Geocaching (again)

After a blustery and snowy Sunday - Monday was much improved so we decided to go out for a few more caches. I love geocaching, but that day turned out to be a lot less fun than I expected. The first cache was in a village where a famous writer lived. I had no trouble finding it, hidden down a tree in a lane by a pretty white church. It was on the web site as a traditional cache, so I thought that having found it that was it. Until I read the logbook which then suggested that I had to go to the Museum and read some number on a board. Cheeky, I thought. A traditional cache and then you find out it is really a multi. Needless to say (I found it out since) that it used to be a multi, but they put it back to a traditional because the Museum is closed for refurbishment. However, they forgot to cross off the second instruction, so I ended up very confused. Never mind, I thought I would still get this find credited as it was obvious that I couldn't get in to a closed Museum.

After this we went to a nearby village where the cache was hidden at the foot of a tree on top of an ancient hill fort, now thickly forested. I left Roy at the bottom by the row of wine cellars (sadly closed) :-( and climbed straight up. Found the exact co-ordinates, but no sign of cache. There was a suspicious looking large hole at the bottom of a tree, but still no cache. I was getting a bit p....d off by now, considering my lack of success, but I took some pictures and hoped to have it credited on the basis of the photographs.

When I got back down to Roy and the car I was seriously considering jacking in the whole thing, but felt that at least the next one should be done, as it is en route to home anyway. We got going and stopped in the village appointed (although the village name plate was missing) and asked where the stages of the cross were. The locals looked very puzzled, but thankfully we managed to work out that we stopped one village too early, so we motored on. Before that we did try to put the coordinates in the TomTom, but it decided to send us on a 25 mile trip in a Northerly direction, so we were puzzled yet again. Never mind, perhaps I made a mistake with the co-ordinates or printed the wrong details on my sheet, but as we could now see the village where we should have been on the horizon we journeyed on. Upon arrival we had our sandwiches and then tried the co-ordinates again, same place 25 miles away. Now I decided that I must have got myself confused when copying the details from the web site and the weather seemed to turn as well, so we decided to call it a day. On our way out of the village we suddenly spotted the blue house with the path next to it which was supposedly the departure point. Looking up on the hill we saw the big cross and even spotted the finger post right next to us that pointed up the hill directing you to the cross. Hurraaahhhh!! We must be in the right place. At this point we realised that we were very silly assuming that I boobed with the coordinates as having the hand held GPS, we could have checked. We did so straight away and discovered that our poor old TomTom must have been having a bad day, because everything was correct and all I had to do was to climb the bloody big hill right above us to the big cross and find the cache. This I duly did, so we amassed a grand total of 3, having suffered all kinds of mishaps and frustrations. Sill I can't complain as I was out in the fresh air, had some exercise and took a few really lovely photos of the glorious countryside around me.

Upon arrival home I put my finds on the web site: it accepted the password without the one from the Museum for the first - GREAT!! - the second was put up without the password, and the third normally. Having re-read some of the comments on the hill fort one it transpired that the last time anyone found it in situ was at the end of September, nothing in the following 3 months, then one person at the beginning of January found it accidentally in a bush 30 metres away from its place and another poor bugger 5 days before me couldn't find it at all. Since then the owner of the cache has accepted our find based on the photos, but only after I nudged him by e-mail. Great fun this geocaching lark, I must say!!