up and down mountains.
As we had an appointment with the motorway system the following day, and planned to do some more walking, we got home quite early, packed our bags, and went to bed. The end of another day filled with fresh air, sunshine, and mountains.
by Kevin | Jun 2, 2016
Ahhhh! The 2nd of June. The day that saw both of our little balls of energy come into the world. Not on the same day, you understand – they gave us a three year gap in between – but they were indeed both born on June 2nd.
The early part of the day was spent with both girls opening the presents that I’d very neatly wrapped without the aid of sellotape the previous evening. Izzy got a new iPod Touch to add to the bike she wanted (and had received a few weeks earlier). Ami wanted a bunch of Star Wars bobbleheads, and then kept a tight grip on monetary gifts so she could have a fun shopping day in London on the weekend that me and Izzy were in Valenciennes.
After the present opening ceremony we got dressed for the now ritual trip down to the riverside for skimming stones and plopping rocks. We had a little while to kill before Denise and Dave arrived from Whitburn, so there was time for a bit of that.
Once Denise and Dave did arrive it was getting towards lunchtime, so we decided to head out down to the side of Derwent Water and camped ourselves down in a very nice cafe at the Theatre by the Lake. The menu was really nice, and I decided to go for the maximum score on middle-class lunch bingo by ordering a salad with black olives, rocket, sun-dried tomatoes, quinoa and halloumi. It was rather nice though. The lemon juice was the swinger for me.
From here we decided to take a walk down by the lake, like you do. It was another stonkingly nice day and the kids were beginning to think we were lying when we said it always rains in the Lake District. Well, it always has every other time I’ve been. There must be something wrong about this week.
On the way down the lakeside I tried to grab a couple of caches. I found one trad but then somehow managed to DNF a virtual. Quite a few people do, apparently, because the requisite item is quite well hidden, and, if you’re like me, you’re trying to fit in a few sneaky caches while the others aren’t looking.
Anyways, as you can see from the photos the weather could easily be described as “grand” again.
On the way back past the theatre the girls grabbed ice creams, and we then went and parked up in the centre of town again to go for a quick wander around the shops.
We didn’t really get anything except for some pie and two small cakes off a bloke in the market. That’ll do us for tea then. The pie in question was a traditional northern English affair, a big flat tinfoil tray containing a fully pastry-enclosed mince-and-onion, thankyou very much. Once we’d driven back to the log cabin I then had to scoot out again to fill my car up with diesel and also to get those northern essentials to go with pie – mushy peas and gravy. OK, so I’m the only one that actually likes mushy peas, and I’m the most southerly of the lot apart from Ami, but the point had to be made.
And that was more or less it for the day. Denise and Dave set off home in the early evening to give themselves time to get back while it was still daylight. The rest of us chilled for a bit and went to bed earlyish.
by Kevin | Jun 1, 2016
Our third day in the Lakes, and our second full day. Today was planned to be somewhat easier going than the previous day, as we were waiting for Nana and Grandad to come over from Whitburn.
We started off with a fairly leisurely breakfast. Well, three of us did. Kas started off with an early breakfast and a run, as she often does.
We then went for another wander down to the side of the River Greta for a bit more stone skimming and general mucking about to fill the time.
Once Kas was back I stole an hour or so to go and do a couple of caches up at Castlerigg Stone Circle.
When Nana and Grandad arrived it was already getting on towards late morning so we decided to head straight out for our daytime appointment. We’d decided to go catch a boat on Ullswater. There are a couple of services that run regularly during the day between Aira Force and Glenridding. We hadn’t booked, we just decided to play it by ear. The place we arrived first was the car park at Aira Force, so we parked up and legged it down to the waterside just in time to catch a boat. It was kind of a grey morning compared to the previous days, so the photos aren’t great, but you get the picture.
By the time we got to Glenridding it was definitely lunchtime. Glenridding was hit really badly by Storm Desmond in December 2015 and much of the village centre was flooded. Where we walked to first had evidently suffered very badly as it was right by the stream. The banks were still being rebuilt, in fact, which meant we were initially put off going in any of the cafes because of the building work going on outside. One looked OK through, and once we were inside it was fine, and the food was rather good.
When lunch had finished it was pretty much time to get back on the boat again so we would have the chance to do some walking at Aira Force too.
Aira Force is a place I always seem to go to whenever I go to the Lake District. I think I’ve been there four times now, but each visit was sufficiently far apart that I don’t remember much of the detail from one to the next. The quirk of the trip this year was that people have got into the habit of hammering pennies into various bits of fallen wood by the pathside. I don’t remember that before. It was remarkably easy to do though, once you found an appropriate stone to use as a hammer.
We walked a little way past the waterfall, and I grabbed a couple of caches on the way up. Eventually we reached the “plodging” bit above the waterfall, where we decided to stop for a while and let the girls get their feet wet. OK, I did too.
Back at the bottom, it was time for ice cream while I shot over the road to grab another cache on the path down to the boat jetty. I’d not been able to grab it earlier because of the number of people around.
Nana and Grandad drove back to the log cabin with us and we had a snack-based tea whilst chatting about nothing in particular, and then they shot off home.
After they’d left, and everyone else had gone to bed, I attempted the very difficult job of wrapping up birthday presents without using any sellotape. I had paper, but not sellotape. D’oh! It sort of worked, but only because Ami’s presents neatly fit back into the cardboard box they’d been delivered in.
by Kevin | May 31, 2016
We had an early breakfast and made some sandwiches to take as provisions with us. The weather looked good, or at least as good as you can expect in the Lake District in May, in that it wasn’t raining or snowing. It was bright, and a bit windy.
When Kas was a girl, she apparently made several attempts to walk up Skiddaw with her dad, but never quite made it to the top. Admittedly she was under 9 years old the last time she tried, so not that surprising, I guess. Anyway, on this holiday she was absolutely insistent that we would make it to the top. Both kids seemed keen to give it a go, and we had suitably attired ourselves with a collection of walking boots, many-layered clothes and lightweight waterproofs, so what could possibly go wrong ?
We drove up to the car park at the bottom of Latrigg because it looked like the best place to start. It’s a rough road up but that’s why I got a car with high ground clearance, although I didn’t like the look of the great big channels down the side of the road that the December 2015 floods had made. They are seriously in need of a lorry load of hardcore up there.
The thing about Skiddaw is that it’s quite an easy climb, because there’s a graded path all the way up, but it is considerably steeper at the bottom than at the top. I guess this is true of many UK mountains because most were formed by glaciation. Skiddaw is well known for being generally shaped like an upside-down pudding bowl, except with less pudding.
There’s a route up from the Latrigg Car Park that is cunningly known as the Skiddaw Path. It goes along the flat for a while before ascending at a scary rate on a zig-zag course that can be seen from most of the Keswick area, at least on a clear day. When you get to the top of the steep bit (known as Jenkins’ Hill) you come to a flatter section and you go out of sight of anyone standing in the car park or down in the valley. We had a little break around this point, where we sat in a ditch, ate some snacks and took a few photos. The “sitting in a ditch” part was encouraged by the wind as well as by the fact that it was better sitting there than on a flat bit of grass. It’s quite an impressive view from where we stopped.
After our little rest we plodded up further until we were under the shadow of Skiddaw Little Man, at which point we decided that enough was enough, and we took a five minute breather to get our raincoats out and put them on. Not to keep the rain off, but to keep the wind out. It was getting progressively more windy.
When we eventually reached the top the wind was getting unpleasant. The view from the top is spectacular though. We did the obligatory photograph standing by the trig point and then the girls hid behind a pile of stones to get out of the wind while eating lunch and I wandered 30 yards down the scree to look for a cache. I didn’t find it and eventually retired for lunch.
After lunch I had another pop at the cache and was successful. That’s one of the highest caches I’ve ever found.
From here we decided to head back down rather than try to continue on any further, but we did so by going over the Little Man on the way. It was very windy up there. So windy that I nearly got blown off my feet. At this point, survival instinct kicked in, and we made the wise decision to get downhill as fast as we safely could. The side we were descending was taking the brunt of the rising wind, so it was a very unpleasant walk down for the first couple of hundred metres, and I made the suggestion that we walk down the grassy sides of the path rather than down the path – less likelihood of damage if someone fell over.
When we got down to the bottom, Izzy and me sat in the car for 20 minutes while Kas and Ami went for a repeat walk over to Latrigg. Ami felt upset that she hadn’t made it over there the previous day because she’d been too ill. Today was a different matter.
This meant we’d been out of the log cabin for 7 hours or so, and we decided it was time for holiday rules to come into play. The particular rule that came into play is the one about having to have at least one ice cream every day. We obtained these from the Sawmill Cafe down at the bottom of Dodd Hill. We sat outside in the sunshine getting further sunburnt and regretting our failure to apply sunblock earlier. Sunblock also works as windblock.
Post ice-cream we still had a bit of walking left in us so we did the shortest of the three trails leading into the woods from here. It was only a mile or so around, but it was quite steep and our legs were feeling it a bit after the mountain climbing exploits of earlier. At least it was out of the wind.
From here we went back home to get cleaned up and to do a bit of stone-skimming in the river again. We hadn’t made much of a plan for evening meal so we decided to go out, and taking a recommendation from a brochure in the log cabin we went to the Swinside Inn in the Newlands Valley. It was a lovely evening and we sat and ate outside, partly to enjoy the scenery and partly so the kids didn’t have to sit except for when they were actually eating. I seem to remember Ami wasn’t happy initially because she wasn’t really hungry and didn’t want to have to sit through dinner, but then ordered something quite substantial and ate it all. Must be the fresh air.
And that was more or less it for the day. We drove back home and put the kids to bed, ready for another busy day. For me and Kas there was undoubtedly some beer involved. Or wine.
by Kevin | May 30, 2016
Why did we decide to go on holiday to the Lake District in half term? Firstly, it’s pretty. Secondly, none of us have been there for ages. Thirdly, it was half term. Finally, we were in Liverpool anyway, so we were sort of halfway there already. Ish. And finally, finally, who needs a reason anyway? It’s the Lake District.
So we checked out of our hotel in Liverpool and started to make our way north. We chose to drive through the city centre and head for the M58, because it looked the shortest route. Short doesn’t always mean quick though. It took us an hour to get onto the M6. At least the weather was nice and there was little traffic once we got there.
By the time we’d got through the “nice” bit on the M6 and reached Tebay Services we were ready for a break, so we stopped and grabbed some lunch in the cafe, followed by a half hour of the kids running around like mad things while I walked down the car park to grab a geocache that was conveniently situated in the bottom of a tree. Each to his or her own.
At this rate we were going to arrive far too early to get into our accommodation, a log cabin at Low Briery Holiday Park, but we’d got dressed up in clothes suitable for walking, so we decided to head through Keswick to the car park at the foot of Latrigg and go for a short walk. There was someone from the Girl Guides in the car park selling cakes and drinks. We convinced her we’d buy something when we got back.
Latrigg is a very easy walk from the car park, because once you’re there it’s only about 1km along and 100m up to reach the summit, so little more than a gentle stroll. There’s also now a good gravel path all the way there, so we went that way.
Just on the crest, I noticed there was a cache nearby. The GPS was pointing off down the mountain, so I scrambled down a very steep grassy bank and through some gorse and eventually found a small cache in the top of a tree stump. This holiday should get the average terrain rating for my cache finds up a bit.
Back on the summit, Ami had come over quite ill and needed to get back, so she and Kas started walking back around the gravel path while Izzy and me went back to the very summit for a quick gawp, and then returned over the grassy knoll. Ami was so bad, and moving so slowly, that Izzy and me got back first.
We decided at that point that we should get to the accommodation as soon as possible so that Ami could get settled, and by the time we arrived they were happy for us to go into the log cabin. It was small but perfectly formed. There were two bedrooms, a bathroom and a combination lounge-kitchen-diner, plus a small balcony. It was really nicely fitted out.
Ami got herself cleaned up, changed and settled a bit while Kas, me and Izzy were carting stuff up from the car and generally getting bedded in, after which it was time to go buy food. Keswick is the nearest town, so we trusted that there was bound to be a supermarket there somewhere. Indeed there was. It was called Booth’s, a local brand I’d never heard of, but definitely at the upper rather than the lower end of the market. Lots of fresh produce, fruit and posh alcohol, and relatively few crisps and biscuits. So we grabbed enough “stuff” to provision ourselves for a couple of nights, a couple of breakfasts, and some things for lunch the following day.
When we’d done all that, it was time to indulge in the “holiday rules” tradition of getting an ice cream. We found a shop in the centre of town that looked like it was wanting to close (it was nearly 6 pm, after all) and grabbed a few of their finest, which we then ate sitting on a bench.
Back at the log cabin, we decided it was time to do a bit of exploring before bedtime, so we went for a wander around the site to see what was where, and ended up at the north end, where you can walk out onto the side of the River Greta. This proved to be a worthwhile walk, as the river bed is full of interesting geology. The river is one of the ones that flooded very heavily in December 2015, which caused severe damage to many roads, pathways and also to the holiday park we were staying at. They lost a number of the static caravans. They weren’t so static once they were given the opportunity to float. Anyway, the riverbed here is a mass of tangled debris, huge rocks of varying geological origin, and general muck, with remarkably little water (at this time), so it was interesting. It was also a great place to practice skimming stones, or plopping them into the water.
And that was more or less the end of our first day. We didn’t do much in the evening because we’d got a busy day planned for the following day. The weather looked good, so we were planning to hack our way up Skiddaw.
by Kevin | May 29, 2016
Friday Night
Our now annual trip (apparently) to Liverpool for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Half started, as such things often do, with a frantic Friday afternoon and then a busy drive up a motorway. Aside from the fact that it was a fairly typical Friday night on the M6 and we had tea at Norton Canes there’s not a lot to say about the journey.
It was getting a bit late when we arrived at our hotel, the Premier Inn on Albert Dock, and we were ready for getting ourselves sorted. As we checked in we had a bit of a scare as the receptionist commented we’d booked for 4 nights. “No we didn’t. We booked for 3” we said. Then we thought about it for a bit and looked at our confirmation. When we’d booked it, about 9 months previously, it was a speculative booking made with the intention of finding somewhere cheaper at a later date, and we sort of assumed we’d stay until Tuesday rather than rush home, so that we could spend a bit of time in Liverpool. Subsequently we’d obviously booked our holiday in the Lake District (see Up the Lakes) and had evidently forgotten about the Liverpool booking. Not to worry though. We’d booked it on the flexible rate, so we were allowed to just cancel the one night.
I had to drive miles and then walk all the way back to park the car, because the hotels on Albert Dock don’t have their own car parks, and by the time I got back we were ready for a drink, and then bed. Alcohol seemed in order. The bar was open.
Saturday, 5k
Saturday greeted us with a smile a wander over into the Echo Arena to get all our race numbers for the weekend. There were quite a lot of these, as Kas and me were running the half, Ami and me were running the 5k, and all four of us were running the Sunday Extra Mile. That’s a lot of numbers. It was enough to make us ready for breakfast. A Premier Inn breakfast. Mmmmm! Not too much, though. We’ve got running to do.
The Rock ‘n’ Roll series this year decided to add a 5k event into their weekend, and put it on Saturday morning. We would all have run it was it not for the fact that they put an age limit which Izzy was sadly below. We thought that’d be fine, no bother, I can understand, and all that, until we got into running the race itself, and we saw the considerable number of runners who were shorter than Ami. Now I know that’s not always a good marker, but Ami is quite small for a 12-year-old, and the race’s age limit for the race was 11. Some of the runners were a full head shorter in height than Ami. It’s unlikely they were 11.
On the way to the start line we met a bunch of ladies dressed as Minions, with a token Gru thrown in for good measure.
Still, what do we care, huh? Except that Izzy being unable to race meant that someone had to stay with her. Ami and me both did quite well though. Ami shot round in about 28 minutes, which is the fastest she’d run a 5km distance in ages. She obviously enjoyed the sea air and the flat course. And the smell of a medal at the end. It was quite impressive to finish inside the Arena, with the lights down and loud music playing, but I’m not sure it made us run faster, as we’d finished by then, as it were.
The rest of the day disappeared in a fit of not really being bothered. I think we had lunch in Costa right next to the hotel, and then we mooched about a bit whilst being generally not bothered. I had sort of planned to do a bit of caching, but was unable to persuade either child to come with me, so I left all three girls in the hotel room on the strict instruction that mummy was to be left alone for a snooze. Yeah, like that’ll happen.
From the hotel I walked along the side of the Mersey in the upstream direction until I reached the Chung Ku restaurant. I was finding most of the caches I tried on this stretch, albeit there were many anyway. At the restaurant I had my first failure, and also noticed the time. As it happens, I was getting rather hot and thirsty too. So I turned and started walking back towards the docks along Sefton Road. This isn’t the most inspiring of walks, but I did find a couple more caches on the way, and it is a proverbially straight route into the heart of town.
