Geocaching Adventures, part 7 - October and November 2010

I've combined two months this time around, as our geocaching activities are slowing down considerably with the hockey season back in full swing, the lousy weather, and the dark evenings.

But I still have some great geocaching experiences to share :)

First of all, we took our caching adventure overseas once again, back to Ireland, but to the North this time.

On Saturday 2nd October, we managed to shake the kiddies loose, and headed over to Belfast for the weekend with our good pals Michelle and Tracy. We were mainly there to see the visiting Boston Bruins take on a British Elite League super team at ice hockey, but we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to spend a few hours geocaching before the big game.

First, after lunch in the gorgeous Crown Saloon Bar, we found a nano cache right by the Europa Hotel – #180 Europa Hotel, Crown Bar and Grand Opera House - which turned out to be where the Bruins were staying. I was glad we read the previous logs on this one, as a lot of people reported the co-ords pointing to the wrong side of the (wide) road, and we had the same problem. We had to resort to the hint in the end, which I didn’t understand at all, but Tracy and Jay got it straight away (it was something to do with sensors… )

Next we parted ways, M&T went off to do some shopping, and Jay and I took a short walk down to the river.

On the way we picked up a particularly unexciting cache – a film tub chucked under a bush in amongst piles of litter. Lovely. Not. This one was #181 May Street (George VI Memorial), if you’re planning a trip to Belfast and want to avoid it.

Our next find was much nicer – as was the approach to it along the Lagan Towpath. We passed a nice fountain, and a giant bottle top sculpture, and some cool totem pole style signs. I expected the towpath to be running alongside a canal, but instead it turned out we were walking by a whopping great big river. It was so tranquil and calm down here within just a few minutes walk of the city centre, I’m surprised we didn’t see more people out enjoying this walk on a Saturday afternoon.

The cache itself - #182 The Gasworks - was a good size, always a nice surprise to find a proper trading cache in or near a city centre – and we dropped off a troll travel bug here.

We just had time to pick up one more cache on the way back to the hotel before the big game, #183 St Geo’s Harbour, and it was a little cracker.

Can you see it?

How about now?

Cute :)

The following weekend, on the Saturday (October 9th), Connor was at his dad’s for a few hours, so Jay, Reece and I took the short drive out to the pretty Cotswold village of Bibury, with big plans to tackle our first 4.5 difficulty cache - #184 Bibury. We braced ourselves for a fiendishly difficult search, and likely failure, only to end up finding the cache really easily exactly at ground zero, what an anti climax! I don’t think that the easy find was down to any stupendous caching genius on our part, as looking back over previous logs, it appears that a few other people agree that it really doesn’t deserve its 4.5 stars. It was placed in 2002, and the cache description implies that the extra stars were given due to tree cover. Maybe our modern GPS is just more able to deal with the distractions?

Anyway – other than being disappointingly easy – it was a nice cache, and it gave us some spectacular views over Bibury. And Reece got himself a little dragon toy which he happily played with for the rest of the day. Result.

There's the giant bull.  Eek.

As we had found the first cache quicker than expected, we still had time after lunch to go and find another – a quick check of the surrounding area highlighted a nearby cache called #185 Ablington Down which looked promising, so we headed there.

This one was a gem – it involved a fairly long walk through some glorious countryside, complete with chocolate-box-perfect rolling hills, a slight scare from a HUGE bull who looked to be coming up the valley to investigate / gore us (but then thankfully walked straight on past us), and a close encounter with the world’s friendliest jay bird. The jay was so cool, he followed us the whole length of the field, coming right up within a foot or two of us, so we were able to get some great photos of him even with just the little camera (I did wish I had taken the DSLR!).

The cache itself was a nice big ‘un, and we found a travel bug in there that hasn’t ever been logged in there (before or since), so we have no idea who put it there, that was a nice surprise though.

This is absolutely our favourite kind of cache – a decent walk through beautiful surroundings with a nice big box at the end of it – yet we were the first people to find it in over three months, and at the time of writing this, it’s gone almost two months again without a finder since our visit. What a pity that these great experience caches are overlooked nowadays in favour of a quickie in Tesco’s car park :(

the jay had been perched on that gate post in the right of the photo, we were trying to get our picture taken with him but he suddenly went camera shy :)

geocaching event at Stow On The Wold - #186 A Quick Flash In Stow.  This started at 10 am and lasted for precisely 10 minutes (this ending at 10/10/10 10:10 :)  ), and was a tremendous amount of fun! For somebody as socially inept as me, a ten minute event is perfect – no long awkward silences :) We were able to put some faces to names and meet a few new people, and we also met a trackable dog named Flo :) Plus the kids got “discovered” a few times in their travel bug t-shirts. Big thanks to Walk Tall for organising this one, we all enjoyed it.

