The Chiltern 100 in a day

Planning…

Since the very first time we went out on a caching trail with mel-ray, the “Chiltern Hundred” caching series had been mentioned. This is a large series in Hertfordshire placed by the number 1 UK cacher, drsolly, consisting of 109 traditional caches + 1 bonus with a 5/5 difficulty and terrain rating. The series is split into 3 loops so it can be done on separate days, or just one day.

The Chiltern100 plotted in CACH'EYE

Along with “The UK Mega Series” and “The Sussex Amble” this is one of the UK’s biggest trails over the most miles. With 300+ “Found it” logs on the caches it is very well known and very often visited. I’d always been quite unsure of the mileage for it. I’d heard a lot of people say the series was 25 miles around, so this is what we based our planning on. Initially we thought we’d really give it a go and do it in a single day… and then we had a moment of weakness and decided that it wasn’t practical and we should just split it into two days… Finally, last Saturday at the Goldhanger meet we finalised our plans and whilst I was chatting to another cacher, unbeknown to me the rest of the team were discussing doing the Chiltern Hundred this Saturday with a 5am start so we could honour our initial plans and walk it in 1 day. Blimey! I did think they were joking so this was followed by me asking “Really? Really? Really? Are we DEFINTELY doing it this Saturday?” a lot as they often pull my leg about these things! Fellow Essex cachers schoolfrenz and The Kitty Cachers had recently done amazingly well and managed the series in a day with a record breaking time by doing a fair bit of power walking, but we’re nowhere near as fit as them so I did think we had bitten off a bit more than we could chew, however it was a challenge so we thought we’d try our best…

Caching around Essex and Hertfordshire

We stayed close to home on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, but still managed to get out and grab some caches…

High Fields

Just down the road from us is the recently published High Fields trail. This took us across the fields near Great Dunmow, Essex over 6.5 miles for 13 caches. I must admit that after the day before when we were spoilt with 35 caches over 7.5 miles it did seem quite a trek for these 13! It was, however worth it for the special location at cache number 8… A secret bunker! It was constructed for the cold war in case of a nuclear attack. After we found the cache we thought we’d be daring and peek inside. We didn’t go down the ladder though!

The outside of the secret bunker

It's like season 2 of Lost!!!

Hertfordshire Caching – Take 2

Today was a really good day of caching. We only got 18 finds, which is low compared to most other days, however we filled in 3 squares of our terrain/difficulty matrix. 3 in one day is amazing! To me filling this in is more important than any other milestones. We managed this by getting Climate Chaos: The solution (4.5d,3t), Can you? A ford to get your feet wet! (3d/4t), and Bongard Christmas Puzzles (5d,3t). And I must say I *really* enjoyed all 3 and have put them on my favorites list.

Our terrain/difficulty matrix now stands as follows. The highlighted ones are what we added today. Only 26 to go now…

Need to go up some hills to boost that terrain!!!

Hertfordshire Caching Trip

Climate Chaos: The Triumph

After last weeks disaster when I still didn’t manage to find the final I’d been twitchy at work all week! I wanted to find it immediately. If it hadn’t been so dark in the evenings then I would have been out to get that cache! Saturday was the day, however. We set off pretty early in the morning and parked up at a very familiar place!!! I couldn’t believe how windy it was, I think we must have actually flown to GZ! The coords for this series are always good and it was no surprise when finding GZ took only a minute to locate and then far less to retrieve. Victory was ours!!!

Was it worth last weeks disaster? YES!

The little stream

A Disasterous day of caching!!!

As cassandy#2 had decided that we need to have a goal to reach our 2500th find by the end of January, we planned for a weekend of heavy caching. It’s usually me who sets the goals and plans things so I’m quite surprised that both of us are infected with the caching bug. Saturday went brilliantly, however Sunday I think could be called our most disasterous caching day to date…

Meopham March

For our big Saturday trail we teamed up with our good friends mel-ray to tackle the caches on Meopham March. This was a trail of 52 caches over about 10 miles. They also bought along another cacher who lives near them, Squirtchy. The day started off extremely miserable with rain, and wind. The ground was wet and muddy, however it wasn’t too bad in comparison to some of the weather that we have cached in.

A dull start to the day

A few more caches to end the holiday

We’ve cached a lot this christmas holiday, mainly to make up for the days we haven’t been out due to the snow. Today was our last chance to get some caching in before back to work tomorrow (Boooo!) We stayed quite close to home today and headed up to Royston and Biggleswade for caches dotted here and there. Our target today was 25 cache finds to take us to 2300 finds. It always feels better to end the day on a round number!