In the evening Kas had arranged for us to meet up with a largish group from the various running clubs we’re in at a Pizza Express in Liverpool One. It was a pizza. As we had the kids with us, they were kind enough to serve us in advance of everyone else and bill us separately, which was good, because the rest of the party was still just finishing their starters by the time we left, and as it was well gone nine o’clock, we really needed to get off and get the kids to bed.
A Swift Half, with a Chaser
Sunday morning started warmer than Saturday, and it stayed that way. Not ideal conditions for running, but ho hum, we’re here now.
We had a swift Premier Inn breakfast again and then got ourselves prepped up and out of the door ready to find the McGreals, who had kindly volunteered to look after the girls for us while we were running. By the time we’d all met up and handed over control of the daughters it was pretty much time to get into the starting pens.
And then we had to run a half marathon. Kas did well. I didn’t. I got round, but it wasn’t pleasant, and it did some damage to my already heavily battered running mojo. I hadn’t really been training and I didn’t really enjoy the MK Half I’d done at the start of May. So whilst I enjoyed the experience of visiting the city, and I love the event, this particular race has to get filed under “experiences to be forgotten” – Move along now, nothing to talk about here.
By the time I got back, Kas had managed to find time to put the kids through a couple of years of schooling. I felt like death warmed up, so I’m afraid I excused myself for a while and went for a lie down on the bed in our hotel while the girls enjoyed some sunshine. I couldn’t manage, and anyway I’d still got to get myself up and about to run a further mile in the afternoon. Why oh why oh why ?
When I got to the start of the extra mile, having met up with the girls again, I have to say that I wasn’t looking forward to it at all. When I started the race it would be generous to describe me as “running” – everything hurt and I was right stiff after the race in the morning. I thought I’d end up walking, and I told the girls to just get a move on and leave me behind. They did. Ami shot off like a greyhound and Kas and Izzy got well in front of me quite quickly too. As we were running along the main road though, I started to loosen up a bit and ended up running a decent speed, despite having finished the half marathon at walking pace and with frequent cramps (yes, I’m that unfit). In the end I finished the extra mile in less than 10 minutes, which is faster than all but 2 of the 13 I’d done in the morning, and I felt quite pleased with myself. I also got another medal to add to the collection.
The end of the extra mile signalled the end of the running for the weekend, and therefore officially the start of “holiday rules” – as a family we have a set of ethical and behavioural guidelines (1) that apply on any day that is arbitrarily nominated as a holiday. We’d nominated the rest of the week, what with us going up to the Lake District and everything, so the start of holiday rules for a whole six days was most welcome.
(1) OK, so there’s only one mandatory rule (about having ice cream every day), and the others get made up as we go along. I think there’s one about adults having beer or wine, and another about the kids staying up late.
It was getting late enough for us to go partake of the things that the Rock ‘n’ Roll events are most famous for – live music and free beer, and in the case of every trip we’ve made to Liverpool, sunshine. We walked (hobbled/shuffled – take your pick) over to the Arena, where they set up a big stage and get various live bands to play over the course of the afternoon.
We were around at the stage through most of The Velveteins and all of Cast, and I made my way through more than one of the beers. Izzy seemed to enjoy it too. Ami got a bit bored, tired and sun-stroked though, so she wandered back to the hotel on her own and had a lie down in the bed. Wimp ! I would never do that. Oh, wait….
There was a point where all three of us sort of fizzled a bit and decided to give up, especially as we’d got an evening meal date somewhere and we all needed to get cleaned up. So we jacked it in and went to reunite with Ami. She was there, in the room, where she’d promised. Good.
For dinner we met up with a substantial group of others from Redway Runners at a small Italian restaurant in the centre of town. It was basic but pleasant and the food was good. I was rather tired though. Ami was still suffering and kept going outside for fresh air.
We didn’t stay too long into the evening, because to be honest, more than one of us had had enough by about 9 pm, and just wanted to be asleep.
It had been a busy old weekend, and we’d got some driving to do the following day to get ourselves up north.
Caches found over the weekend were :
by Kevin | May 27, 2016
Friday Night
Our now annual trip (apparently) to Liverpool for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Half started, as such things often do, with a frantic Friday afternoon and then a busy drive up a motorway. Aside from the fact that it was a fairly typical Friday night on the M6 and we had tea at Norton Canes there’s not a lot to say about the journey.
It was getting a bit late when we arrived at our hotel, the Premier Inn on Albert Dock, and we were ready for getting ourselves sorted. As we checked in we had a bit of a scare as the receptionist commented we’d booked for 4 nights. “No we didn’t. We booked for 3” we said. Then we thought about it for a bit and looked at our confirmation. When we’d booked it, about 9 months previously, it was a speculative booking made with the intention of finding somewhere cheaper at a later date, and we sort of assumed we’d stay until Tuesday rather than rush home, so that we could spend a bit of time in Liverpool. Subsequently we’d obviously booked our holiday in the Lake District (see Up the Lakes) and had evidently forgotten about the Liverpool booking. Not to worry though. We’d booked it on the flexible rate, so we were allowed to just cancel the one night.
I had to drive miles and then walk all the way back to park the car, because the hotels on Albert Dock don’t have their own car parks, and by the time I got back we were ready for a drink, and then bed. Alcohol seemed in order. The bar was open.
Saturday, 5k
Saturday greeted us with a smile a wander over into the Echo Arena to get all our race numbers for the weekend. There were quite a lot of these, as Kas and me were running the half, Ami and me were running the 5k, and all four of us were running the Sunday Extra Mile. That’s a lot of numbers. It was enough to make us ready for breakfast. A Premier Inn breakfast. Mmmmm! Not too much, though. We’ve got running to do.
The Rock ‘n’ Roll series this year decided to add a 5k event into their weekend, and put it on Saturday morning. We would all have run it was it not for the fact that they put an age limit which Izzy was sadly below. We thought that’d be fine, no bother, I can understand, and all that, until we got into running the race itself, and we saw the considerable number of runners who were shorter than Ami. Now I know that’s not always a good marker, but Ami is quite small for a 12-year-old, and the race’s age limit for the race was 11. Some of the runners were a full head shorter in height than Ami. It’s unlikely they were 11.
On the way to the start line we met a bunch of ladies dressed as Minions, with a token Gru thrown in for good measure.
Still, what do we care, huh? Except that Izzy being unable to race meant that someone had to stay with her. Ami and me both did quite well though. Ami shot round in about 28 minutes, which is the fastest she’d run a 5km distance in ages. She obviously enjoyed the sea air and the flat course. And the smell of a medal at the end. It was quite impressive to finish inside the Arena, with the lights down and loud music playing, but I’m not sure it made us run faster, as we’d finished by then, as it were.
The rest of the day disappeared in a fit of not really being bothered. I think we had lunch in Costa right next to the hotel, and then we mooched about a bit whilst being generally not bothered. I had sort of planned to do a bit of caching, but was unable to persuade either child to come with me, so I left all three girls in the hotel room on the strict instruction that mummy was to be left alone for a snooze. Yeah, like that’ll happen.
From the hotel I walked along the side of the Mersey in the upstream direction until I reached the Chung Ku restaurant. I was finding most of the caches I tried on this stretch, albeit there were many anyway. At the restaurant I had my first failure, and also noticed the time. As it happens, I was getting rather hot and thirsty too. So I turned and started walking back towards the docks along Sefton Road. This isn’t the most inspiring of walks, but I did find a couple more caches on the way, and it is a proverbially straight route into the heart of town.
In the evening Kas had arranged for us to meet up with a largish group from the various running clubs we’re in at a Pizza Express in Liverpool One. It was a pizza. As we had the kids with us, they were kind enough to serve us in advance of everyone else and bill us separately, which was good, because the rest of the party was still just finishing their starters by the time we left, and as it was well gone nine o’clock, we really needed to get off and get the kids to bed.
A Swift Half, with a Chaser
Sunday morning started warmer than Saturday, and it stayed that way. Not ideal conditions for running, but ho hum, we’re here now.
We had a swift Premier Inn breakfast again and then got ourselves prepped up and out of the door ready to find the McGreals, who had kindly volunteered to look after the girls for us while we were running. By the time we’d all met up and handed over control of the daughters it was pretty much time to get into the starting pens.
And then we had to run a half marathon. Kas did well. I didn’t. I got round, but it wasn’t pleasant, and it did some damage to my already heavily battered running mojo. I hadn’t really been training and I didn’t really enjoy the MK Half I’d done at the start of May. So whilst I enjoyed the experience of visiting the city, and I love the event, this particular race has to get filed under “experiences to be forgotten” – Move along now, nothing to talk about here.
By the time I got back, Kas had managed to find time to put the kids through a couple of years of schooling. I felt like death warmed up, so I’m afraid I excused myself for a while and went for a lie down on the bed in our hotel while the girls enjoyed some sunshine. I couldn’t manage, and anyway I’d still got to get myself up and about to run a further mile in the afternoon. Why oh why oh why ?
When I got to the start of the extra mile, having met up with the girls again, I have to say that I wasn’t looking forward to it at all. When I started the race it would be generous to describe me as “running” – everything hurt and I was right stiff after the race in the morning. I thought I’d end up walking, and I told the girls to just get a move on and leave me behind. They did. Ami shot off like a greyhound and Kas and Izzy got well in front of me quite quickly too. As we were running along the main road though, I started to loosen up a bit and ended up running a decent speed, despite having finished the half marathon at walking pace and with frequent cramps (yes, I’m that unfit). In the end I finished the extra mile in less than 10 minutes, which is faster than all but 2 of the 13 I’d done in the morning, and I felt quite pleased with myself. I also got another medal to add to the collection.
The end of the extra mile signalled the end of the running for the weekend, and therefore officially the start of “holiday rules” – as a family we have a set of ethical and behavioural guidelines (1) that apply on any day that is arbitrarily nominated as a holiday. We’d nominated the rest of the week, what with us going up to the Lake District and everything, so the start of holiday rules for a whole six days was most welcome.
(1) OK, so there’s only one mandatory rule (about having ice cream every day), and the others get made up as we go along. I think there’s one about adults having beer or wine, and another about the kids staying up late.
It was getting late enough for us to go partake of the things that the Rock ‘n’ Roll events are most famous for – live music and free beer, and in the case of every trip we’ve made to Liverpool, sunshine. We walked (hobbled/shuffled – take your pick) over to the Arena, where they set up a big stage and get various live bands to play over the course of the afternoon.
We were around at the stage through most of The Velveteins and all of Cast, and I made my way through more than one of the beers. Izzy seemed to enjoy it too. Ami got a bit bored, tired and sun-stroked though, so she wandered back to the hotel on her own and had a lie down in the bed. Wimp ! I would never do that. Oh, wait….
There was a point where all three of us sort of fizzled a bit and decided to give up, especially as we’d got an evening meal date somewhere and we all needed to get cleaned up. So we jacked it in and went to reunite with Ami. She was there, in the room, where she’d promised. Good.
For dinner we met up with a substantial group of others from Redway Runners at a small Italian restaurant in the centre of town. It was basic but pleasant and the food was good. I was rather tired though. Ami was still suffering and kept going outside for fresh air.
We didn’t stay too long into the evening, because to be honest, more than one of us had had enough by about 9 pm, and just wanted to be asleep.
It had been a busy old weekend, and we’d got some driving to do the following day to get ourselves up north.
Caches found over the weekend were :
Why did we decide to go on holiday to the Lake District in half term? Firstly, it’s pretty. Secondly, none of us have been there for ages. Thirdly, it was half term. Finally, we were in Liverpool anyway, so we were sort of halfway there already. Ish. And finally, finally, who needs a reason anyway? It’s the Lake District.
So we checked out of our hotel in Liverpool and started to make our way north. We chose to drive through the city centre and head for the M58, because it looked the shortest route. Short doesn’t always mean quick though. It took us an hour to get onto the M6. At least the weather was nice and there was little traffic once we got there.
By the time we’d got through the “nice” bit on the M6 and reached Tebay Services we were ready for a break, so we stopped and grabbed some lunch in the cafe, followed by a half hour of the kids running around like mad things while I walked down the car park to grab a geocache that was conveniently situated in the bottom of a tree. Each to his or her own.
At this rate we were going to arrive far too early to get into our accommodation, a log cabin at Low Briery Holiday Park, but we’d got dressed up in clothes suitable for walking, so we decided to head through Keswick to the car park at the foot of Latrigg and go for a short walk. There was someone from the Girl Guides in the car park selling cakes and drinks. We convinced her we’d buy something when we got back.
Latrigg is a very easy walk from the car park, because once you’re there it’s only about 1km along and 100m up to reach the summit, so little more than a gentle stroll. There’s also now a good gravel path all the way there, so we went that way.
Just on the crest, I noticed there was a cache nearby. The GPS was pointing off down the mountain, so I scrambled down a very steep grassy bank and through some gorse and eventually found a small cache in the top of a tree stump. This holiday should get the average terrain rating for my cache finds up a bit.
Back on the summit, Ami had come over quite ill and needed to get back, so she and Kas started walking back around the gravel path while Izzy and me went back to the very summit for a quick gawp, and then returned over the grassy knoll. Ami was so bad, and moving so slowly, that Izzy and me got back first.
We decided at that point that we should get to the accommodation as soon as possible so that Ami could get settled, and by the time we arrived they were happy for us to go into the log cabin. It was small but perfectly formed. There were two bedrooms, a bathroom and a combination lounge-kitchen-diner, plus a small balcony. It was really nicely fitted out.
Ami got herself cleaned up, changed and settled a bit while Kas, me and Izzy were carting stuff up from the car and generally getting bedded in, after which it was time to go buy food. Keswick is the nearest town, so we trusted that there was bound to be a supermarket there somewhere. Indeed there was. It was called Booth’s, a local brand I’d never heard of, but definitely at the upper rather than the lower end of the market. Lots of fresh produce, fruit and posh alcohol, and relatively few crisps and biscuits. So we grabbed enough “stuff” to provision ourselves for a couple of nights, a couple of breakfasts, and some things for lunch the following day.
When we’d done all that, it was time to indulge in the “holiday rules” tradition of getting an ice cream. We found a shop in the centre of town that looked like it was wanting to close (it was nearly 6 pm, after all) and grabbed a few of their finest, which we then ate sitting on a bench.
Back at the log cabin, we decided it was time to do a bit of exploring before bedtime, so we went for a wander around the site to see what was where, and ended up at the north end, where you can walk out onto the side of the River Greta. This proved to be a worthwhile walk, as the river bed is full of interesting geology. The river is one of the ones that flooded very heavily in December 2015, which caused severe damage to many roads, pathways and also to the holiday park we were staying at. They lost a number of the static caravans. They weren’t so static once they were given the opportunity to float. Anyway, the riverbed here is a mass of tangled debris, huge rocks of varying geological origin, and general muck, with remarkably little water (at this time), so it was interesting. It was also a great place to practice skimming stones, or plopping them into the water.
And that was more or less the end of our first day. We didn’t do much in the evening because we’d got a busy day planned for the following day. The weather looked good, so we were planning to hack our way up Skiddaw.
We had an early breakfast and made some sandwiches to take as provisions with us. The weather looked good, or at least as good as you can expect in the Lake District in May, in that it wasn’t raining or snowing. It was bright, and a bit windy.
When Kas was a girl, she apparently made several attempts to walk up Skiddaw with her dad, but never quite made it to the top. Admittedly she was under 9 years old the last time she tried, so not that surprising, I guess. Anyway, on this holiday she was absolutely insistent that we would make it to the top. Both kids seemed keen to give it a go, and we had suitably attired ourselves with a collection of walking boots, many-layered clothes and lightweight waterproofs, so what could possibly go wrong ?
We drove up to the car park at the bottom of Latrigg because it looked like the best place to start. It’s a rough road up but that’s why I got a car with high ground clearance, although I didn’t like the look of the great big channels down the side of the road that the December 2015 floods had made. They are seriously in need of a lorry load of hardcore up there.
The thing about Skiddaw is that it’s quite an easy climb, because there’s a graded path all the way up, but it is considerably steeper at the bottom than at the top. I guess this is true of many UK mountains because most were formed by glaciation. Skiddaw is well known for being generally shaped like an upside-down pudding bowl, except with less pudding.
There’s a route up from the Latrigg Car Park that is cunningly known as the Skiddaw Path. It goes along the flat for a while before ascending at a scary rate on a zig-zag course that can be seen from most of the Keswick area, at least on a clear day. When you get to the top of the steep bit (known as Jenkins’ Hill) you come to a flatter section and you go out of sight of anyone standing in the car park or down in the valley. We had a little break around this point, where we sat in a ditch, ate some snacks and took a few photos. The “sitting in a ditch” part was encouraged by the wind as well as by the fact that it was better sitting there than on a flat bit of grass. It’s quite an impressive view from where we stopped.