We spent the rest of the day in beautiful Bourton On The Water, where we didn’t go looking for a single cache, but we did get one last one for the weekend on the way to Bourton from the event. This was located in a RAF town called Upper Rissington, where a lot of the RAF housing appears to be largely abandoned now. And so is the huge Officers Mess building, which is well on its way to being an urban ruin. I would have loved to have got in there and taken some 28-Days-Later style urban exploration photos, but it was pretty well boarded up. It looks like the local kids have a lot of fun running around the area playing their own version of Counterstrike, as there were BB gun pellets everywhere!

The actual cache - #187 UPPER Cache, Proud History - was a straightforward find close to the Officers Mess. And as usual the boys enjoyed having a good rummage through the contents.

The weekend after, we were blessed with lovely sunny autumn weather, and on the 17th we headed over to High Wycombe to the Hell-Fire Caves as an early Halloween treat for the boys (we weren’t going to be with them at actual Halloween as Connor was off to Ireland to see his granny, and Reece was staying at his mum’s house to trick or treat with his school mates). The caves were absolutely brilliant, especially decked out in their Halloween finest. We also loved the nearby church with its golden globe (this caught the sunlight brilliantly and is visible for miles around as it is at the top of a hill), and the octagonal mausoleum built by Francis Dashwood, the leader of the infamous Hellfire Club back in the 1700s.

Close to the mausoleum we found #188 Hellfire’s Globe - another old cache, hidden back in 2002. This one took a bit of finding but we got there in the end with the help of the hint.

On our way home from High Wycombe, we found a really cool cache in the woods - #189 An Unusual Parking Job. The cache was hidden on the chassis of an abandoned pick up truck quite deep into the forest. It was indeed an unusual place to park :) I particularly liked the graffiti’d trees around the car. It all had a bit of a Mad Max vibe going on :) Fun! I love this hobby. How else would we have found this exact spot?

A rare midweek outing saw myself and Connor out caching after work on Wednesday 20th October – on the hunt for a First To Find. We came soooooo close this time, too! We arrived at #190 Central Park just a minute or two after Slogger007, he was just signing the log when we got there. Drat. Foiled again! (That will teach me for picking Connor up from after school club first, I should have gone straight there :)   ). It certainly wasn’t a wasted visit, however, as the cache hunt took us to a really nice park that I hadn’t known about before, and Connor had a good play there for a while before we headed off for home. We also found the Blondini statue that used to be in the town centre years ago – apparently this is where it was relocated to. Nice to see it again.

Then two days later, the weather was cold but dry, and I had time to nip out on one of my Friday lunchtime solo caching adventures, which was fun.

The cache I chose was #191 Two Degrees West – Merchants Downs. This was my second Two Degrees West cache – I’d love to do more, having enjoyed the book so much, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, as my log online shows:

view from the parking spot for the 2DW cache, looking down into the valley

I love Fridays :) Because dress down day in the office is the only chance I get to do a bit of lunchtime geocaching, and today was a great example of that. A proper little midday adventure.

I’m surprised that nobody else has gone looking for this cache in months – it’s not that far from civilisation (after all I managed to get there, take a leisurely walk down, take some piccies on my phone, find the cache, wander about for a bit trying to get the exact 2 degrees west co-ords to show up on my GPS, clamber back up the hill, and be back at my desk in Cirencester all within an hour (just!)). And the walk takes you through some stunning countryside - plus it’s related to the fab 2 Degrees West book (which I bought and read and LOVED after finding a previous 2 Degrees West cache)

At least if anyone has been put off going to look for it as it hasn’t had a find since July, I can confirm it’s definitely still there – in fact it was a very easy find as it was pretty exposed – I tried to re-hide it a bit better, but I doubt it’s at much risk from muggles down there. It is in excellent condition, all nice and dry and tidy.

