Extreme caching in the Peak District (Part 2 …and the lows)

I’ve already blogged about the first half of our week in the Peaks where we conquered the high peaks, but for the rest of the week we stayed on flatter ground…

Day 5 – Forest fires!!!

Still determined to pick up another d/t combo we needed we headed about 25 miles NW of the Peaks to Greater Manchester to pick up Emerald Waterfall. This was a 1.5D/5T rated cache. We knew that we’d have to climb up a stream to get to it, but also knew it’d probably be nowhere near as bad what we’d already climbed up. We were right. It was wet, muddy and slippery, but not steep so it was relatively easy to get to, however I think if we’d gone after heavy rain we’d really have been asking for trouble!

The emerald waterfall at the end of the stream

Extreme caching in the Peak District (Part 1 – The Highs)

We’ve just got back after a glorious week in the Peak District. For non-UK readers, this is an area in central/northern England which has a lot of rounded hills and gritstone escarpments. There are also quite a lot of caches! We went to the High peak area where the steeper hills are, including Kinder Scout, which is the highest point at 2087ft. When I booked the trip I didn’t really have caching in mind. I noted that there were a few around the area to keep us busy, however on closer inspection due to the high terrain there were a lot of caches that fitted the holes in our difficulty/terrain matrix. Therefore this is what our caching was centered around for the week. We needed to fill 20 of the holes in our d/t matrix, and after grabbing Grimmerscotting’s “The devil’s porridge” a few days earlier which filled the 3.5D/3.5T that gave us 14 that we could potentially find on our trip away.

Before and After

Well that picture probably spoilt “The ending” as I’ve just told you that we did manage to get everything we went for, however in true cassandy style things didn’t go particularly smoothly and we managed to do quite a lot of caches the hard way…

Caching in Kettering

Air Station 106

We decided to take a trip up to Kettering on Friday to grab some caches up that way. The main focus of our attention was the “Air Station 106” trail. This was a trail of 12 caches (Plus two laid by others) around an old airfield opened in the 1940′s, “Grafton Underwood”.

There was a cache placed in the entrance, RAF Grafton Underwood which was an easy find to get us started and in a lovely large bison container which I can imagine would have cost a few pennies.

At the Entrance to Grafton Park

TOTRB – Two great days of letterbox hybrids

Messing about on the river

On Sunday 7th November I got another year older! However it meant that as it was my birthday I got to pick something to do to celebrate. Me being me, I obviously hadn’t worked out that on your birthday you’re meant to relax and put your feet up so that you can be spoilt rotten and nstead, caching was the order of the day! I had had my eye on a special set of caches for months and my birthday seemed to be the perfect excuse to stay up in Lincoln for a few days to complete the TOTRB (Tales of the Riverbank) trail there. So after the fireworks had finished in Peterborough we headed up to Lincoln and stayed up there for the Sunday and Monday to do the trail which was linear long the river and totalled about 60 miles (30 there, 30 back). This trail was so special because all of the caches are letterboxe hybrids. With letterboxes you don’t just sign the logbook, instead you stamp the logbook or doodle in it. The boxes also contain a stamp that you can put in your own personal book. They are on the whole just more a lot more creative. I loved that idea and designed my own stamp and sent it off for creation. So armed with our stamp and or bikes we headed off down the river…

TOTRB Series 1 – 3

We didn’t really know what to expect from the trail. In the cache description we had been told to print out a little grid which was labelled with numbers and letters. We found the first cache and opened it up to find a homemade stamp. We stamped it in square A1 and placed the cache back. I then read the description for the next cache in the series and realised I was meant to stamp it in certain squares a certain amount of times. Ah! I retrieved the cache again and read the front of the logbook. We knew what to do now! The majority of the caches were easy finds, which after last weekend’s DNF-littered trip down the river was very welcome! The boxes were all of a reasonable size meaning we didn’t have to dig down too often to retrieve the treasure. Despite the odd blob of rain it was also a really lovely day weather-wise. The sun was shining, and I was smiling. I remember thinking to myself “THIS is what caching is all about!”