After our little rest we plodded up further until we were under the shadow of Skiddaw Little Man, at which point we decided that enough was enough, and we took a five minute breather to get our raincoats out and put them on. Not to keep the rain off, but to keep the wind out. It was getting progressively more windy.
When we eventually reached the top the wind was getting unpleasant. The view from the top is spectacular though. We did the obligatory photograph standing by the trig point and then the girls hid behind a pile of stones to get out of the wind while eating lunch and I wandered 30 yards down the scree to look for a cache. I didn’t find it and eventually retired for lunch.
After lunch I had another pop at the cache and was successful. That’s one of the highest caches I’ve ever found.
From here we decided to head back down rather than try to continue on any further, but we did so by going over the Little Man on the way. It was very windy up there. So windy that I nearly got blown off my feet. At this point, survival instinct kicked in, and we made the wise decision to get downhill as fast as we safely could. The side we were descending was taking the brunt of the rising wind, so it was a very unpleasant walk down for the first couple of hundred metres, and I made the suggestion that we walk down the grassy sides of the path rather than down the path – less likelihood of damage if someone fell over.
When we got down to the bottom, Izzy and me sat in the car for 20 minutes while Kas and Ami went for a repeat walk over to Latrigg. Ami felt upset that she hadn’t made it over there the previous day because she’d been too ill. Today was a different matter.
This meant we’d been out of the log cabin for 7 hours or so, and we decided it was time for holiday rules to come into play. The particular rule that came into play is the one about having to have at least one ice cream every day. We obtained these from the Sawmill Cafe down at the bottom of Dodd Hill. We sat outside in the sunshine getting further sunburnt and regretting our failure to apply sunblock earlier. Sunblock also works as windblock.
Post ice-cream we still had a bit of walking left in us so we did the shortest of the three trails leading into the woods from here. It was only a mile or so around, but it was quite steep and our legs were feeling it a bit after the mountain climbing exploits of earlier. At least it was out of the wind.
From here we went back home to get cleaned up and to do a bit of stone-skimming in the river again. We hadn’t made much of a plan for evening meal so we decided to go out, and taking a recommendation from a brochure in the log cabin we went to the Swinside Inn in the Newlands Valley. It was a lovely evening and we sat and ate outside, partly to enjoy the scenery and partly so the kids didn’t have to sit except for when they were actually eating. I seem to remember Ami wasn’t happy initially because she wasn’t really hungry and didn’t want to have to sit through dinner, but then ordered something quite substantial and ate it all. Must be the fresh air.
And that was more or less it for the day. We drove back home and put the kids to bed, ready for another busy day. For me and Kas there was undoubtedly some beer involved. Or wine.
Our third day in the Lakes, and our second full day. Today was planned to be somewhat easier going than the previous day, as we were waiting for Nana and Grandad to come over from Whitburn.
We started off with a fairly leisurely breakfast. Well, three of us did. Kas started off with an early breakfast and a run, as she often does.
We then went for another wander down to the side of the River Greta for a bit more stone skimming and general mucking about to fill the time.
Once Kas was back I stole an hour or so to go and do a couple of caches up at Castlerigg Stone Circle.
When Nana and Grandad arrived it was already getting on towards late morning so we decided to head straight out for our daytime appointment. We’d decided to go catch a boat on Ullswater. There are a couple of services that run regularly during the day between Aira Force and Glenridding. We hadn’t booked, we just decided to play it by ear. The place we arrived first was the car park at Aira Force, so we parked up and legged it down to the waterside just in time to catch a boat. It was kind of a grey morning compared to the previous days, so the photos aren’t great, but you get the picture.
By the time we got to Glenridding it was definitely lunchtime. Glenridding was hit really badly by Storm Desmond in December 2015 and much of the village centre was flooded. Where we walked to first had evidently suffered very badly as it was right by the stream. The banks were still being rebuilt, in fact, which meant we were initially put off going in any of the cafes because of the building work going on outside. One looked OK through, and once we were inside it was fine, and the food was rather good.
When lunch had finished it was pretty much time to get back on the boat again so we would have the chance to do some walking at Aira Force too.
Aira Force is a place I always seem to go to whenever I go to the Lake District. I think I’ve been there four times now, but each visit was sufficiently far apart that I don’t remember much of the detail from one to the next. The quirk of the trip this year was that people have got into the habit of hammering pennies into various bits of fallen wood by the pathside. I don’t remember that before. It was remarkably easy to do though, once you found an appropriate stone to use as a hammer.
We walked a little way past the waterfall, and I grabbed a couple of caches on the way up. Eventually we reached the “plodging” bit above the waterfall, where we decided to stop for a while and let the girls get their feet wet. OK, I did too.
Back at the bottom, it was time for ice cream while I shot over the road to grab another cache on the path down to the boat jetty. I’d not been able to grab it earlier because of the number of people around.
Nana and Grandad drove back to the log cabin with us and we had a snack-based tea whilst chatting about nothing in particular, and then they shot off home.
After they’d left, and everyone else had gone to bed, I attempted the very difficult job of wrapping up birthday presents without using any sellotape. I had paper, but not sellotape. D’oh! It sort of worked, but only because Ami’s presents neatly fit back into the cardboard box they’d been delivered in.
Ahhhh! The 2nd of June. The day that saw both of our little balls of energy come into the world. Not on the same day, you understand – they gave us a three year gap in between – but they were indeed both born on June 2nd.
The early part of the day was spent with both girls opening the presents that I’d very neatly wrapped without the aid of sellotape the previous evening. Izzy got a new iPod Touch to add to the bike she wanted (and had received a few weeks earlier). Ami wanted a bunch of Star Wars bobbleheads, and then kept a tight grip on monetary gifts so she could have a fun shopping day in London on the weekend that me and Izzy were in Valenciennes.
After the present opening ceremony we got dressed for the now ritual trip down to the riverside for skimming stones and plopping rocks. We had a little while to kill before Denise and Dave arrived from Whitburn, so there was time for a bit of that.
Once Denise and Dave did arrive it was getting towards lunchtime, so we decided to head out down to the side of Derwent Water and camped ourselves down in a very nice cafe at the Theatre by the Lake. The menu was really nice, and I decided to go for the maximum score on middle-class lunch bingo by ordering a salad with black olives, rocket, sun-dried tomatoes, quinoa and halloumi. It was rather nice though. The lemon juice was the swinger for me.
From here we decided to take a walk down by the lake, like you do. It was another stonkingly nice day and the kids were beginning to think we were lying when we said it always rains in the Lake District. Well, it always has every other time I’ve been. There must be something wrong about this week.
On the way down the lakeside I tried to grab a couple of caches. I found one trad but then somehow managed to DNF a virtual. Quite a few people do, apparently, because the requisite item is quite well hidden, and, if you’re like me, you’re trying to fit in a few sneaky caches while the others aren’t looking.
Anyways, as you can see from the photos the weather could easily be described as “grand” again.
On the way back past the theatre the girls grabbed ice creams, and we then went and parked up in the centre of town again to go for a quick wander around the shops.
We didn’t really get anything except for some pie and two small cakes off a bloke in the market. That’ll do us for tea then. The pie in question was a traditional northern English affair, a big flat tinfoil tray containing a fully pastry-enclosed mince-and-onion, thankyou very much. Once we’d driven back to the log cabin I then had to scoot out again to fill my car up with diesel and also to get those northern essentials to go with pie – mushy peas and gravy. OK, so I’m the only one that actually likes mushy peas, and I’m the most southerly of the lot apart from Ami, but the point had to be made.
And that was more or less it for the day. Denise and Dave set off home in the early evening to give themselves time to get back while it was still daylight. The rest of us chilled for a bit and went to bed earlyish.
Our last full day in the Lake District before having to head home, which was a bit of a shame, but the kids only get one week off, so we were scuppered from that perspective. We had to get back home and get some washing through the washing machine. Anyway, that’s all tomorrow.
Back at today, we set off fairly early because Kas wanted to go for a run to recce a bit of the course she is supposed to be running on some madder-than-a-sack-of-monkeys ultra marathon she’s doing in September. The part of the course in question was away on the west side of Skiddaw, so we drove her off there and then went for a bit of a drive looking for a few caches. Well, Izzy and me were looking. Ami was sat in the back of the car playing on her iPad, as she tends to these days. We found a couple of caches in pretty good locations. Here’s the view from one of them.
When it was about time, we drove round to our assigned pickup point and found a convenient parking spot but therein began the problems. We had absolutely no phone signal where we were parked and assumed Kas didn’t either, so we couldn’t see where she was on Glympse and nor could we phone her.
Anyway, we sat waiting for 15-20 minutes with me getting increasingly disturbed about Kas being late. There was some nervous pacing about going on. But eventually Kas rolled up, having discovered that fell running is a little slower than running on roads, due to the uneven terrain, and the having-to-navigate. She’d ducked a chunk of her planned route on the basis that she was taking far longer than planned, so she cut short and run up to meet us along the road, which was not a direction I was expecting her to come from.
We drove over to the The Old Sawmill Tearoom for a quick change and to grab a handful of cold drinks to take with us, and then we set off for our main event of the day – the walk up Cat Bells. This is more of a family-friendly mountain than some of the others nearby, being only modest in height and having a decent quality path most of the way up. It certainly is a well-trodden path.
When we reached the top it was well into lunchtime, so we sat for a break and some well earned nosh. It was another fan-dabby-tastic day for the weather and the view from the top is pretty darn good.
We were doing (well, I was doing) a few caches on the walk around – just those we passed within 100m of – which added up to eight or so on the walk. Most were easy. The one down the side of the hill in the ruined shepherd’s hut surrounded by bracken was not so easy. Ami came with me to that one. From the summit we lurched over the back a little bit and then descended a path down to the shore of Derwent Water. We’d been walking for a while so the first thing we did at the lakeshore was to whip our shoes and socks off and cool our feet down in the lake water. The water was refreshing.
By the time we got back to where we’d parked time was moving on a bit and the ice cream stand was shut, which we obviously count as a total failure. We therefore drove into the middle of Keswick, safe in the knowledge we’d find something there. What we found was the really rather nice Bar Metro. It was a very small but perfectly formed mock American diner, serving a selection of American favourites, plus beer and massive milkshakes. Perfect pick-me-up food after a day of walking up and down mountains.
As we had an appointment with the motorway system the following day, and planned to do some more walking, we got home quite early, packed our bags, and went to bed. The end of another day filled with fresh air, sunshine, and mountains.
We got out of the log cabin quite early, having decided not to bother with parkrun. On the agenda today we had a bit more walking followed by a drive down to the East Midlands. First up though, we drove into Keswick to find a local sandwich shop and get ourselves tooled up for the day.
We drove from Keswick down the recently reopened A591. This was badly hit by the floods in December 2015, the result of which was the loss of significant stretches of the road on this section. It only opened about two weeks before we drove down it, and there were obvious signs of rebuilding everywhere.
We drove down into Ambleside and then headed up Langdale for our walking. On the cards was a walk up to Stickle Tarn and a potential climb up one or more of the surrounding peaks.
We parked up in a car park that I’m sure wasn’t there when Kas and I came in 2004, and headed off up the somewhat improved paths up the mountain.
It took us a while to climb up as it was pretty steep. We kept needing to take a break, however that was fine, because having a break means having to turn around and enjoy the scenery.
When we got up to the tarn it was lunchtime, so we found a good spot on the grass and ate the sandwiches we’d bought in Keswick earlier in the day.
After lunch we’d regained some strength and enough confidence to go for a climb up a mountain.. We weren’t quite sure how many mountains we’d manage, but we decided to head initially for Pavey Ark, and then see how we felt at the top. We had to walk all the way around the tarn to get to the path up the mountain. When we found the path it looked quite unappetizing. It was kind of steep and would be classed as a scramble rather than a walk. I didn’t enjoy looking back down, and I wasn’t particularly keen on walking back down that way either.
At the top, the view was spectacular. You could see a long way as it was another clear and quite sunny day. It’s also quite a long way up.
Time was marching on so decided not to attempt any other mountains, but just to head back down instead. To get back down again we decided to follow a path that was marked on Kas’s Ordnance Survey app but wasn’t on my Garmin OS maps with Open Street Map overlay. Hmmm ! I think my maps won. There wasn’t a path there. Thankfully there was a series of gently sideways slopes we could walk down until we reached the stream bottom, and were then able to follow the stream around to the tarn and the place we’d headed off up the scramble on the way up. We know for next time, if there is a next time.
We failed to get ice creams at the NT property at the bottom of the mountain, so we decided to drive into Ambleside instead.
We parked up in a big car park near the centre and walked just a couple of hundred yards up into the town to grab an ide cream. There was a cunningly placed streetside wagon thingy selling locally made ice cream. Izzy also wanted to buy a souvenir. It was quite late in the afternoon so most places were shut already. The best we could manage was a small place right over the road. It didn’t stock very much, but Izzy eventually decided on a scarf (for some reason) and Ami didn’t really seem bothered about anything.
We drove home alongside Windermere and then past Kendal and straight home down the M6. We stopped at Knutsford Services on the way down for some tea and then drove round to my folks place in Measham to spend the night.
It had been a good week overall, especially with the weather. We’d got the kids interested in a new sport of walking up Wainwrights. Kas had done a few runs and I’d found a handful of caches in some lovely locations. It also reawakened my love of the Lake District after many years of not visiting.
by Kevin | Oct 24, 2015
What’s that about then ?
Kas entered the 2015 Snowdonia Marathon. It’s not in our nature to split up for events like this – we prefer to have a weekend away and call it a mini-holiday, if only so that the Gardner Family Holiday Rules (1) apply. This, therefore, obliged us to go and have a long weekend in Snowdonia.
(1) The main rule that applies is the one about having ice cream every day.
Friday Night
Well, it was a Friday night, wasn’t it ? A Friday night that heralded the start of the kids’ half term break too, thus meaning that seemingly every single person who ever lived was in their car and attempting to get somewhere else.
We started off on our usual route north, up the M1 and M6 and stopped at the services on the M6 Toll to grab something to eat. From here things went a bit wrong. We’d heard somewhere along the way that the top of the M6 was a mess, so we decided to bypass it by heading up the A41 through Whitchurch and joining the A55 near Chester. This part proved to be very slow, as it’s single track, it was dark, and the road is heavily used by lorries and farm vehicles, even at night. At least we were actually moving though.
The A55 was OK until we started getting near Llandudno, at which point we joined the back of a massive queue. Kas managed to successfully re-route us through the middle of Conwy, which allowed us to bypass a couple of junctions on the A55, and hence allowed us to skip past about 5 miles of queue. When we got back onto the main road the traffic wasn’t too bad, and we soon picked up speed and got to our required junction – the road down to Llanberis. We were staying at the Padarn Hotel in central Llanberis. Car parking was a bit of a joke, partly because they accept dinner guests who aren’t staying at the hotel, but we eventually just abandoned the car and got into our room. It was late and Kas had to be up quite early in the morning. If they needed the car moving they could come and ask us. The room was quite basic (especially the bathroom) but fairly spacious. It wasn’t very warm though, apparently because October in Snowdonia isn’t really counted as winter. It wasn’t warm enough to sit comfortably in the room, even with a jumper on. Ho hum ! We’re here now, and there’s nowhere else in town we could go, especially seeing as we’d already paid to stay here.
Saturday Morning. The Race is On.
Saturday greeted us with wet weather. “Il pleut des chats et des chiens” as they say in France.
Kas had to be over the road at the Electric Mountain Visitor Centre quite early to get herself registered. We all went over with her and mooched about a bit while she did the doings. The start was a couple of hundred metres away on the main road, but the weather wasn’t fit for any significant amount of standing around outside, so we spent a while milling around and we shot around the back to grab the webcam geocache in the rear garden ( Mole says “Stick ’em up” 2 ). This is a venerable old beast set up in 2005, and one of only a handful of webcam caches left in the UK. It took us a couple of goes to get ourselves into shot, but we did get into shot. One of the reasons it took a while is that the iPhone screen isn’t quite so sensitive as it ought to be when it’s covered in water.
Once it got round to a sensible time we decided to just leave Kas in the Visitor Centre and head off. The kids were getting decidedly bored.
We chose to walk the half a mile or so over to the National Slate Museum, where we were treated to a selection of fine-grained-foliated-homogeneous-metamorphic-rock-based experiences including historical films, pictorial displays, bits of old equipment and a demonstration of the fine art of making roof tiles, all of which was quite interesting and was significantly enhanced by being mainly indoors. There was also a cafe. It had cake.
By the time we were finished the weather had cleared a bit and it wasn’t actually raining any more.
From here we crossed back into Llanberis and then walked up the hill to the Ceunant Mawr Waterfall, which is the site of an Earthcache as well as being photogenic. The only downside is that you have to cross over the lines of the Snowdon Mountain Railway to get to the viewing point. It’s not that the tracks are massively busy, but there isn’t a lot of room on the viewing platform should you just happen to get stuck there when a train is coming down (or going up).