I took a cute little old butter knife that reminds me of one I had as a child (strange thing to find in a cache, but I’m glad I did), and replaced it with two bouncy balls as that’s all I had on me (wasn’t really expecting to trade today as I had no kiddies in tow). I also found a lovely feather just near the cache, so am taking that home as another souvenir of my adventure :)

I actually got a reading of W 001 99 989 or something along those lines at the cache site, but I was determined to get my W 002 00 000 photo, so ended up having to wade across the little stream… I was a bit bedraggled by the time I got back to the office, but nobody seemed to notice / mind.

Thanks RoobyDoo for yet another quality cache!

On Sunday October 24th, we set out to break our personal best of most cache types found in a single day. To be honest, we didn’t have to try very hard, as our previous best was a paltry two :)  And today we smashed that – finding 5 different types – go us!

The location for our record breaking expedition was Avebury, its stone circles and surrounds, always a great place to visit at any time of the year, but especially so on a gloriously sunny Autumn day.

The first cache type on our list was a webcam cache – our first of this type: #192 Avebury Inner Eye - yet another 2002 placement, we found a lot of oldies this month. Unfortunately the webcam itself was down for maintenance - pah - but the cache owners were happy to accept a virt-style qualifying photo instead.

Next, an even older one – a virtual cache placed in 2001 - #193 Avebury Stone Circle – this is apparently the 3rd oldest virtual in England, and the 30th oldest cache of any type. There was a twist to this one which was partly funny and partly a bit of an anti-climax, but to tell you what the twist is would be a bit of a spoiler, you’ll have to find it yourself :)

It was at the location for this cache that Reece found the cob of corn that he played with non stop for the rest of the day (why do we waste our money on expensive toys for them? :)  )

For our traditional cache, we chose #194 Betwixt Stones and High Place. This one involved walking along the muddiest path in the world, ever. But the cache was a nice one, and we were rewarded with a brilliant view of Silbury Hill on the walk over to the cache site:

After some (delicious) lunch in the Red Lion (the only pub in the world to be situated inside an ancient stone circle, and the subject of a whole episode of Most Haunted once, if I remember rightly), we drove a short distance to the pretty village of Lockeridge Dene to find an earthcache, imaginatively named the Lockeridge Dene Earthcache (our #195). This was based upon a field of glacial erratics – Sarsen stones (see, I’m learning something from all these earthcaches :)  ), quite a spectacular location, and fun for photo ops too...:)

Nearby, #196 Chocolate Box Cottage, a multi cache, completed our 5 types in one day challenge.

That was fun! What can we do to top that?

How about finding caches in 6 different counties in one day? And they all have to be counties we have never cached in before.

OK then:)

So, that’s exactly what Jay and I planned to do on Saturday 30th October – on our way up to Lincoln for our second weekend away without the kids in the same month! I could get used to this:)

Our quest didn’t start off too well, our first two caches were DNFs.

The first we unsuccessfully searched for was Max’s Swap Box 3 – this was to be our find in Worcestershire, but unfortunately it had been muggled – we found its camo bag but no sign of the cache (the CO has since archived it). As we were on a fairly tight schedule, and we figured we could come back to Worcestershire easily enough another day as it’s very close to Jay’s house, we decided to press on. So we re-adjusted our ambition from 6 counties in a day to 5, and drove onward to the West Midlands.

I have to confess that made a bit of a boo boo with the selection of our West Midlands cache – Hatchford Brook, Bell Walk - I had looked for recent DNFs (it didn’t have any, good sign), but I had failed to notice that the last FOUND date was in May. And unsurprisingly, we didn’t find it, I think it was long gone :( . I can’t believe, given the regularity with which it had been found before May, and its location very close to a built up area, that nobody at all had searched for it over the entire summer. So how come not one person had posted a DNF??? There’s no shame in it, people! The CO responded very quickly after we posted our DNF log, confirmed the cache missing and replaced it. This could have been dealt with much sooner if people had bothered to log their lack of a find. Ah well.

We weren’t going to give up on the West Midlands as easily as we gave up on Worcestershire, so after that 2nd DNF we went after another West Mids cache and got our first find of the day, woohoo!!

This was #197 Riverside Ramble 5 in Solihull. It was a nice easy find once we got there, but on heading for the parking spot, and pointing out a block of flats where one of my ex boyfriends used to live when I should have been concentrating on my driving, I ended up driving down a “buses only” road and getting pulled over and ticked off by the long arm of the law. Luckily the policemen were nice, and once they had established we were from distant country yokel parts, they let us off with just a mildly stern look and a warning not to rely too heavily on the sat nav, to the exclusion of noticing big signs that say BUSES ONLY! Sorry officers!

