Climbing and Snowy Caching

Learning to climb

And now for something completely different… Today we took a special trip up to Grafham water (Near Huntingdon) for an introductory course in climbing. It was a 3 hour “taster session” course to show how to climb on an indoor wall. We were attracted to it as it was the cheapest around (£17 for the 3 hours) and they provided you with all equipment. It also wasn’t too far to go. Fortunately there was only a dusting of snow overnight and the roads were clear enough for us to get up there safely.

On the course there were just 4 adults (including us) and a party of 7 kids. Well, the kids made it look so easy and they were up that wall like rats up drainpipes. After the kids had had a go we all tried and… erm… well, let’s just say the kids were absolutely fearless, however we were all a lot more hesitant and cautious. We learnt how to belay and how to tie knots as well as how to climb and how to correctly come down. I was quite impressed as I managed to get all the way to the top.

Up the wall I go!

Caching in Peterborough goes with a bang!

We were heading up to Peterborough today for their Firework Fiesta. It’s a massive Fireworks display held at Ferry Meadows (Right next to Nene Park) every year which never disappoints and I would highly recommend. There were also a few caches in Nene Park which we thought we’d try and grab. We had a very casual day of caching and found about 15, however there were two very important puzzle caches that I had worked hard on solving for a few weeks. Getting these caches would mean completing two of the difficulty/terrain combos that we hadn’t found before so our trip was planned around them.

The road to René Descartes

The René Descartes puzzle cache had been the focus of my attention for a whole week. You know what it’s like when you start a puzzle, you have that driving force to complete it! This one was special however as it had a 4 difficulty/3 terrain rating which we needed so I tried extra hard to solve it. It did also turn out that I was going down the right route to solving it, I just had to keep trying until I found the thing I needed. This cache is in Great Paxton, near St Neots, which we could slightly inconveniently take a detour to on our way to Peterborough.

I plotted a route and on our way there we stopped to grab some caches in Yelling. We had a 50/50 success rate with these, however didn’t get down about it as the real reason we were passing through there was to bag the puzzle.

The first couple were easy finds in your typical cache location (base/hollow of tree covered in sticks).

The CO had done an interesting doodle on the lid of this!

Supermarket (Cache) Sweep

Today we decided to pop up the road to Morrisons in Cambourne for a bit of a shop. Afterwards we couldn’t resist grabbing some caches on the way home around the area. We grabbed 8 in total, but had real fun finding them!

We stopped off for a cache that was positioned on a recently opened walkway over the A428, Hardwick Hangover. It was a very, very blue hang over! It took a few minutes to find it, but we got it after our search. I had to be very careful when replacing it that I didn’t drop it as it was a long way down.

Very blue

Got it!