By this time Kas had been going long enough to have made a decent attempt at it, so we returned to the town centre to go and play spot-the-missus. We walked up and down a bit wondering whether she’d finished yet and where she’d be, and eventually we managed to exchange texts and determine she’d finished ages ago and was mooching about wondering where we were. We ended up meeting halfway up the main street. She’d finished in a pretty impressive time.
Saturday Afternoon
After we’d met up with Kas we did the usual short period of going to our room while Kas got all cleaned up, and then wondered what else we could do on a Saturday afternoon. I was up for a bit of geocaching. The girls didn’t want to, but promised faithfully that they wouldn’t bug Kas, but would leave her alone for a rest and would play on their iPads for a couple of hours.
So off I set back in the general direction of the National Slate Museum again in search of a few caches slightly further up the hillsides. I got to do a bit of challenging walking over some rough ground and generally enjoyed the caching. The weather had improved somewhat by this point too. In no particular order, the caches I found on this stretch were :
After the second one I encountered three familiar figures walking towards me – the girls had forced Kas to go out for a walk. They followed me up to the site of the third cache before deciding that was enough and going back to the hotel again.
The last one was a bit of a pain in the proverbial. It was a three-stage multi, with most of the stages over around by the National Slate Museum, and then a pointer back to the middle of town, where I had to find something based on a hint I couldn’t really understand, which lead me to a final location a good bit further up the street. By the time I got there it was basically dark, after all it was late October.
Once I got back it was getting fairly late and Kas had about had enough, so we walked along the main street and ate at Pete’s Eats, which apparently has a good reputation in the parts. It was basic but good.
Sunday Morning, Up We Go!
Sunday morning greeted us with weather that could be described as a bit iffy. It wasn’t as bad as Saturday, meaning that you could stand outside without any imminent danger of being drowned, but it was grey and quite cold.
Anyway, there was no way Kas was going to walk up Snowdon the day after a marathon, and nor, I suspect, was Izzy, so we’d got some tickets to go up on the train. Buying tickets was problematic as a result of them seemingly have limited windows for selling advance tickets, and hence it being non-trivial to get them. I walked over before we’d had breakfast but then had to return again later, as for some reason they weren’t able to sell me tickets for a train two hours in the future. I can’t remember the excuse.
The train is a good way to get up to the top if you’re not up to the walk, although it’s a bit expensive. One downside (if you’ll pardon the pun) is that you have to tie yourself to a particular return journey too, because there’s not enough of a service to allow everyone to just stack up for the last train, if you see what I mean. As a result, you get a fixed amount of time at the top, and it isn’t very long bearing in mind how busy everything is up there.
When we got to the top we were greeted with a bit of a white-out. There are a couple of caches at the top, which we duly found. One of them is an earthcache which (we suspect) would be a lot more fun and educational if we could actually have seen some of the surrounding scenery. As it happened, from the trig point on the top you could barely see your way back to the train station, all of 15 yards away. The top was in a cloud, in case you hadn’t guessed. One of them is a virtual, which required the seeking out of some information from inside the cafe, which was most welcome. The YOSM had also been up there at some point in the past. The caches at the top were :
After doing the caches and getting cold and damp, we retired inside, along with seemingly the entire population of Wales. There were lots of people milling around who looked like they’d walked up, and had got very wet and cold doing so. There was a kind of steam floating around in the air and a vaguely unpleasant musty smell.
After a few minutes of deciding we didn’t want to queue there for hot food, we grabbed some snacks and drinks and had a chat about what to do. Ami fancied the walk down, and I did too. I think Kas probably would have too but Izzy wasn’t up for it, so Kas volunteered to take Izzy down on the train so that me and Ami could have the opportunity to try walking down. We figured that a few hundred metres down we’d drop out of the bottom of the cloud and all would be sweetness and light again. The walk down into Llanberis is the longest route, but it’s also the best surfaced, easiest to follow, and has the gentlest gradients. Time estimates seemed to be around 2 hours to get down.
So Ami and me set off to walk down, having first made sure Kas had all the train tickets, so she could offer the spare returns to someone who had walked up but didn’t fancy walking back down again. The top really was very murky and we couldn’t see very far, but the signposting is good and there were plenty of other people going the same way, so we figured it would be fine. It’s not like there were any advisory signs warning people not to attempt the walk. Sure enough, after 10 minutes and one quite steep little scramble over loose rocks, the air started to clear and the route down became very obvious. Our mood picked up a little here and we turned into the proverbial happy wanderers as we picked our way down the gently sloping rocky pathway back to Llanberis. At one point a little train came past us that we think had Kas and Izzy on it, but it was in the murky bit and I don’t think they saw us. Harumph ! Never mind.
One thing that did strike me as odd though, was the number of people who were walking up the mountain while we were walking down. Bear in mind this was the end of October and anyone walking up was almost certainly not going to be able to get a train back down, it seemed quite dangerous. It was well into the afternoon when Ami and me left the top, and it took us nearly two and a half hours to get back to the village, but all the way down we were passing people who looked like they were making an attempt on going all the way up, and were asking us what the path was like and how much further they’d got left to go. I don’t think I ever quite said to any of them “you won’t make it up and down before darkness” as surely they must know they were too late to get to the top, but I was surprised at the number. I was also surprised by the number of people walking up in shorts and trainers and apparently not carrying either food or waterproof clothing. Me and Ami had a couple of drinks each and some chocolate bars at least. Some of the people beginning their ascent didn’t have any bags, so obviously didn’t have anything with them.
When we got back to the bottom, Kas and Izzy were crashed out in the hotel waiting for us to get back.
Sunday Afternoon – The Island
We’d still got a couple of hours of daylight left and it was a bit early for giving up, but none of us fancied walking really, so we decided we’d drive 20 minutes or so and go for a quick gawp at the island of Anglesey and the famous Menai Suspension Bridge. Google satellite view indicated an abundance of parking nearby, so it looked a prime target for a bit of late afternoon gawping. We parked up on the mainland side and legged it all the way across to the island and back, making sure we grabbed a cache on the way over (Bridging the gap (GC20BDQ)).
And that was about it for our Sunday, aside from a quick and quite functional meal in the hotel bar.
Monday Morning, Time to Do a Runner
We were in no particular hurry to get back home because it was half-term, so the kids were off school for the week. We therefore deemed Monday also to be officially a holiday, as far as the consumption of ice cream is concerned. After breakfast at the hotel and a loose bit of planning we set off by driving east from Llanberis and up over some mountainous bits. The views were quite good. I think it was the first time all weekend that we could actually see the summit of Snowdon from down below.
After a couple of photo stops and associated geocaches, we found ourselves heading towards the A5 in the general direction of Betws-y-Coed, where we made a stop to allow for consumption of coffee and cake. We also did a bit of souvenir shopping (at least, the kids did) before we then headed back up the A5 in the direction we’d just come so that we could visit the Swallow Falls. It was pretty busy there but impressive enough to have been worth the visit, as the photos attest.
I Suppose We Ought to Go Home Then
We drove down to Lake Bala for a wee stop and a final bit of admiring the scenery before heading off on a wild drive over the hills in search of a single geocache within the boundaries of Powys. You wouldn’t have thought it would be difficult, what with Powys taking up an area half the size of Wales, but it was surprisingly difficult. All the ones on the edge that I thought were in turned out to be, in fact, out. So we had to drive right into the heart of the county to find one. Powys is probably the least urbanised place I’ve been to in Britain. It’s big, and there’s not much there.
So for the sake of general interest, the caches we found on Monday were :
We got back to civilisation (or back to major roads at least) somewhere near Shrewsbury and then had a very easy drive back around the motorways to get home again. The house was where we’d left it, which is always a bonus.
by Kevin | Oct 5, 2014
Kas booked herself into the Chester marathon earlier in the year and we decided to all go up, on the basis that we were able to persuade my brother to allow us to use his flat near Wrexham over the weekend – he’s back home in Southwell at the weekends.
So off we headed up the M40 with a carload of stuff on Friday night for what proved to be a busy weekend. We made the mistake of thinking that the more direct looking route around Brackley would be quicker. It wasn’t. We then needed to stop for something to eat, so we ducked into Warwick Services for a healthy repast. That wasn’t either. It was burgers, chips, sandwiches and fizzy drinks.
By this time it was totally dark so the rest of the journey was going to have to be done in “darkness” mode. It was probably time the kids went to sleep anyway. They didn’t.
We drove up around the south side of Birmingham, then onto the M54 and along the A41 towards Whitchurch – this looked the best route for a Friday night. It wasn’t too bad, just a little slow once off the motorway due to there being plenty of lorries and not really enough long straight parts to pass them. We found the flat (near to Holt) fairly quickly and were able to get out and upstairs pretty quickly. Once we’d found where Phil kept all the bedding we were well away.
No running weekend away would be complete without a bit of geocaching. After all, why go for two days when the running only takes one? Anyway, there didn’t seem to be any parkruns around here so there was no opportunity to go do that.
You can read about my day’s geocaching at Bike or Hike.
Sunday morning started fairly early for Kas, and not quite so early for the rest of us. We had to get into Chester before they started closing the roads, which was about 90 minutes before the race started. Thankfully though the traffic wasn’t too bad and they were using big portions of the racecourse’s infield for parking, which meant we were fairly close to everything. It also meant that when we got there we’d still got something like 2 hours to kill before Kas’s race started. It was a cold morning and the various attractions at the race HQ didn’t keep us occupied for long – just a coffee van and the usual running clothes stands. So by the time we’d finished this and made the first of a number of trips to the “facilities” in the field we were starting to get a bit bored and a lot cold. None of us had taken our hats or gloves (after all, it hadn’t been at all cold so far this autumn) so the early morning chill was taking its toll a little bit. We ended up sitting inside for a while in the big marquee just to keep the cold away.
Eventually it was time for Kas to set off, so we walked out onto the racecourse, via the “facilities” again, and Kas started running around the grass field to get warmed up, closely followed by the kids, who obviously needed to warm up too for their 1 mile race that was starting over an hour after Kas left us.
In that time after Kas left we went off the racecourse slightly to grab a geocache up on the perimeter road, just to “fill in” a new county for the kids, and then we came back down and mooched about near the race HQ again until we received the call to go and get lined up.
The kids race was a straightforward 1 mile which involved running a few furlongs out around the racecourse and then a 180 degree turn before running all the way back through the start gate and then a few hundred yards further on to the finish. Ami said she’d run all the way with Izzy to make sure she as OK, but in the event she left Izzy at the turn and just sprinted in. To be fair to Izzy though, she seemed fine with it and was positively tanking it when she came into the finish straight, so I was quite proud of them both. It was also quite funny that despite all the announcements about having to run through the start gate on the way back and keep going for another 300 yards there were still several children (and their accompanying adults) who sprinted through the start gate and then simply stopped. Most then had a moment of dawning as they realised others were still sprinting past them…….
After the kids had finished and got their medals (which are very nice medals) we took a few photos and got their jumpers back on before noticing that we really didn’t have time for much else before Kas was due back. We just about had time to go to the car and make another trip to the “facilities” and then we went down to the marathon start point to wait for Kas.
She made her grand entrance into the racecourse in a very quick time and was spurred on a little by us three cheering her into the final few yards, and she finished in a stonkingly fast new PB time of 3:53.41 – Fan-dabby-tastic ! – Try reading about the Chester Marathon on Kas’s blog.
After all that exertion Kas needed a bit of a rest, so we sat at the outside coffee bar (it was now quite warm outside) and then took the kids into the play-area tent before heading off back to Wrexham.
We didn’t have much of a plan here except to get gone as soon as we could, but after a day and a half there wasn’t a great deal of packing to be done, so I was comfortable to leave the girls in the flat while I shot out to collect 7 of the easiest drive-by caches I’ve ever done in a mere 40 minutes.
The drive back was a predictably slow Sunday afternoon crawl stuck behind slow moving lorries and cars. All the way down I was looking out for a convenient place in Shropshire to stop and do a single geocache (again, to “fill in” a new county). After driving through quite a lot of Shropshire we ended up at Newport, where we thought we’d stop for a random cache and then get something for dinner before finishing the drive. The cache proved easy but then finding somewhere to eat seemed rather harder. We had Googled a couple of pubs but when we got there one of them looked rubbish and the other didn’t seem to exist, so somewhat disappointed we jumped back in the car and decided to go look in the next town, whatever that would be. Thankfully, as we were pulling out of Newport back onto the main road we found the missing pub – it was simply marked into totally the wrong place on Google Maps, as is often the case. It was a chain restaurant attached to a Premier Inn hotel, so nothing special, but it did do a decent Sunday carvery for the kids.
By the time we finished here it was straying into darkness again but thankfully not long after here we were on motorways with street lights, so it wasn’t too painful. The traffic also seemed to have died down a bit, so the drive went quite quickly, especially once the girls made me put Madness on the iPod. After a bit of that it was my turn to choose and I went for a bit of Beatles. It was surprising how many of their hits that the kids had heard of.
And that was it. When we got home everything was pretty much as we left it, except Kas and the girls each had a new medal to hang up somewhere.
by Kevin | Aug 25, 2014
Oooh ! A new running event.
I can’t remember how I found out about this one but as soon as I saw it I have to say it was a must-do. Who could refuse a start-up event that starts and ends in Wales and involves running over the Severn Bridge ? I couldn’t.
Well, it would also involve an excuse for visiting MyGeocachingProfile.com’s trickiest English county – the not-really-a-county-or-is-it City of Bristol. Another reason for going then.
We decided to stump up a few of our air miles to get a room in the Mercure Holland House in central Bristol for a couple of nights (it was a Bank Holiday weekend after all). The race was scheduled for Sunday so we were fine with spending the whole day there and coming back on Monday.
We drove down in Kas’s car on Saturday lunchtime, Kas having run parkrun in the morning. We stopped at a random service station for some lunch on the way – Membury or Leigh Delamere – and got to Bristol in good time for a bit of a chill in the hotel before going out for dinner. We had a bit of a stroll around before getting thoroughly lost trying to find our way into Cabot Circus to the local Zizzi’s. We should have looked at the photo on Wikipedia then. It’s clearly in shot. We had our usual collection of spaghetti bolognese and pizza, and then we walked back home for a relatively early night. After all, I had to be over the other side of the Severn Bridge at some awful time of the morning and there was some breakfast to be eaten beforehand.
We began race day with as hearty a breakfast as I could manage in the time allowed and we jumped into the car to make our way (surprisingly quickly) up to the Severn Bridge before it was closed for the event.
We parked up in an industrial estate to the west of the bridge and made our way up a steep grass bank onto the event area. There were a couple of other Redway Runners there, but not many.
As it was a first event, they suffered the usual problem of not having enough toilets, but thankfully I managed to time my bicycle rotation to suit and I was ready in time to get up to the start point. This proved to be halfway along the bridge, nearly under the western tower of the main bridge.
One thing you don’t notice when you’re driving over suspension bridges is the slope. When you’re running, you do notice it. The first stretch was uphill, followed by a mile of quite sharp downhill running off the bridge into England.
Once on dry land the route went north of the motorway around Elberton and thereabouts over roads which were narrow and generally “agricultural” in nature. We were warned at the start that there was a hill at about halfway, and we ran up a big one at about 5.5 miles so I assumed that had been it, until, that is, I got to the bottom of the “proper” hill. It was one of thse where I immediately stopped running and started walking. No way I was going to be getting up there at running speed. After a busy August I was feeling rather unfit anyway and was starting to struggle.
By the time we got back out onto main roads I was having problems. I was still going at a decent speed but starting to tire, and by the time I got to the end of the bridge I’d had enough. The mile up the English side of the bridge was more than my legs could manage and I ended up having to slow to a run-walk strategy. All of this meant a rather disappointingly slow 2:03 finish. I’m not sure what I was expecting but after a run of sub 2 hour halves I certainly had that in mind. It was getting painful towards the end though.
After finishing I devoured all edible contents of the goody bag and got a bad neck carrying the rather substantial medal before jumping into the car and doing a cache in my first new county of the day, Zetec, in Gwent.
Back to Bristol then for a quick wash and brush up followed by a walk over to the Floating Harbour, where we failed to find a cache (as it was inaccessible due to some re-paving) but then found a decent looking waterside pub, where we sat outside (with jumpers on) whilst eating some well-earned sandwiches and crisps and beer.
So what to do from here?
We’re always up for a bit of “active” history or geography at Gardner Towers, so we decided to walk along to the SS Great Britain to see what was up. It was really quite interesting. The kids marvelled at the (small) size of the cabins and beds and we also got to meet the real Mr Brunel, or at least that’s what he told us, and he did have the big hat and everything.
Once we’d finished upstairs we descended into the room beneath the boat, where the temperature and humidity are somewhat akin to a sauna, because apparently it’s good for the hull. Down here there was a great view of the business end of the ship. Or, at least, a restored and replaced business end.