Next on our route was Staffordshire – specifically #198 the Tamworth Two’s Bridleway/Footpath Stroll #1. This one had a super cool container :)

Then we hot-footed it into Leicestershire and visited Ashby-de-la-Zouch, the town, famous for being the home of Walkers Crisps, that sounds like it should be the lead singer of Rage Against The Machine. Our cache here was #199 the Ashby Ghost. This was by a really lovely old graveyard which we enjoyed exploring and photographing. We had some lunch here too.

Next on our whistlestop tour of the country was a milestone cache for us – #200 Feeling Flakey, in Stanton by Dale, Derbyshire. We really are the slowest cachers on earth, as it has taken us almost 3 years to reach 200 finds (some people do that in a week!). Never mind, slow and steady wins the race and all that :) We like playing this game at our own pace.

Our last county for today (at least to cache in, we did actually end the day in Lincolnshire but didn’t find a cache there until the next morning) was Nottinghamshire. The cache we found here was an Earthcache - #201 The Hemlock Stone – Fact or Fiction. This was probably our favourite cache of the day as the location was so fascinating.

From Wiki:

The Hemlock Stone has been proven to have been deposited on Stapleford Hill, opposite Bramcote Hills, in the early Triassic Period over 200 million years ago. Many theories surround how the Stone came into being.

Some believe it was created by nature, some that it was made by man. If it was indeed made by man, it is most likely made by ancient civilizations, carving it as a symbol of worship. The geological side of it suggests that the stone is merely the remains of the strata that once built up the whole district, as the surrounding area has a similar structure. They suggest that as the land around the Stone wore away over the millennia, the Hemlock Stone was just a harder piece of rock that has taken much longer to wear away. Following on from this, since the whole of the surrounding area was once subject to glaciation, the Hemlock Stone could have been the outcome of ice erosion. It cannot, however, be a glacial erratic because its rock types match those of its surroundings.

Against this research, some argue that it is the work of the Devil.

The next day, after a HUGE and delicious breakfast in our very posh hotel in Lincoln, we pottered out into the beautiful old city and went looking for a cache or two. The first we looked for was Houses of the Holy. I really wanted to find this one purely because I liked the name, having listened to a lot of Led Zep in my wasted youth. And it was in a lovely location overlooked by the gorgeous cathedral. But we looked and looked (feeling rather uncomfortable as Ground Zero seemed to be very close to some residential front gardens and the whole area was muggle central) and came up empty handed :(  . I notice that, following a couple more DNFs after ours, the cache owner has now confirmed the cache had gone walkies and has replaced it.

Very close by, though, was the rather unattractively named but pleasantly situated nano cache #202 THE CURSE OF THE FTF LINCOLNSHIRE #11 (there’s no need to shout, Mr Cache Hider!). I was quite chuffed with this one as it was a tricky lil devil, and I found it before Jay spotted it, which is unusual as his cacher’s eye is much better than mine. This was around the back of the Cathedral which afforded us another less touristy view of this stunning building.

We managed to find one more cache in Lincoln before we moved on, but it wasn’t straightforward – it seems that the ghosts of Lincoln were feeling mischievous! Well, it was Halloween after all :) The evening before, we had gone on a Ghost Walk – a night time guided tour around the old city on foot, complete with spooky stories – it was really good fun! There was one part of the walk, an archway, that the guide said many locals were scared to pass through at night despite the fact it provided a significant shortcut across town. She also claimed that many people get disturbance there to their electronic devices, phones ring for no reason, cameras won’t take photos etc etc. We pooh-poohed all that at the time and our photos came out fine, and our phones worked as they should. But then the next day, as we were walking towards that same archway, following the arrow on the GPS, the display froze. I switched the GPS on and off again, and all our caches (6 lots of carefully prepared pocket queries, sob) had disappeared! Noooooo. Never mind, thought I, I have my fancy schmanzy Android smartphone, we’ll use that. But no, my geocaching app which usually works fine decided to flip out. All very spooooooky.

In the end we gave up on the cache and went back to the Cathedral in search of the Lincoln Imp, which had been roped off when we had tried an hour before due to a service being in progress. There is a happy ending, though, after finding the Imp (which perhaps appeased the ghosties and ghoulies?), I managed to get onto geocaching.com via my phone browser, get the co-ords for the cache, input them manually into the GPS, and we found it, hooray!