Climate Choas: The Vision

The climate chaos series of caches include 5 puzzle caches. The idea behind these caches includes a little story. Basically, due to climate change and running out of fossil fuels, a new renewable carbon-free energy source has been invented by a small team. However, Mobexx, an organisation that sells energy aren’t happy about it and are trying to destroy the research. Information on the new research is hidden in boxes around the countryside and our mission is to find them all, assemble the information and find the penultimate cache. You have to find Climate Chaos: The beginning to get coordinates for the next 3 caches Climate Chaos: The vision, Climate Chaos: The design, and Climate Chaos: The Theory. Then after finding ALL of them you will have enough information to find Climate Chaos: The Solution.

Climate Chaos: The Vision was the closest unfound cache to home. We’d been working on it for a while though. To find the easting coordinates of the final we had to walk two loops about 3.5 miles from home. We’d walked the first loop in the summer, however decided to call it a day after a child fell off of her bike on the road right where we were searching. Luckily we were there to help though as the father didn’t have a mobile with him and she was cut very badly. Then on Sunday we took a stroll to do the second loop. We must have done about 4 miles walking for all of the boxes for this one cache, a lot more effort than we’d usually put in to a cache, however it was close to home and fun! After getting the Eastings from the long walk, I had to get the Northings by solving a puzzle. I’d put off this cache for this long because the puzzle blew my mind. It turned out it was really simple and I managed to solve it within about 15 minutes of focusing on it.

Today we headed out towards the final cache. It was a very muddy trek to GZ, and once we got there, there were no obvious cache hiding places (there was no hint either) however after 10 minutes of checking tree, upon tree, we returned to the first place we’d looked and there it was, a big ammo box.

Finally, the box is ours!

Doodling around Hatfield Forest

Earlier in the week a trail had been published in Hatfield Forest, just down the road from us. It was Doodle Trail. They were obviously placed by someone working for the forest and had popped up on our notification emails as being placed earlier in the week. There had been a couple of logs in the week on the caches and most noted that they were quite obvious and easy to find so we decided to go and grab them this weekend before they got muggled! It was a nice short trail and close to home meaning that we could take Teddy, our Geodog.

We parked on the road (£4.60 parking in the forest was a little bit too much for just an hour’s caching) and strolled in. The first was down in the high muggle area. None of the caches had hints so we weren’t sure if we would be able to find them, but they were gigantic boxes that were pretty easy to find.

A very big cache!

Caching with Friends

Today we decided to head over to Hemel Hempstead with our caching buddies mel-ray. Although we’d done dribs and drabs of caching with a few cachers that we bumped into whilst out hunting, today was the first time we’d gone on a day trip with others. We definitely proved that 4 pairs of eyes are better than 2 as we had our best day of caching ever: 67 finds. We started at about 6:30am and finished about 6pm, covering about 17 miles over 3 trails near Hemel Hempstead (Hertfordshire): Staggering to Bovingdon, RAWGOLD.COMP, Route 66, and the odd cache here and there that we bumped in to along the way.

Staggering to Bovingdon

We started Staggering to Bovingdon at 6:30am in the dark! We had planned to start at about 7am but were running a bit early. It wasn’t too bad though and we definitely had luck on our side as the we managed to find the first 4 whilst it was quite dark.

The view from the top

Bank holiday Baldock blues

It’s bank holiday Monday. Yay! No work. Yay! So we can cache! Yay! But we’ve done all of the trails in the area so all that’s left are drive-by caches! Boooooooo!

So today we went to Baldock in Hertfordshire. It’s about a 45min drive from us, but has a lot of caches dotted around. Sadly they are well and truly dotted around and meant we had to do drive-by caches for the most part. Some people like doing drive by’s as they are quite “traditional” (regular tubs and ammo cans as opposed to trails of micros) however we kind of find them boring and prefer nice long walks.

We started off to the north of Baldock. Things went alright, but then we hit a slight problem. We started searching for a micro that was under a bench in the middle of nowhere and just couldn’t find it! I waded into the long grass and managed to kick out part of a film cannister. The lid and the log were missing but the base was indeed the cache container! We stuck our sticker on the inside, took a pic to upload to the log, and logged it as a find.

At least there was something to leave our mark on!