All of this was very interesting but it wasn’t, to be honest, ice cream. The weekend had officially been designated as “holiday rules”, and hence at least one ice cream a day was on the cards.
We walked halfway back along the quayside and grabbed some from a kiosk before continuing our way back to the hotel.
When we got back to the hotel it wasn’t quite late enough to give up, so we jumped in the car and drove up to the Clifton Suspension Bridge for a nosey. There’s not much parking and in trying to find somewhere we ended up taking the car over the bridge. We walked back and did the earthcache at the bridge and then crossed it on foot to do another cache and have a quick walk up to the observatory building.
As we were walking back to the car we saw a sign announcing that we were crossing into North Somerset. So I checked for a nearby cache and there was one on a sign about 30 yards further on. Cha-ching ! That’ll be another county done then. That made three new counties done in a single day.
After this we headed back to the hotel and got tidied up (again) to go out looking for dinner. We couldn’t be bothered to walk far that evening (or, technically, I wasn’t able to walk far) and anyway we’d promised the girls we’d try to find a Sunday roast, so we mooched around the harbour area until we found a reasonable looking pub diner. We found one after walking probably three-quarters of the way around a loop. It was a decent pub though, and they had beer. And they had roast dinners. Several of those then.
After dinner we retired for another fairly early night and then got up in the morning to have a somewhat longer and more filling breakfast than we’d had the previous morning. And that was more or less it for the weekend, aside from having to drive home to Milton Keynes, which we did both quickly and uneventfully. It was just as well we did, because when we got home we had to pack up the car again for a week and head up to my folks house in Measham, where we were spending the final week of the kid’s summer holiday. Kas stayed at home to get some proper work done. I took mine with me.
by Kevin | May 26, 2014
Saturday
We had a busy weekend planned. We’d heard from friends who’d done their other events that the Rock ‘n’ Roll running series were excellent to enter, so I was the lucky one who’s name came out of the 2-person hat and I was the one who got to run it. Kas had to make do with a weekend away. The race we planned was the Liverpool Rock ‘n’ Roll Half (there was a “full monty” as well, but only nutters run those) and we booked up nice and early to avoid disappointment. We booked early enough that it wasn’t officially a Redway Runners club trip when we booked up, and as a result we were in a different hotel to most of the other club members who went. A couple were in the same place as us, but not many. The hotel in question was the excellent little Hotel Indigo on Chapel Street. They didn’t have any family rooms so we booked two standard double rooms and hoped for the best.
Anyway, before all of that we had to actually get there. As it was a Saturday we had the obligatory trip down to parkrun first thing and then dashed home to finish packing our bags before setting off up the motorways. The drive was fairly uneventful until after we stopped at Norton Canes for some lunch. As we were heading up the M6 around Stoke it started to rain, and it kept raining pretty heavily for the rest of the way. Heavy rain on the M6 always makes it slow, difficult to see, and quite dangerous. And when we arrived in central Liverpool to park up we hit the next problem – the hotel didn’t have its own car park. We had to park in a public multi-storey a couple of hundred yards away. Fine if the weather’s nice, not so fine when it’s chucking it down. We walked from the car quickly.
After checking in and finding our rooms we chilled for a while before deciding it was time for some dinner – after all I needed a fairly early night and we were all hungry. Having failed to find a branch of our favourite Italian style chain nearby we resorted to asking the hotel for a recommendation, and they suggested we walk around the corner to Trattoria 51 – a local chain of two Italian restaurants. Meh ! How bad can it possibly be ?
Well, it wasn’t bad at all. Aside from the fact that we were early so there was virtually no-one else in the place, it was really excellent. The food was very good, the staff were friendly (always an advantage when the kids are around) and the service was really good. If you’re in the area, it’s worth a visit.
When we finished it was still fairly early, and there was still quite a lot of daylight left. It had also stopped raining at last and there was more than a hint of blue sky around, so I suggested to Kas it might be nice to take a walk down to the Pier Head to look at the big buildings and get a breath of fresh air. It was a really lovely evening by this time, to be honest. So we made a quick dash back up to the hotel rooms to grab our cameras and then off we went. We ended up walking all the way along to Albert Dock and managed to get far enough to find where I was supposed to be in the morning, and more to the point, it meant I could measure (roughly) how long it would take me to walk here again the following morning.
On the way back there were some signs that there was going to be a race in the morning, including some interesting road markings indicating who needed to run where. Straight on into that bollard for me then!
Sunday
We awoke in the morning after a decent night’s sleep (for me and Izzy) and a painful, fitful night for Kas, who drew the short straw and had to share a bed with Ami the wriggle monster. Breakfast was open early enough for us to go grab something but not early enough for any lingering, so I got fully prepared for my race before going downstairs and left Kas and the girls in the breakfast room while I walked straight out and off down the road to find the rest of the Redway Runners Posse. As ever there were quite a few of us.
We met up outside the Echo Arena, which was the designated Race HQ. They had a baggage drop and some frighteningly long queues for the toilets. I was going to have to time this one well.
The race started at a very early 8am, which meant I was down at the start just after 7. It was quite cold at that time of the morning, but I had been bright enough to bring my sunglasses out of the car and pack them in my race bag. It looked like they’d be needed.
At about 7:45 we started to mosey over to the start line, and I was greeted there by Kas and the girls, who’d finished up breakfast not long after me, and had then bumped into a couple of other Redway Runners who were staying at the same hotel (but not running). They’d walked down together and arrived just as I was starting to get lined up for the off, and so just in time for a quick hug while I was relatively un-sweaty.
And so to the race…………
I can’t remember whether I’d set a target time for this but it was my fourth half of the year and I’d been getting progressively faster – well over 2 hours at the MK Festival of Running Half in March, 1:54 something at the now infamous Sheffield Half, and about 1:52 at the inaugural MKM Half Marathon on the first May Bank Holiday. The MKM Half wasn’t a PB but it felt like it should have been and I was feeling nicely refreshed and ready to try another one.
I set off on this one very quickly, running slightly below 5 minute kilometres. After the first 3 or 4, I slowed back to a more modest 5:00 to 5:10 mins/km but still fast, and I was surprised that I managed to keep this up until about 1 km from home – I had to have a short walk break then, but regained some energy and ran into the finish. OK, I knew I was going quickly so I was going to run down that last straight if it killed me because I knew I was on for a PB and I wanted it to be as good as I could manage. In the end, I finished at exactly 1:50.00 on the clock and 1:48.21 on the chip time. I’ll have that one, Guv’nor – that’s more than 2 minutes off
When I got back I felt surprisingly good. There were a few other Redway Runners around so we did a quick photo and then made our way in through the Echo Arena to get our bags and goodies.
I like the way they did it here – instead of getting a pre-packed bag stuffed with useless flyers they provided a bag and a series of help-yourself stands, so I was able to pick up a cereal bar, some crisps, a drink, a banana and another drink, but no bits of paper. Over at another desk they had all the t-shirts – I went for the largest, as ever. And then they saved the best bit until last. They were handing out beer tokens. Marvellous. One for each finisher, entitling the bearer to one of Mr Cobra’s finest, to be served outdoors in the sunshine. What could be better? Well, two of them could be better, and somehow Kas had managed to acquire one of the said beer tokens from someone else. Remember the race started at 8 am and it took me less than two hours. I can’t remember the last time I was sitting outside at 10:30 am with a beer in my hand.
Not only did they have beer, they also had music. Well, it’s a Rock ‘n’ Roll event, I suppose, so just after the half there was a half-hour set from The Christians, which was spot on for me.
After all this beer the assembled company decided it was time to retire to a nearby Weatherspoons for some breakfast. Blimey was it busy? We went upstairs – no seats. So we went downstairs and spotted some likely punters who were leaving and nabbed their seats before they changed their minds. A suitably heavy carb and lard-laden repast was had by all (especially by me) and Ami did a fine job of making the world’s longest drinking straw. Well done that girl!
By the time we’d finished breakfast I was beginning to feel the weight of the morning’s activity (and I was beginning to smell the aroma of it too) so we left the assembled company and plodged back to our hotel for a bit of a rest and a cleanup. To be honest, I could have slept for the rest of the afternoon, but it seemed to waste a beautiful afternoon when there was a) a few Redway Runners finishing the marathon at some point and b) a few geocaches available to be done. So I had a quick shower and got changed then we headed back out for a bit more. Anyway, the pros say it’s a good idea to keep moving for a few hours after a long run to stop yourself from seizing up.
So we legged it back down past the Albert Dock, this time walking along the riverside, grabbing a couple of caches on the way. By far the best was Albert Lock – a sneaky little Herbert that involves identifying which one of the very many padlocks attached the chain contains a little bit of paper instead of a locking mechanism. It’s surprisingly hard.
Once back at the Echo Arena we were obviously duty-bound to have a go on the big wheel. It’s becoming a bit of a habit (or another one of the “holiday rules”) after the trip to Brighton earlier in the year. This one sails nicely above the arena and gives an impressive view of the city centre in one direction and the river in the other. The glass was a bit mucky and scratched, which affected photo-taking opportunities a little bit, but the kids loved it (all 3 of us) and I think Kas did too. And we got to spin round a whole four circles before having to get off again.
We also went to greet a few more of the Redway Runners after their marathon exploits, and this time we got to listen to The Farm for a little while.
Eventually, we decided to wander back to the hotel, this time walking through Albert Dock and stopping in the museum place for some souvenirs for the kids, before retiring to the hotel for a brief respite and planning an evening. There wasn’t much to plan really. We needed a restaurant. The hotel came up trumps again by recommending Olive on Castle Street. OK, it’s another Italian one, but it was good. It was extremely busy so we were glad we went quite early, but even so we still had to sit at the bar for a while until they could clear us a table. After we’d finished we went back to the hotel and had a coffee and a digestif while the kids ran merry riot in their own special, quite restrained, way.
A new PB. I’ve gotta be happy with that!
Monday
And so to Monday morning, the morning after the day before. And guess what ! Nothing was hurting me. I must try running really early, drinking a lot and standing out in the sunshine all afternoon again. It seems to prevent running aches and pains.
We legged out way back down towards Albert Dock again again, and this time we grabbed a cake and a coffee at a cafe there and went into one of the many tourist-tat boutiques to buy some sweeties and other gubbins before deciding to head off. The car was exactly where we’d left it, which was good, and as it was the first ever time I’d been to Liverpool I asked Kas if she was OK to take a trip up to Anfield, not particularly to look at the football ground, but to pay my respects at the Hillsborough Memorial. I was working away in Holland when it happened but still remember watching the news broadcasts with horror, and it was, of course, my team at the other end. You don’t forget things like that in a hurry.
Not being familiar with the layout of the stadium, though, the memorial proved to be quite awkward to find. We parked in the massive Stanley Park Car Park and somehow I had it in my mind (without knowing) that the memorial would be at the Kop End, but down there it’s all gates and club shops and the like. The memorial is at the other end, which meant we basically walked all the way round and ended up only a few yards from where we’d started. Never mind. Football grounds aren’t that big, really.
We spent a few minutes at the memorial, quietly reflecting and trying to explain to the kids what it was all about., and then it was time to jump into the car and drive home. It was early afternoon and we had to get back, albeit that the kids were on holiday for the following week.
What an excellent weekend. My stereotypical preconceptions about Liverpool were as just well and truly smashed as my half marathon PB was, and we’d had an excellent couple of days. Kas is going to run it next year.
by Kevin | Feb 16, 2014
The Trip Down
The long awaited trip to Brighton for Kas to do the Brighton Half Marathon, entry to which she won as part of her Virgin London Marathon package from Lucozade Sport.
We did our usual parkrun in Milton Keynes in the morning and then dashed home for a quick clean up before heading out on the highway, looking for adventure and whatever comes our way, as it were. Whilst the prime objective of the weekend was Kas’s run, we were loaded up for a general weekend away, and were calling it a mini-break as much as anything else. All good mini-breaks have to involve some form of posh coffee and cake (or pies) so once we thought we were approximately halfway there (Cobham Services) we thought we’d better park up and do the doings. While the doings were being done, I thought I’d check the locality for caches, as you do, not really expecting anything nearby. Indeed, according to Google Satellite View, the services aren’t there. So imagine my total (lack of) surprise when a Motorway Madness cache appeared a mere 200m away from where I was sitting. Got to be done. So while the girls were finishing up their lunch I ventured over what looked like fields, but was actually a car park, and made an easy find under a bench near the bus park. It’s a new county for me too. Never been caching in Surrey before.
It turned out that we’d stopped a lot further on than halfway. Once we got back in the car expecting another 2 hours or so we were very surprised and quite happy to be entering Brighton a mere hour later and trying to pick our road down to our hotel in Newhaven. The hotel was easy to find but not so easy to get into. There’d been a lot of rain and the car park around the front was totally flooded. We had to park down the side of the hotel, where there weren’t really that many spaces.
The hotel itself was a fairly standard Premier Inn of the variety that has an attached pub for the provision of food. The room was spacious enough and we began what we hoped would be a gentle evening. It was about 4:30pm and the light was all but gone. This is where we hit upon a bit of an issue. As Kas was unpacking she noticed that she’d failed to pack one of her key pieces of running equipment. The one that is, shall we say, more necessary for a lady than for a gentleman. So we had to make a dash up to the nearest running equipment shop, which turned out to be in central Brighton, and yes madam, we’ll be open until 5:30 pm so you should have plenty of time. Driving into new places in the dark isn’t my favourite thing in the whole world so I was glad that Kas was doing it. We managed to get parked fairly easily and find the relevant shop easily too. So far so good. It was a bit warm inside the shop for me, what with me wearing shirt, thick jumper and ski jacket, but thankfully Kas found the necessary item fairly quickly and we were out.
Which left us wondering what to do about dinner. Neither of us really fancied the hotel pub so we did a quick search for the nearest Zizzi’s (always good before a race because they do pasta and pizza, and they do stuff the kids will eat, whilst maintaining a reasonably grown-up restaurant feel). Oooh ! There’s one about 300 yards that way. That’ll do us then.
After which it was time to get kids and wife to sleep ready for what promised to be a long day.
A Bit of Running and Some Complicated Caches
Sunday morning greeted us with a nice warm radiant smile. Well, it was sunny, which is about as good as you get in the middle of February.
We needed to be leaving the hotel at 7.15 to avoid road closures but the pub/restaurant resolutely didn’t open for breakfast until 7. It’s the rules, don’t you know. So we dressed, packed and prepared everything first and then carried everything we needed into the pub with us, ready for a swift exit. It’s impressive how much the kids actually managed to eat in the 15 minutes we had in the breakfast room. Well done girls.
And so off we went for the short drive up to our designated parking spot at Brighton Racecourse and a fairly hair-raising (if I had any) bus ride down some very steep hills to the race venue on the sea front. We were dropped off a hundred yards or so from the bag drop and general corral areas, so all going to plan so far. At this point we decided to pretty much leave Kas to her own devices while we went off for a spot of light caching to pass the time. While Kas was waiting to start we grabbed a couple of easy-ish ones on the sea front and tried to solve the fairly complicated, but rather excellent Parallax View II. We mis-counted one of the stages so walked up to a place which looked hopeful until we got there. Botty !
By this time the runners were pretty much on their marks, and had got set, and were just waiting for a “go” – there certainly were quite a lot of them. Which meant that we had to wait a while before we could get over the road to the pier. On the way there the kids decided they were hungry, so we had to wait outside a stall at the end of the pier for 10am so that they could grab an ice cream. The we entered the pier to do The Parallax View (also excellent) and about 3 others. I thought I had the calculations wrong for this one too because it seemed a long way away, but off we went. And it wasn’t there. So I recalculated and realised the problem, but by this time we were running out of time, so we looped back through the middle of Brighton back to where I now knew was the location of Parallax View II (it was an easy find) and then made our way back to the finish line to discover that not only had Kas finished, she’d run a (slight) PB. And the sun was still shining. A good morning for her and a reasonable if slightly frustrating one for us. Still, at least we got a few decent photos.
We jumped back on the double decker bus and took a different but equally steep route back up the hill to the racecourse, and an end to the morning’s frivolities.
Catching the Big Fish
If you look at a geocaching map of Brighton you can see a great big fish shape with the head being a series of traditionals around the outskirts of Saltdean and the body and tail being a series of puzzles stuck out in the sea. Obviously they’re not really in the sea, but… All these puzzles are actually the same thing, near enough. They are all Hidato puzzles, of increasing complexity as you move in numeric sequence through the series. These seem fairly easy once you apply a bit of deductive reasoning to them. So I was armed with the solutions to about 25-30 different puzzles, plus all of those traditionals to go for too.