This was our last cache find of the weekend, and it was #203 Off The Wall. We found a nice big geocoin in there, which was a pleasant surprise as it hadn’t yet been logged into the cache.

We had planned to find a couple on our way home, through Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire, to colour in a couple more counties on the map, but with all our pocket queries zapped, and less time than we had budgeted after outstaying our welcome in Lincoln, we decided to leave those two counties for another day (next time we go to Peterborough to see the Phantoms play, I expect).

We did get up to a grand total of 20 UK counties cached in, though, which made me happy :)  And here's our new map - looking good!

So – onto November – we didn’t get out too much this month, partly as we have been busy doing other stuff at the weekends, and partly because of the coooooooooold weather. In fact we didn’t find our first cache this month until the 12th.

That wasn’t the first we had looked for though, Jay, Reece and I did attempt A Cunning Cache # 5 at Coate Water on the previous Sunday, but sadly we couldn’t find it. A little TOO cunning for us, maybe? Especially as we were all freezing and didn’t want to spend more than a couple of minutes searching. It has been found since, so I know it’s there, we will have to go back and try again one day.  We made up for the DNF by going on the train - I love the Coate Water train :)  ('twas blinking cold going round, mind)

So on to Friday the 12th, and another lunchtime expedition around Cirencester, which very nearly turned into a total blank. The first cache I attempted turned out to be across a VERY muddy field, and I didn’t have my walking boots with me, so I abandoned that idea. And the second, at a church, I could see exactly where the cache was, but couldn’t retrieve it as there were workmen there giving me very suspicious looks. So that one was also postponed until another day.

I was keen to get November started off with at least one find, though, so before returning to the office I pulled one out of the reserve bag – a supermarket car park cache at Tesco - #204 Off Yer Trolley, Cirencester Extra. I had no intention of ever bothering to look for this one, but desperate times call for desperate measures!

And actually, you know what? it wasn’t all that bad – it was a small trading cache for a start, not a micro, and it was in a tree by a stream at the back of the car park, which was fairly pleasant. Compared to the film tub shoved down the back of a bin I found in an ASDA car park once (which put me right off this Off Yer Trolley series), it was positively picturesque!

The next day, we made up for our slow start to the month by doing a pretty little series nearby, centred around the village of Meysey Hampton. This is one of RoobyDoo’s series’ – and this day was his 50th birthday – happy birthday Rooby! – so it seemed appropriate to go out and enjoy some of his caches.

First up, though, we picked up #205 Meysey Hampton, a regular, that wasn’t part of the series, but was very close to where we parked our car. This one seems to have been discovered by the locals, as there were some rather, um, “colourful” entries in the log! But it has been otherwise left intact.

Next we moved on to the series proper, #206-#213 MH8 1-8. This was a really nice stroll around a lovely part of the countryside on a chilly but sunny autumn day. Just the ticket!

We picked up a few travel bugs on the way around, and found some reasonable swag too – I even did some trading myself as there was a really nice small make up bag in one of the caches – brand new – that was a perfect size for weekends away. Thanks to whoever left that :) And there was even an ammo can at one point. What more could you ask for?

We had a good giggle near the end of the series, as there was a locked gate on the public footpath with a teeny tiny gap next to it to squeeze through – this photo was slightly staged for comedy value, but it really was a tight squish :) I notice that a subsequent logger has said something like “a person of larger size would never fit through that gap” – which is good, as that means I can’t be a “person of larger size”, cos I did (just), hurrah! :D

The following day, Sunday 14th, we took a day trip down to Wells, to see the Witch of Wookey Hole (yes, yes, it was W fortnight :)  ) . Caching wasn’t too high on our agenda for the day, but we couldn’t resist doing #214 the Wookey Hole earthcache (it would have been rude not to as we were right there). And all you had to do was have your photo taken in front of the car park sign and then answer a couple of questions that we picked up the answers to on our cave tour. Easy peasy.

The boys had a travel bug to drop off also, so on our way home we took a slight detour to find a small physical cache which promised a nice view of Glastonbury Tor. This was #215, Welcome To Wells – Tor Hill. It was also the location of filming for the accident scene in Hot Fuzz, apparently, I’ll have to watch the film again (yarp), to see if I recognise it. I’ll be pointing at the screen and yelling “there’s a cache in that bit of ivy there!” :)

The promised view of the Tor was a bit on the distant side, but still definitely worth stopping for. On a nicer, sunnier day I’m sure it would have been even better.