By my estimation, I could just about get around in the afternoon before darkness descended. Kas had plans to get cleaned up at the hotel then go back into central Brighton to meet an old workmate for a spot (more) of ice cream, posh coffee and crazy golf. So I had an afternoon of beautiful sunshine, a GPS full of unfound caches, and no one to stop me. My walk started at a YOSM next to Roedean School and continued over the downs around the back of the school and towards Saltdean. I also started collecting information for a multi that started at the same place. I still don’t know why they’re called “Downs” because they seem mainly to be “Ups” every time I’ve been there.
The finds were all very straightforward and I was going great guns really, although maybe a little slower than I thought I might. There was a lot of upping and downing. But the conditions underfoot were generally good. I trundled my way through Rottingdean on the coast road and into Saltdean, and eventually right through to the far side, whereupon I looked at my watch and decided I better get my skates on.
Thankfully the route back was faster than the route out and I made it back to my start point at about 5:30 pm just as the sun had finally disappeared. I measured out my route when I got home and I’d walked about 11 miles. So when I add in the distance I covered in the morning with the kids I’d actually covered at least as much ground as Kas did, just a bit more slowly.
Down the Pub
We tried our very hardest to find a fairly posh restaurant in Newhaven. We really did. But we failed. Not to say that where we ended up was bad, it just was a kind of place I don’t think we’ve taken the kids before. It was down by the harbourside and looked from the outside like a typical English seaside town old pub. It was called the Hope Inn. From the inside it was decorated simply, with a lot of wood, but was set out with dining tables and looked fairly comfortable. It turned out to be really rather good for what it was. Given the general state of us I think it was actually perfect. We’d all spent most of the daylight hours outside and all of us, in some way, had covered a lot of ground and caught the sun. We didn’t really need “posh”. We needed “relaxed”.
It had a simple menu that was a bit heavy on the old “fruits of the sea” theme, but with a few notable (and hence to the ladies of the house “edible”) other things. I think I ended up with a substantial pie and some chips. The kids had a roast dinner, I think, although we had to wait a few minutes so they could have fresh roast potatoes. The other thing of note there was the pub dog. “Dog” is a bit of an understatement. More of a hairy horse, if I’m being honest, but it was softer than a pack of Andrex that hasn’t been put in the freezer, and what was really remarkable is that Izzy was brave enough to go stroke it. Blimey!
And we had pudding as well, because it would have been a sin not to.
The Morning After the Night Before
Monday morning, and no hurry to get away because it was half-term week, so we planned a leisurely breakfast followed by a leisurely few hours doing some bits and bobs in Brighton.
Breakfast was certainly leisurely. And once we’d finished eating it our rate of progress over the ground was somewhat more leisurely too.
We decided to drive down into the centre of Brighton to see what took our fancy. The price of parking didn’t take our fancy very much. We stuck the car on the side of the road near the pier then baulked at the price of £7.50 for 3 hours, and moved on to a public car park further inland. It was a bad choice. The same 3 hours was going to cost us £15 in there. So we moved back again to the roadsisde near the pier.
The kids were gagging for a go on the big wheel thing, so it had to be done. A for once the “picture of yourselves on the tourist attraction” stall got some business out of us. The photos were actually quite good (see below).
After this we crossed a couple of roads to have a bit of a gawp at the Brighton Pavilion. As with many things it seemed much smaller in real life than I imagined, but at least it wasn’t covered in scaffolding. By this stage it had turned into quite a pleasant morning too. The sun was shining and the (early) birds were tweeting away. We sat outside for a coffee in the gardens. Outside, in February. What’s the world coming to ?
We still had a bit of time left on the parking when we’d finished coffee, so we took a walk westwards along the beach from the pier, taking in a couple of caches as we went, including the correct resting place of The Parallax View that I’d given up on the previous morning. There were a few interesting little thingummy-bob and whatsamajig sellers along the beach including one that had an impressive collection of wooden sculptures. There were also a whole host of stallholders attempting to chuck all the stones off the promenade and back onto the beach after the most recent storm.
This took us nicely up to lunchtime, and lunch consisted of chips, on a plastic tray wrapped in paper, eaten with a wooden fork (or fingers) whilst sitting on a wooden bench on the pier. In February. This couldn’t have been more stereotypically English unless St George had been actually killing a dragon on the beach while we were doing it. With a knotted hanky on his head.
And then we drove home. In stages. Firstly I made Kas stop at a church in Pyecombe just so that I could colour in West Sussex on my caching profile map (along with Surrey and East Sussex that made three new counties for the weekend).
And then driving back towards Crawley Kas needed a stop for a posh coffee. I didn’t, so I did the old random “where’s the nearest geocache” search on my phone and discovered a TravelBug Hotel that was fully 25 yards away from where we were parked.
It would have been rude not to.
Back Home
Funnily enough, after a long weekend away like that, neither of us felt like going to the shops to buy food or cooking anything, so we didn’t. We went to the new Chiquitos in Kingston Centre instead. Good choice.
If you can’t fight, wear a big hat…………
by Kevin | Aug 15, 2013
Our final day in Dorset, and after yesterday’s rather soggy debacle we made good on our promise to take the girls down to the beach first thing. On the caching front it turned out to be a fairly productive day involving a lot of multis in central Weymouth which took me through some very nice parts of the town. If you’re reading this just for the list of caches, feel free to skip to the bottom of the post.
Kas was up and at it quite early, having decided the marathon plan said she should run to Weymouth from Dorchester, a distance of about 10 miles. So she set off at about the same time me and the girls started our Premier Breakfast. Mmmmm ! As was now customary, the girls raided the muffin basket for all it was worth while I engaged in the usual protein-fest. I’m sure having cake for breakfast is OK really, so long as it isn’t every day. And so long as it isn’t 4 each.
Back at the plot we jumped in the not-so-trusty bus and headed off up the old Roman Road to Weymouth. Apparently we passed Kas somewhere near the Weymouth Massive Magic Mushroom Sculpture, but we didn’t see her.
We parked up at the park & ride and walked over to the beach at the Queen Vic clock, by way of the Station and it’s “Sidetracked” cache – gotta get that first cache of the day in the bag to get the souvenir. Not a very impressive cache but enough to get us going.
By which time Kas had more or less finished running and met us, as planned, by the Queen Vic clock.
Onto the beach we went then, and sat down, got the kids changed, and then lay down for a bit of a snooze under the light breeze and layer of high cloud. Enough of a breeze that we were quickly getting buried under the drifting sand. Within 5 minutes I had a mouth (and nose) full of the stuff and was starting to get a bit ratty. You may have guessed, if you don’t know me, that beaches are not my kind of thing. At least, not the sitting-around-whilst-getting-sand-in-every-available-orifice kind of beach. I’m fairly happy with the walking-around-taking-photos type and the got-an-Earthcache-on-it type.
So Kas sent me off caching for an hour or so while the kids got the sandcastle building out of their system for a bit. There’s a summary of the caches I did below, but let’s say it was an hour of setting off on a couple of multis rather than much actual caching. I did find one at the ANZAC monument and then another short multi down by the big sailing vessel near the ferry terminal though. However, the main gain from this hour of caching in the morning was that I managed to breeze past a load of other stuff that looked like they’d be good things to do later in the day, especially as the sun was starting to make an appearance by late morning. Near the big sailing boat there’s a little company doing 1-hour tours around Portland Harbour. Just along the river there’s a bridge over the river that opens up every 2 hours. And walking north from there you pass along a pedestrian shopping street with a few bits of summer street entertainment on them.
Back at the plot, and back with the girls, we decided to leave the beach and head for lunch. Kas went to chuck all the buckets, spades, and unnecessary bags of wet, sandy clothes into the back of the car while the girls and me went off in search of somewhere for lunch. Kas had expressed a desire for a hot dog, so we thought that ShakyDog’s looked a good bet. They major on milkshakes in all kinds of bizarre flavours, and do a nice side in hot dogs. I ordered some stuff for the girls and waited for Kas to arrive.
It turned out to be quite a good little place if you can cope with the loud music. Izzy had a hot dog and when I told the staff she wouldn’t eat the bun (she never does), they gave her another sausage free. Kas and Ami had mango milkshakes and I had a peanut butter one. Titter ye not, Mrs ! Peanut butter milkshake, when made with real ice cream, is very nice. None of the food we had was particularly healthy, but who cares. We’re on holiday, innit?
From here we wandered down the shopping street, with the girls choosing to totally ignore the silver-painted bloke standing on a bucket. Shame, he would probably have been good theatre. But we ended up at the Town Bridge, which is a very fine-looking double-leaf bascule. It opens every two hours, and I just so happened to time my walking in the day so that I caught it opening at 12, 2 and 4 pm. Which is quite bad timing. Once or twice would be good for photos, but that third one was just shabby timing on my part. At the 2 pm opening we also did a team hunt on a multi-cache themed on the bridge. It should have been a solo find for me, but I just couldn’t spot any item matching the hint, and eventually went for help. All three girls came over with me and Kas spotted the very thing inside a couple of minutes. An item I had walked straight past probably 6 times already without noticing. Mumble, mumble…….
After the 2pm opening we crossed back over and along the quayside (where the rails and loading platform of the old Weymouth Harbour Tramway are still in evidence. ending up at the tall sailing ship we were just in time to jump aboard one of the little boats doing one hour tours of Portland Harbour. This proved to be a good little trip for us to do, as it filled an hour in the afternoon when the kids were starting to wane a bit, and it was engaging enough for both of them to show a little interest in the Captain’s quite simplistic commentary. It was bright sun by now, so we had a proper holiday feeling as we scooted along over the water being gently burned on the top and cooled by the occasional salty splash.
When we got back to shore we then strolled back along the quay and up the shopping street again, with no particular plan other than maybe going back to the beach for a bit longer. This soon turned when Kas and the girls spotted a woman doing hair braids – a bit of a Gardner girls holiday habit. Unlike their counterparts in France, who seem to charge for the overall effect, the lady in Weymouth charged by the inch. 80p an inch, to be precise. So mine was free, and very quick. The girls had to wait a bit longer. And as Kas knows I’m not much of a “standing around” type of person she basically told me to go caching again and she’d give me a call when the braiding was close to finishing. This gave me the opportunity to finish a couple of caches I’d started earlier in the day, including a walk back over the Town Bridge (with 10-minute wait for the 4 pm opening) and into the old town, south harbour and the Nothe Fort. On this little dash I managed to grab another 5 caches. I ignored two that were marked unavailable.
It was a bit late getting back by now, and whilst Kas had occupied a bit of time by buying a new sweatshirt, it was time to get back together for an early evening meal again. Before that though I had to extend the parking. One thing I came to both love and hate whilst in Dorset is the parking. I hate it because it seems expensive everywhere and you can’t get refunds on part-used time periods, and I love it because you can pay by mobile, and when your period is running out they send you a reminder text with a phone number you can call to extend it without having to return to your car.
I got another 2 hours parking and we went for dinner at King Edward’s Fish and Chips on the Esplanade (again).
This time we were right posh, with the kids having their food served in a plastic bucket (with spade).
Which just about left time to drive back to Dorchester, query why the hotel had let someone park in our allocated space again (they hadn’t – someone had just gone all “freestyle” on them), wash half of Weymouth Beach down the plughole and grab a swift half in the bar before retiring to bed.
So if you’re only reading this post for the caching parts, I’m sorry for wasting your time with the rest of it, but here’s a quick list of the caches I did. If you want a relatively touristy, not too hardcore, day of caching in the centre and old town of Weymouth, I suggest you start at the ANZAC Monument just north of the Queen Vic clock on the esplanade, and gradually work your way south, not that I’m telling you where the multis take you. The caches that I did during the day, in the order I did them, were :
- Sidetracked-Weymouth – a quick nano round the back of the bikesheds.
- ANZAC Tribute – A quick bench job near to the memorial to ANZAC soldiers on the esplanade
- Shipwrecked – Mayday – A short multi down by the ferry terminal with a very muggly end-point, but worth it just for the nerve of putting one there.
- Weymouth Town Bridge – Another short multi themed on the bridge of the same name.
- Hope you find it… – An easy trad near the Rotary Club building in Brewery Square
- OYB 27 Before the Bridge – Part of the big “On Yer Bike” series on the bay to the south of Nothe Fort
- Portland View – An excellent multi starting at the Queen Vic clock and taking you through 5 stages to reach a viewpoint overlooking Portland Harbour
- White Hideaway – A fairly big trad under a rock overlooking the bay to the south of Nothe Fort
- OYB 29 My Favourite Viewpoint – A quick multi based around the Nothe Fort
On the route I took to do these there are several other trads that were temporarily disabled the day I was there, and you might also like to try Cannon Ball Run – a multi I didn’t have time for but which starts near the Town Bridge and ends over by the Ferry Terminal (at least, the description implies it ends there). There are a number of puzzles that appear in the old town but none of them are actually there – most are a good way out. There is the Castle Treasure puzzle, though, which requires you to have found 3 caches at Portland Castle, Sandsfoot Castle and Maiden Castle. We didn’t try this, but given the name I guess it’s most likely to be somewhere near the Nothe Fort.
by Kevin | Aug 14, 2013
What can we say about this day?
We can say it was wet. We can definitely say that. And we can also say that we hadn’t planned what to do if it was wet. And we could say that none of us really dressed properly for the conditions, especially the ladies of the house.
We thought it might be a good idea to start off by going to the hill fort at Eggardon Hill near Bridport. It was an interesting drive up, and at several points we thought we might be driving through the clouds and surrounded by rain. Once we parked up it became apparent that we actually were in the middle of the clouds. We went for a quick walk around the top of the fort (and a quick dash down the back to grab a cache for me), but we weren’t really enjoying it. All of us were getting cold and wet. Enough of that then.
After which we started a few hours of generally farting about as a result of not having planned anything. We ended up in Abbotsbury and down at the western end of Chesil Beach. We thought we might go for a look at some botanical gardens just out of town, but after we saw the cost of entry tickets we ended up just having lunch there. It seemed a bit much for what would undoubtedly be a short walk around. In nice weather it might last us all day, but in bad weather, when we were all already wet and cold, I doubt the kids would last more than an hour.
The weather still wasn’t great so we drove around the village to the other side and walked up a very steep hill to reach St. Catherine’s Chapel, taking in a couple of passing caches on the way. Kas decided to stay in the car, so it was just me and the daughters. It finally stopped raining, so whilst we were still getting wet feet from the grass at least our top halves were drying out.
When we came back down we still needed to complete the daily tasks of doing an Earthcache and feeding some ice cream to the girls. Both were achieved by driving back around to the botanical gardens, abandoning the car in their car park and walking down to Chesil Beach again. There’s an Earthcache that involves a bit of minor chat about pebbles and a load of photos showing the chapel in the background, and the like. This explains why all the photos in this batch have my phone included.
We had an ice cream (or a coffee in mine and Kas’s case) sitting under the porch of a cafe in the car park, whilst watching the renewed rain falling around us. At least it was covered and the coffee was hot.
After which we went home, got clean and dry, and went out for pizzas. At least the day ended well.
by Kevin | Aug 13, 2013
Day 3 of our little holiday and the day began with Kas scooting off for a bit of a run, leaving me and the girls to grab a lardy breakfast and then kill an hour or so waiting for her to come back. We opted to kill our hour by walking just up the road to the Maumbury Rings, a Neolithic Henge just up the road from our hotel.
When we arrived the grass had been recently mown, so the undoubted highlight of the visit was the impromptu history lesson which resulted in us constructing a scale model of the nearby Maiden Castle from the grass clippings. Obviously we decided to name it Hayden Castle, as you would. It is plainly visible on many of the photos I took while we were there.
Once Kas was sorted out it was time to begin the main event(s) of the day. It was time for a bit of walking & caching, followed by a bit of a dip in the sea, with some random geology. First up was a cache named for the Osmington White Horse, which was conveniently sited in a posh new car park built just to provide a good overlook of the White Horse itself. Ideal, in fact, for doing photos of the horse standing on your hand.
After which we proceeded down to Osmington village and then drove round in circles for a bit trying to find somewhere to park. We ended up in the pub car park. The pub was open so we could use the toilets and buy a couple of drinks and some crisps to take on our walk. It also had a cache in the car park. Cha-ching !
The walk stretched for about 4 miles or or so and consisted of walking up and over a rather large hill, down into a valley, and then along a ridge above the White Horse, with a final steep drop back down into the village. There was a selection of types and sizes of cache, and Ami made an event of it by taking photos of a trackable keyring dog (which she decided was called “Cow”). She photographed it everywhere. Kept her busy, I suppose.
By the time we got back to the pub time was marching on and we all had throats drier than a Pharoah’s sock, as it were. So we went back into the pub for a drink and some more crisps before moving on. I’d been collecting information for a multi-cache as we were walking round but because we were doing it’s loop backwards it turned out that the final was a half a mile back up the path where we’d just come from, so we didn’t bother. Getting a drink was more pressing.
Durdle Door is one of those places I remember from school geography lessons. I’d been there once before on a family holiday in the early 80’s I think. Aside from the nostalgia though, it is worth a visit, but if you do go, remember to take a bucket load of coins with you. The parking meters on the top of the cliff wouldn’t accept a credit card and we had no phone signal so we couldn’t pay by phone. We eventually managed to scrounge enough coins between us to pay for a visit long enough to be worthwhile.
The girls descended straight to the beach while I went for a bit of a stroll along the cliffs to grab a couple more caches. There were some steep hills on the way. And some more on the way back.
Down on the beach, the girls were already in their costumes and having a bit of a plodge in the sea. Just after I arrived Ami decided to go for the full dip/swim. She was welcome to it. The water was perfectly warm enough but the beach could best be described as painful. It was all bug pebbles and smashed up bits of cliff, so it was really painful to walk on. In fact, I remember eventually I gave up trying to walk without shoes on and started crawling around instead. Ouchy ! Didn’t seem to bother the kids so much though.
Lulworth Cove is another place I remember from school geography lessons back in the day, back when the Interweb hadn’t been invented (but after everything was in colour instead of black & white). I came here once before on a family holiday too. Funnily enough, the same holiday and the same day as my previous visit to Durdle Door. This was our final touristy act of the day. I think it was about 5pm when we arrived, having already been to, well, all the other places further back in this post. No need to list them. If you’re still with me at this point in the proceedings you’re doing well (and I luv you).
We weren’t really planning much other than a bit of a look around and then maybe stop for something to eat. In the event, we ended up down by the cove, as you do, and my camera automatically realised I wanted to produce a panoramic shot, so it produced this rather impressive image without me having to do anything clever, and without reading the manual. Problem is, I’ve never managed to get it to do the same thing again.
After this, Ami expressed an interest in going for a walk around the beach. Kas and Izzy weren’t bothered, and to be honest I wasn’t that bothered either, despite there being an Earthcache around there. But if we’re going anyway well, it would be rude not to, wouldn’t it. It’s quite a difficult beach to walk around, as it’s all big stones and unevenness. But we got round there eventually and collected enough goodies for the Earthcache. We seemed to be getting a lot of Earthcaches down here. Must be something to do with all the nice scenery. Good geology, you know. Can’t beat a good bit of geology.
Back at the plot, all of this business during the day was taking its toll and we’d all just about had enough, so we decided it was time to grab something to eat. We looked at a few places in West Lulworth but nothing really seemed worthwhile. Everywhere looked a bit expensive, or had menus that the girls wouldn’t eat, or any one of a number of other reasons, so we decided we’d try driving back to the pub in Osmington where we’d parked earlier. Turned out to be a good choice. They did a carvery in the evenings, so the kids gorged themselves on roast dinners. Excellent stuff. Winner winner and, quite literally, chicken dinner.
And then we drove back to Dorchester and put the kids to bed. And ourselves. Long day!
by Kevin | Aug 12, 2013
Our first full day in Dorset, so what shall we do today ? How about going to that bit that sticks out at the bottom ?
The decision was made, as were many on this holiday, whilst working our way through a hearty (for which, read “lardy”) breakfast at The Premier Inn. It proved to be a good idea to pre-buy breakfast. Buy adult ones, get the kids free. Which means unlimited coffees, plates of cooked goodies, and for the kids, a major assault on the European Muffin Mountain, with Sherpas and everything. OK, maybe not the Sherpas then. But a lot of muffins. The American type, not the English.
The decision was probably made the previous night, to be honest, but as is always the case these things need further discussion and confirmation over breakfast, just in case one of us has developed a sudden urge overnight to go spend the day prospecting for gold or herding llamas, or something. You have to check these things.
So to the bus, and off we go in the general direction of Weymouth, with one of us driving, one of us reading a map, and two of us sitting in the back and asking if we’re there yet. We weren’t. Not for nearly an hour, anyway.
To get to the Isle of Portland from Dorchester you have to drive all the way through the middle of Weymouth and out of the other side. And to where we were going, you then have to drive around the harbour and then all the way across the Isle of Portland itself. It’s quite a long way.
When we got there, we pulled into a very large, and really quite empty, car park. Empty maybe because the nearby Portland Bill Lighthouse hadn’t opened at that time. We had no change, but thankfully a bit of a phone signal, so we were able to pay for parking using the phone. Magic that, isn’t it ?
And because the lighthouse wasn’t open we had to find something to do for a while. That something was a couple of geocaches and a quick shufty at the sea. After all, it was sunny (if a little windy) and it was the first time on the holiday we’d been near the seaside.
First up was a traditional geocache stuffed under a big rock. There was a bit of argy-bargy with the kids – the usual fight about who’s turn it was to find the cache – which resulted in a bit of grumping for the next half hour or so. I hate it when they do that.
After that we did a rather dramatic earthcache based around the Pulpit Rock, which required some analysis of the rocks under our feet (which the grumpy kids were already doing), a bit of estimation, a quick peer “over the edge” at the sea and the obligatory photo with a GPS device. At least this time there’s more than one of us, and more than one camera, so the camera can take a photo of the phone (pretending to be a GPS).
Walking back along the cliffs from here the kids were starting to cheer up a little bit at last. Ami was happily snapping away with her camera (the photos on this page are hers as much as mine) and Izzy was enjoying the fresh air. It was starting to feel like a holiday.
By this time the lighthouse was open so we went and stood in the queue to go up to the top. It was a fairly long queue, so we had to wait half an hour or so, and then when we got to the front we discovered that Izzy wasn’t tall enough and they wouldn’t let her go up. Grump-diddly-grump from Grumpington. So Kas stayed at the bottom with Izzy while me and Ami went for a climb.
It is quite a long way up, and to be honest, I don’t think Izzy would have enjoyed the climb, especially not the rather steep ladder/staircase at the top which lead up to the actual lamp room. She wouldn’t have enjoyed that bit. So on reflection, I was quite glad they wouldn’t let her go up there. Which just left the small task of persuading her she was glad too. Wasn’t that hard. She’s a lot more level headed than her sister most of the time.
So we then mooched over the car park to try to do a “Ye Olde Survey Monument” cache in the road, which was supposed to be what’s known as a “Surface Block”. Unfortunately, it’s now what you’d call a “Subsurface Block” after a considerate man with a lorry load of tarmac decided to widen the paved area on this junction. As the block was not actually visible, the cache owner wouldn’t let us log it as a find either. Grump again.
Back in the car and a couple of hundred yards up the road we found a traditional cache, under a rock. Ami grumped again because, despite the bleedin’ obvious, she wasn’t able to find it and I had to do it. At this point, and getting a bit tired of her not trying, and then grumping when someone else got the cache first, so I decided we should stop at a cache and make her do the whole thing on her own. The cache concerned was a golden postbox jobby, dedicated to sailor Helena Lucas and attached rather unsurprisingly to a big black box on a post right next to said golden postbox. Ami did actually find it unaided, and thankfully this did elicit a bit of an improvement in general attitude. Woo-hoo!
Next, we made our way back across the island to a car park overlooking the harbour which had a nice seating area and a great big set of concrete Olympic Rings. Ideal for taking a few arty photos of Chesil Beach. It was supposed to have another geocache as well, but we couldn’t find it.
The beach itself was a bit easier to find. In fact, you couldn’t really miss it. Big thing, covered in stones. Over there, between the sea and the, oh, the other sea. Wikipedia says that the Isle is joined to Chesil Beach by a barrier beach, but there isn’t really a line showing where the barrier beach ends and Chesil Beach begins. It’s all just stones. And an Earthcache. And a cafe, which meant it was (late) lunchtime. Cake and crisps time, to be precise, but we’re on holiday, so who cares. The Earthcache required some more examination of the floor and a photo with the GPS, so we got the girls to experience the beach up close by laying on the shingle with my phone. Then we walked over the crest of the beach onto the seaward side. When you get to the top you realise quite how large it actually is. It really is huge. On both sides.
Talking of beaches, the weather was still nice and the kids were getting stressed again by the lack of plodging in the sea, so we drove into central Weymouth and went for a sit on the beach for a while. We hadn’t planned to, so we didn’t have their swimming gear with us, and as a result, there was a lot of sandy clothing in the car on the way back. We also left quite a lot of sand on the floor of a very nice fish & chip joint right opposite the Queen Vic Clock. It was so good, in fact, that we went back on our final day.
After which we had a sand-filled walk back past the station to the car and then a drive home, some washing of sand down the plughole, and an earlyish night caused by all of us being in the same room. It was a fairly traditional first day to a holiday for us – the kids were grumpy after getting tired and being over-excited the day before, we did a bit of this and a bit of that, and we went to bed to try to get the kids back onto Planet Earth again.
I wonder what tomorrow will bring.
by Kevin | Aug 11, 2013
Our much-awaited and eagerly anticipated trip down to Dorset started with a lot of packing and loading, but not until I’d been out for a bit of a run with the Redway Runners crew over at Marston Vale Forest Centre.
We took the obvious route down through Bicester, Oxford and Newbury and then Southampton, where we stopped on the motorway services for the mandatory geocache. Mandatory because it was a day required for the August 2013 “31 Days of Geocaching” challenge. Not mandatory as in “you’ll be locked up if you don’t”.
The motorway services on the M27 have a single cache on the eastbound side. We were going westbound, but there’s a tunnel left over from the days when the eastbound side only had a car park. It was an easy find.
From here it was a matter of just over an hour more to get down to Dorchester through the New Forest and through upper Dorset.
Our hotel was the brand spanking new Premier Inn on the Brewery Square development in the centre of Dorchester. The only bad bit was that it wasn’t obvious either whether you could stop the car outside the hotel (you can) or where their car park was (underground). So we abandoned the car outside the station nearby and walked in, from where we were given the keys for our room and a numbered parking bay.
The room was maybe just as, or slightly better than, what I expected. The standard family room apparently has a double bed and a single. For us, they had moved a bit of furniture around so we had two singles but a bit less floor space. It wasn’t too bad though. The cases fit under the beds and there was a draw, shelves and a bit of hanging space which allowed us to unpack the kids’ stuff at least.
The Brewery Square development is a redevelopment of what used to be, obviously, some land belonging to the Dorchester Brewery. The development has the hotel and also a bunch of apartments, several restaurants and a cinema. It also has some splashy fountains, which after a long drive on a warm day was most welcome. The kids got straight into their swimming costumes and we all went outside so they could get themselves cooled off a bit. After a while they were a bit too cold, so they put on their “summer onesies” and went back for a bit more. All of this meant that when we did go back to the hotel room they left a lovely trail of soggy footprints all the way through the hotel reception area. I think anyone following us would have been thrown off the scent at the exit ofg the lifts though. And anyway, we weren’t the only people bringing soaking wet kids into the foyer.
We finished off the day with some spicy chicken in the well-known restaurant with a name that rhymes with commandos. Nuff said. The chicken was spicy, they were short of peas so we got a free extra side, and we all went home early to try to get some sleep ready for a fun day tomorrow.
by Kevin | Aug 11, 2013
Our much-awaited and eagerly anticipated trip down to Dorset started with a lot of packing and loading, but not until I’d been out for a bit of a run with the Redway Runners crew over at Marston Vale Forest Centre.
We took the obvious route down through Bicester, Oxford and Newbury and then Southampton, where we stopped on the motorway services for the mandatory geocache. Mandatory because it was a day required for the August 2013 “31 Days of Geocaching” challenge. Not mandatory as in “you’ll be locked up if you don’t”.
The motorway services on the M27 have a single cache on the eastbound side. We were going westbound, but there’s a tunnel left over from the days when the eastbound side only had a car park. It was an easy find.
From here it was a matter of just over an hour more to get down to Dorchester through the New Forest and through upper Dorset.
Our hotel was the brand spanking new Premier Inn on the Brewery Square development in the centre of Dorchester. The only bad bit was that it wasn’t obvious either whether you could stop the car outside the hotel (you can) or where their car park was (underground). So we abandoned the car outside the station nearby and walked in, from where we were given the keys for our room and a numbered parking bay.
The room was maybe just as, or slightly better than, what I expected. The standard family room apparently has a double bed and a single. For us, they had moved a bit of furniture around so we had two singles but a bit less floor space. It wasn’t too bad though. The cases fit under the beds and there was a draw, shelves and a bit of hanging space which allowed us to unpack the kids’ stuff at least.
The Brewery Square development is a redevelopment of what used to be, obviously, some land belonging to the Dorchester Brewery. The development has the hotel and also a bunch of apartments, several restaurants and a cinema. It also has some splashy fountains, which after a long drive on a warm day was most welcome. The kids got straight into their swimming costumes and we all went outside so they could get themselves cooled off a bit. After a while they were a bit too cold, so they put on their “summer onesies” and went back for a bit more. All of this meant that when we did go back to the hotel room they left a lovely trail of soggy footprints all the way through the hotel reception area. I think anyone following us would have been thrown off the scent at the exit ofg the lifts though. And anyway, we weren’t the only people bringing soaking wet kids into the foyer.
We finished off the day with some spicy chicken in the well-known restaurant with a name that rhymes with commandos. Nuff said. The chicken was spicy, they were short of peas so we got a free extra side, and we all went home early to try to get some sleep ready for a fun day tomorrow.
Our first full day in Dorset, so what shall we do today ? How about going to that bit that sticks out at the bottom ?
The decision was made, as were many on this holiday, whilst working our way through a hearty (for which, read “lardy”) breakfast at The Premier Inn. It proved to be a good idea to pre-buy breakfast. Buy adult ones, get the kids free. Which means unlimited coffees, plates of cooked goodies, and for the kids, a major assault on the European Muffin Mountain, with Sherpas and everything. OK, maybe not the Sherpas then. But a lot of muffins. The American type, not the English.
The decision was probably made the previous night, to be honest, but as is always the case these things need further discussion and confirmation over breakfast, just in case one of us has developed a sudden urge overnight to go spend the day prospecting for gold or herding llamas, or something. You have to check these things.
So to the bus, and off we go in the general direction of Weymouth, with one of us driving, one of us reading a map, and two of us sitting in the back and asking if we’re there yet. We weren’t. Not for nearly an hour, anyway.
To get to the Isle of Portland from Dorchester you have to drive all the way through the middle of Weymouth and out of the other side. And to where we were going, you then have to drive around the harbour and then all the way across the Isle of Portland itself. It’s quite a long way.
When we got there, we pulled into a very large, and really quite empty, car park. Empty maybe because the nearby Portland Bill Lighthouse hadn’t opened at that time. We had no change, but thankfully a bit of a phone signal, so we were able to pay for parking using the phone. Magic that, isn’t it ?
And because the lighthouse wasn’t open we had to find something to do for a while. That something was a couple of geocaches and a quick shufty at the sea. After all, it was sunny (if a little windy) and it was the first time on the holiday we’d been near the seaside.
First up was a traditional geocache stuffed under a big rock. There was a bit of argy-bargy with the kids – the usual fight about who’s turn it was to find the cache – which resulted in a bit of grumping for the next half hour or so. I hate it when they do that.
After that we did a rather dramatic earthcache based around the Pulpit Rock, which required some analysis of the rocks under our feet (which the grumpy kids were already doing), a bit of estimation, a quick peer “over the edge” at the sea and the obligatory photo with a GPS device. At least this time there’s more than one of us, and more than one camera, so the camera can take a photo of the phone (pretending to be a GPS).
Walking back along the cliffs from here the kids were starting to cheer up a little bit at last. Ami was happily snapping away with her camera (the photos on this page are hers as much as mine) and Izzy was enjoying the fresh air. It was starting to feel like a holiday.
By this time the lighthouse was open so we went and stood in the queue to go up to the top. It was a fairly long queue, so we had to wait half an hour or so, and then when we got to the front we discovered that Izzy wasn’t tall enough and they wouldn’t let her go up. Grump-diddly-grump from Grumpington. So Kas stayed at the bottom with Izzy while me and Ami went for a climb.
It is quite a long way up, and to be honest, I don’t think Izzy would have enjoyed the climb, especially not the rather steep ladder/staircase at the top which lead up to the actual lamp room. She wouldn’t have enjoyed that bit. So on reflection, I was quite glad they wouldn’t let her go up there. Which just left the small task of persuading her she was glad too. Wasn’t that hard. She’s a lot more level headed than her sister most of the time.
So we then mooched over the car park to try to do a “Ye Olde Survey Monument” cache in the road, which was supposed to be what’s known as a “Surface Block”. Unfortunately, it’s now what you’d call a “Subsurface Block” after a considerate man with a lorry load of tarmac decided to widen the paved area on this junction. As the block was not actually visible, the cache owner wouldn’t let us log it as a find either. Grump again.