A nice sunny day like the following Friday perhaps? which was gorgeous! And so I was out of the office like a shot as soon as it was lunchtime, to go and find me a cache or two down by the canal. It turned out to be one, not two, as my first attempt - Sapperton Canal Tunnel - was a DNF. I know it’s there, as a finder a few days after me has logged it with a “nice quick easy find, thank you” (don’t you just hate that when you’ve just DNF’d it?? ), but I couldn’t find it. Pah. I couldn’t look as long as I would have liked, though, to be fair as, after a couple of minutes of searching, I looked up to see a grumpy old bloke staring at me suspiciously from the top of the tunnel entrance, and I thought I’d better skedaddle before he called the Neighbourhood Watch out on me or something. I’ll have to get back out there on another lunchbreak and have a better look.

But no worries, I didn’t go back to my desk empty handed, as I walked further down to the canal to my primary target cache for the day - #216 Lengthman’s Round House – and am pleased to report that I actually found that one, yay! And it was my bessie mate Alison’s first cache too – well sort of – as she was on the phone chatting to me as I found it :)  That counts, right?

The location for this one is very cool indeed – this disused part of the old Thames and Severn canal is very very pretty, and the abandoned cylindrical house once used by the local “lengthman”, who was in charge of this stretch of the canal, is a fascinating structure.

This was the first cache in which I left one of our new signature items – a chainmailled moebius ball phone charm – I’ve been watching keenly to see if anyone picks it up, but nobody has found the cache since, so it’s still in there. I traded it for a cute little pottery squirrel, who now lives on my desk at work next to my hockey duck.

On the Saturday, in complete contrast to the lovely sunny Friday, it was freeeeezing, and foggy too. So we only braved the one cache. Fair weather cachers, us :)

We wanted to visit Nightingale Woods in South Marston, as it looked on Google Maps like it might be a good potential spot for a new cache we have in the planning pipeline. It’s a sizeable patch of woodland which currently only has one cache in it right at the top end, and a nice winding path through from the large car park at the bottom. However, when we got there and walked through the woods to find the cache - #217 This Way Or That – we soon realised why the area is virtually cache free. The wood is very young – planted in the 1990s – and therefore rather sparse, so no decent cover for caches – the one we found was pretty much right out in the open rather half heartedly covered up with a small plank. Plus, well, it’s just not very pretty. So we decided against it as a potential spot for our new letterbox hybrid.

But we did enjoy the cache that’s already in there, despite the chilly weather, it was a good size and had some good swag inside, Reece got himself a brand new pair of school scissors which he needed anyway, so that was handy. And I left another of our signature items in there. Nope – that one’s not been picked up yet either. This was actually The Chaos Crew’s second attempt at this cache, as Connor and I nearly went after it back in early 2008 – but just as we pulled up in the car park the heavens opened and we decided to go back home and look for the cache another day. I didn’t expect it would take us almost 3 years!

So that’s pretty much it for October and November, This Way Or That was out last find. I did have one more solo DNF though – on Thursday 25th I had to go to Maidenhead for a work meeting, and arrived about an hour too early. So I fired up my phone and had a quick scan, and discovered that there was a small cache called Wonky Donkey very close by. I liked the name, so off I toddled in my office clothes and shoes in the freezing cold. By the time I arrived at ground zero I was cold and had sore feet and was writing myself mental reminders that work clothes and geocaching really don’t mix (which is why I only ever lunchtime cache on dress down Fridays). The cache location was right on a VERY busy road and very close to some rather expensive looking houses. I felt distinctly uncomfortable rooting around in a huge pile of fallen leaves in sight of so many people, so I quickly called it a day, and tottered back down the hill to my meeting, which thankfully went very well, and was in a nice warm building :) I think I should just have taken a book to read in reception for that hour, rather than waste it freezing myself through in an abortive attempt to find what probably wouldn’t have been the world’s most exciting geocache ever anyway. But you live and learn!

We will probably do even less caching in the next 2 or 3 months than we did in November, so this is likely to be my last geocaching post until winter draws to a close.

To all of you hardy souls who are still out there for hours a day, I admire your stamina and resistance to the cold! But I think I am happier indoors near the radiator :)  In fact - I wonder if there's a company out there that makes these cat beds in human size??

See you all after the thaw!