Back in the car and a couple of hundred yards up the road we found a traditional cache, under a rock. Ami grumped again because, despite the bleedin’ obvious, she wasn’t able to find it and I had to do it. At this point, and getting a bit tired of her not trying, and then grumping when someone else got the cache first, so I decided we should stop at a cache and make her do the whole thing on her own. The cache concerned was a golden postbox jobby, dedicated to sailor Helena Lucas and attached rather unsurprisingly to a big black box on a post right next to said golden postbox. Ami did actually find it unaided, and thankfully this did elicit a bit of an improvement in general attitude. Woo-hoo!
Next, we made our way back across the island to a car park overlooking the harbour which had a nice seating area and a great big set of concrete Olympic Rings. Ideal for taking a few arty photos of Chesil Beach. It was supposed to have another geocache as well, but we couldn’t find it.
The beach itself was a bit easier to find. In fact, you couldn’t really miss it. Big thing, covered in stones. Over there, between the sea and the, oh, the other sea. Wikipedia says that the Isle is joined to Chesil Beach by a barrier beach, but there isn’t really a line showing where the barrier beach ends and Chesil Beach begins. It’s all just stones. And an Earthcache. And a cafe, which meant it was (late) lunchtime. Cake and crisps time, to be precise, but we’re on holiday, so who cares. The Earthcache required some more examination of the floor and a photo with the GPS, so we got the girls to experience the beach up close by laying on the shingle with my phone. Then we walked over the crest of the beach onto the seaward side. When you get to the top you realise quite how large it actually is. It really is huge. On both sides.
Talking of beaches, the weather was still nice and the kids were getting stressed again by the lack of plodging in the sea, so we drove into central Weymouth and went for a sit on the beach for a while. We hadn’t planned to, so we didn’t have their swimming gear with us, and as a result, there was a lot of sandy clothing in the car on the way back. We also left quite a lot of sand on the floor of a very nice fish & chip joint right opposite the Queen Vic Clock. It was so good, in fact, that we went back on our final day.
After which we had a sand-filled walk back past the station to the car and then a drive home, some washing of sand down the plughole, and an earlyish night caused by all of us being in the same room. It was a fairly traditional first day to a holiday for us – the kids were grumpy after getting tired and being over-excited the day before, we did a bit of this and a bit of that, and we went to bed to try to get the kids back onto Planet Earth again.
I wonder what tomorrow will bring.
Day 3 of our little holiday and the day began with Kas scooting off for a bit of a run, leaving me and the girls to grab a lardy breakfast and then kill an hour or so waiting for her to come back. We opted to kill our hour by walking just up the road to the Maumbury Rings, a Neolithic Henge just up the road from our hotel.
When we arrived the grass had been recently mown, so the undoubted highlight of the visit was the impromptu history lesson which resulted in us constructing a scale model of the nearby Maiden Castle from the grass clippings. Obviously we decided to name it Hayden Castle, as you would. It is plainly visible on many of the photos I took while we were there.
Once Kas was sorted out it was time to begin the main event(s) of the day. It was time for a bit of walking & caching, followed by a bit of a dip in the sea, with some random geology. First up was a cache named for the Osmington White Horse, which was conveniently sited in a posh new car park built just to provide a good overlook of the White Horse itself. Ideal, in fact, for doing photos of the horse standing on your hand.
After which we proceeded down to Osmington village and then drove round in circles for a bit trying to find somewhere to park. We ended up in the pub car park. The pub was open so we could use the toilets and buy a couple of drinks and some crisps to take on our walk. It also had a cache in the car park. Cha-ching !
The walk stretched for about 4 miles or or so and consisted of walking up and over a rather large hill, down into a valley, and then along a ridge above the White Horse, with a final steep drop back down into the village. There was a selection of types and sizes of cache, and Ami made an event of it by taking photos of a trackable keyring dog (which she decided was called “Cow”). She photographed it everywhere. Kept her busy, I suppose.
By the time we got back to the pub time was marching on and we all had throats drier than a Pharoah’s sock, as it were. So we went back into the pub for a drink and some more crisps before moving on. I’d been collecting information for a multi-cache as we were walking round but because we were doing it’s loop backwards it turned out that the final was a half a mile back up the path where we’d just come from, so we didn’t bother. Getting a drink was more pressing.
Durdle Door is one of those places I remember from school geography lessons. I’d been there once before on a family holiday in the early 80’s I think. Aside from the nostalgia though, it is worth a visit, but if you do go, remember to take a bucket load of coins with you. The parking meters on the top of the cliff wouldn’t accept a credit card and we had no phone signal so we couldn’t pay by phone. We eventually managed to scrounge enough coins between us to pay for a visit long enough to be worthwhile.
The girls descended straight to the beach while I went for a bit of a stroll along the cliffs to grab a couple more caches. There were some steep hills on the way. And some more on the way back.
Down on the beach, the girls were already in their costumes and having a bit of a plodge in the sea. Just after I arrived Ami decided to go for the full dip/swim. She was welcome to it. The water was perfectly warm enough but the beach could best be described as painful. It was all bug pebbles and smashed up bits of cliff, so it was really painful to walk on. In fact, I remember eventually I gave up trying to walk without shoes on and started crawling around instead. Ouchy ! Didn’t seem to bother the kids so much though.
Lulworth Cove is another place I remember from school geography lessons back in the day, back when the Interweb hadn’t been invented (but after everything was in colour instead of black & white). I came here once before on a family holiday too. Funnily enough, the same holiday and the same day as my previous visit to Durdle Door. This was our final touristy act of the day. I think it was about 5pm when we arrived, having already been to, well, all the other places further back in this post. No need to list them. If you’re still with me at this point in the proceedings you’re doing well (and I luv you).
We weren’t really planning much other than a bit of a look around and then maybe stop for something to eat. In the event, we ended up down by the cove, as you do, and my camera automatically realised I wanted to produce a panoramic shot, so it produced this rather impressive image without me having to do anything clever, and without reading the manual. Problem is, I’ve never managed to get it to do the same thing again.
After this, Ami expressed an interest in going for a walk around the beach. Kas and Izzy weren’t bothered, and to be honest I wasn’t that bothered either, despite there being an Earthcache around there. But if we’re going anyway well, it would be rude not to, wouldn’t it. It’s quite a difficult beach to walk around, as it’s all big stones and unevenness. But we got round there eventually and collected enough goodies for the Earthcache. We seemed to be getting a lot of Earthcaches down here. Must be something to do with all the nice scenery. Good geology, you know. Can’t beat a good bit of geology.
Back at the plot, all of this business during the day was taking its toll and we’d all just about had enough, so we decided it was time to grab something to eat. We looked at a few places in West Lulworth but nothing really seemed worthwhile. Everywhere looked a bit expensive, or had menus that the girls wouldn’t eat, or any one of a number of other reasons, so we decided we’d try driving back to the pub in Osmington where we’d parked earlier. Turned out to be a good choice. They did a carvery in the evenings, so the kids gorged themselves on roast dinners. Excellent stuff. Winner winner and, quite literally, chicken dinner.
And then we drove back to Dorchester and put the kids to bed. And ourselves. Long day!
What can we say about this day?
We can say it was wet. We can definitely say that. And we can also say that we hadn’t planned what to do if it was wet. And we could say that none of us really dressed properly for the conditions, especially the ladies of the house.
We thought it might be a good idea to start off by going to the hill fort at Eggardon Hill near Bridport. It was an interesting drive up, and at several points we thought we might be driving through the clouds and surrounded by rain. Once we parked up it became apparent that we actually were in the middle of the clouds. We went for a quick walk around the top of the fort (and a quick dash down the back to grab a cache for me), but we weren’t really enjoying it. All of us were getting cold and wet. Enough of that then.
After which we started a few hours of generally farting about as a result of not having planned anything. We ended up in Abbotsbury and down at the western end of Chesil Beach. We thought we might go for a look at some botanical gardens just out of town, but after we saw the cost of entry tickets we ended up just having lunch there. It seemed a bit much for what would undoubtedly be a short walk around. In nice weather it might last us all day, but in bad weather, when we were all already wet and cold, I doubt the kids would last more than an hour.
The weather still wasn’t great so we drove around the village to the other side and walked up a very steep hill to reach St. Catherine’s Chapel, taking in a couple of passing caches on the way. Kas decided to stay in the car, so it was just me and the daughters. It finally stopped raining, so whilst we were still getting wet feet from the grass at least our top halves were drying out.
When we came back down we still needed to complete the daily tasks of doing an Earthcache and feeding some ice cream to the girls. Both were achieved by driving back around to the botanical gardens, abandoning the car in their car park and walking down to Chesil Beach again. There’s an Earthcache that involves a bit of minor chat about pebbles and a load of photos showing the chapel in the background, and the like. This explains why all the photos in this batch have my phone included.
We had an ice cream (or a coffee in mine and Kas’s case) sitting under the porch of a cafe in the car park, whilst watching the renewed rain falling around us. At least it was covered and the coffee was hot.
After which we went home, got clean and dry, and went out for pizzas. At least the day ended well.
Our final day in Dorset, and after yesterday’s rather soggy debacle we made good on our promise to take the girls down to the beach first thing. On the caching front it turned out to be a fairly productive day involving a lot of multis in central Weymouth which took me through some very nice parts of the town. If you’re reading this just for the list of caches, feel free to skip to the bottom of the post.
Kas was up and at it quite early, having decided the marathon plan said she should run to Weymouth from Dorchester, a distance of about 10 miles. So she set off at about the same time me and the girls started our Premier Breakfast. Mmmmm ! As was now customary, the girls raided the muffin basket for all it was worth while I engaged in the usual protein-fest. I’m sure having cake for breakfast is OK really, so long as it isn’t every day. And so long as it isn’t 4 each.
Back at the plot we jumped in the not-so-trusty bus and headed off up the old Roman Road to Weymouth. Apparently we passed Kas somewhere near the Weymouth Massive Magic Mushroom Sculpture, but we didn’t see her.
We parked up at the park & ride and walked over to the beach at the Queen Vic clock, by way of the Station and it’s “Sidetracked” cache – gotta get that first cache of the day in the bag to get the souvenir. Not a very impressive cache but enough to get us going.
By which time Kas had more or less finished running and met us, as planned, by the Queen Vic clock.
Onto the beach we went then, and sat down, got the kids changed, and then lay down for a bit of a snooze under the light breeze and layer of high cloud. Enough of a breeze that we were quickly getting buried under the drifting sand. Within 5 minutes I had a mouth (and nose) full of the stuff and was starting to get a bit ratty. You may have guessed, if you don’t know me, that beaches are not my kind of thing. At least, not the sitting-around-whilst-getting-sand-in-every-available-orifice kind of beach. I’m fairly happy with the walking-around-taking-photos type and the got-an-Earthcache-on-it type.
So Kas sent me off caching for an hour or so while the kids got the sandcastle building out of their system for a bit. There’s a summary of the caches I did below, but let’s say it was an hour of setting off on a couple of multis rather than much actual caching. I did find one at the ANZAC monument and then another short multi down by the big sailing vessel near the ferry terminal though. However, the main gain from this hour of caching in the morning was that I managed to breeze past a load of other stuff that looked like they’d be good things to do later in the day, especially as the sun was starting to make an appearance by late morning. Near the big sailing boat there’s a little company doing 1-hour tours around Portland Harbour. Just along the river there’s a bridge over the river that opens up every 2 hours. And walking north from there you pass along a pedestrian shopping street with a few bits of summer street entertainment on them.
Back at the plot, and back with the girls, we decided to leave the beach and head for lunch. Kas went to chuck all the buckets, spades, and unnecessary bags of wet, sandy clothes into the back of the car while the girls and me went off in search of somewhere for lunch. Kas had expressed a desire for a hot dog, so we thought that ShakyDog’s looked a good bet. They major on milkshakes in all kinds of bizarre flavours, and do a nice side in hot dogs. I ordered some stuff for the girls and waited for Kas to arrive.
It turned out to be quite a good little place if you can cope with the loud music. Izzy had a hot dog and when I told the staff she wouldn’t eat the bun (she never does), they gave her another sausage free. Kas and Ami had mango milkshakes and I had a peanut butter one. Titter ye not, Mrs ! Peanut butter milkshake, when made with real ice cream, is very nice. None of the food we had was particularly healthy, but who cares. We’re on holiday, innit?
From here we wandered down the shopping street, with the girls choosing to totally ignore the silver-painted bloke standing on a bucket. Shame, he would probably have been good theatre. But we ended up at the Town Bridge, which is a very fine-looking double-leaf bascule. It opens every two hours, and I just so happened to time my walking in the day so that I caught it opening at 12, 2 and 4 pm. Which is quite bad timing. Once or twice would be good for photos, but that third one was just shabby timing on my part. At the 2 pm opening we also did a team hunt on a multi-cache themed on the bridge. It should have been a solo find for me, but I just couldn’t spot any item matching the hint, and eventually went for help. All three girls came over with me and Kas spotted the very thing inside a couple of minutes. An item I had walked straight past probably 6 times already without noticing. Mumble, mumble…….
After the 2pm opening we crossed back over and along the quayside (where the rails and loading platform of the old Weymouth Harbour Tramway are still in evidence. ending up at the tall sailing ship we were just in time to jump aboard one of the little boats doing one hour tours of Portland Harbour. This proved to be a good little trip for us to do, as it filled an hour in the afternoon when the kids were starting to wane a bit, and it was engaging enough for both of them to show a little interest in the Captain’s quite simplistic commentary. It was bright sun by now, so we had a proper holiday feeling as we scooted along over the water being gently burned on the top and cooled by the occasional salty splash.
When we got back to shore we then strolled back along the quay and up the shopping street again, with no particular plan other than maybe going back to the beach for a bit longer. This soon turned when Kas and the girls spotted a woman doing hair braids – a bit of a Gardner girls holiday habit. Unlike their counterparts in France, who seem to charge for the overall effect, the lady in Weymouth charged by the inch. 80p an inch, to be precise. So mine was free, and very quick. The girls had to wait a bit longer. And as Kas knows I’m not much of a “standing around” type of person she basically told me to go caching again and she’d give me a call when the braiding was close to finishing. This gave me the opportunity to finish a couple of caches I’d started earlier in the day, including a walk back over the Town Bridge (with 10-minute wait for the 4 pm opening) and into the old town, south harbour and the Nothe Fort. On this little dash I managed to grab another 5 caches. I ignored two that were marked unavailable.
It was a bit late getting back by now, and whilst Kas had occupied a bit of time by buying a new sweatshirt, it was time to get back together for an early evening meal again. Before that though I had to extend the parking. One thing I came to both love and hate whilst in Dorset is the parking. I hate it because it seems expensive everywhere and you can’t get refunds on part-used time periods, and I love it because you can pay by mobile, and when your period is running out they send you a reminder text with a phone number you can call to extend it without having to return to your car.
I got another 2 hours parking and we went for dinner at King Edward’s Fish and Chips on the Esplanade (again).
This time we were right posh, with the kids having their food served in a plastic bucket (with spade).
Which just about left time to drive back to Dorchester, query why the hotel had let someone park in our allocated space again (they hadn’t – someone had just gone all “freestyle” on them), wash half of Weymouth Beach down the plughole and grab a swift half in the bar before retiring to bed.
So if you’re only reading this post for the caching parts, I’m sorry for wasting your time with the rest of it, but here’s a quick list of the caches I did. If you want a relatively touristy, not too hardcore, day of caching in the centre and old town of Weymouth, I suggest you start at the ANZAC Monument just north of the Queen Vic clock on the esplanade, and gradually work your way south, not that I’m telling you where the multis take you. The caches that I did during the day, in the order I did them, were :
- Sidetracked-Weymouth – a quick nano round the back of the bikesheds.
- ANZAC Tribute – A quick bench job near to the memorial to ANZAC soldiers on the esplanade
- Shipwrecked – Mayday – A short multi down by the ferry terminal with a very muggly end-point, but worth it just for the nerve of putting one there.
- Weymouth Town Bridge – Another short multi themed on the bridge of the same name.
- Hope you find it… – An easy trad near the Rotary Club building in Brewery Square
- OYB 27 Before the Bridge – Part of the big “On Yer Bike” series on the bay to the south of Nothe Fort
- Portland View – An excellent multi starting at the Queen Vic clock and taking you through 5 stages to reach a viewpoint overlooking Portland Harbour
- White Hideaway – A fairly big trad under a rock overlooking the bay to the south of Nothe Fort
- OYB 29 My Favourite Viewpoint – A quick multi based around the Nothe Fort
On the route I took to do these there are several other trads that were temporarily disabled the day I was there, and you might also like to try Cannon Ball Run – a multi I didn’t have time for but which starts near the Town Bridge and ends over by the Ferry Terminal (at least, the description implies it ends there). There are a number of puzzles that appear in the old town but none of them are actually there – most are a good way out. There is the Castle Treasure puzzle, though, which requires you to have found 3 caches at Portland Castle, Sandsfoot Castle and Maiden Castle. We didn’t try this, but given the name I guess it’s most likely to be somewhere near the Nothe Fort.