Stamping the logbook

1500 here we come!

Notable Caches: The Brayford Pool earthcache, All On a Line, Pyewipe junction, Skeg-to-ness #75-95.

A special 1500th milestone?

It was our last day on our trip away and as we had to vacate our lodge it meant that we had to do something on the bikes as we didn’t fancy leaving them on the back of the car parked at a random location. We therefore chose the trail running along the old railway from Chesterfield to Lincoln conveniently grabbing the rest of the skeg-to-ness series running in descending order from #95 on the way there. This put us in a rather awkward situation. We were 21 finds away from our 1500th find. This 1500 meant quite a lot to us as for about 3 months it had been our target for 6th March 2011, our 1 year Geocaching anniversary. Well, we managed to get a lot closer than we had expected! We didn’t want it to be on a little micro. So after a lot of planning we decided that we would do Skeg-to-ness on the way to the trail, get to our 1499th find and then whizz all the way down into Lincoln to get The Brayford Pool earthcache for 1500. We would then make our way up the train line and get all of the caches on the way. Now that sounds like a plan, Batman! [...]

Close encounters of the cacher kind!

Notable Caches: RVCP, Waleswood Wander

RVCP

We headed north-east a bit to Rother Valley Country Park. We were a bit undecided as to whether to take our bikes. We knew that the country park was bikable by visiting the website, however the cache description mentioned it being along the lesser-used paths. It turned out that leaving the bikes back at the lodge was a wise choice as only about 50% of it was comfortably bikable.

We headed from the parking spot to the first cache and noticed a name already in it for the same day ‘Eddie Robinson’. We must have started there at about 9:30am so we thought he must have been somewhere in front of us. “I wonder if we will bump into him” I said. The first 3 caches were easily found, however cache 4 was placed right where a little pay booth was for parking in the park. The man in the booth was staring right at us as we ducked up and down trying to find the cache. 10 minutes later it turned out that it was a rock cache. This usually wouldn’t have phased us but it was a very dark rock in a very dark hole! We were pleased to move on up until we had to cross a poorly marked golf course. Some waypoints in the cache description would have really helped us. We quickly hurried along the course going around the edge of the driving range and eventually ended up near a footpath sign. Phew! We feel so uncomfortable when we’re not sure if we’re on the right track. [...]

Our Saviour!

Weirs, Wading, and Well ‘ard hills

Notable Caches: Guide Stoops-Beeley Moor II, Skeg-to-ness #95-#131, A Quarry Caper, Harry’s Place, A Bridge over the River Wye

Journey to the Peak District

Yesterday’s weather was just right, however today we woke to quite a miserable, drizzley day. The object of today was to get to the Peak District so we could bag our second 5/5 cache and a virtual called “Harry’s Place” that would allow us to find a number that would give us the location of the “Harry’s Other Place” virtual in London. We also fancied the look of a trail around some quarry pits called ‘Quarry Capers’ which we just about got enough time to do to finish our day.

Many of you will have seen the ‘Skeg-to-ness‘ series which stretches from coast to coast. Conveniently part of this runs from where we were staying all the way into the Peak District at the point which we wanted to get to. So, we thought we would grab this on the way there. Pretty much all of the caches along this route had obvious lay-by’s or pull in’s for parking and we were able to park safely off of the road.

We started down near Ollerton with very little traffic on the roads. It seemed like we had chosen the perfect day as despite the rain we weren’t out in it for any long periods of time due to the cache and dashing.

I did the jumping out of the car to grab the caches, and called for assistance when they got a little tricky, but there weren’t too many difficult ones.

Not another nano on a wheel. Where is it???

What a wonderful woodland wander!

Notable caches today: Some of the Monkey Puzzle series, Eleanor’s Sweetie Jar, Wellow Woods Nature Trail, Funny Money, and Sound and Vision, The UK’s first oil field earthcache.

WARNING! THIS ENTRY CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE WELLOW WOODS NATURE TRAIL.

A puzzling start to the day

We decided to stick to trails that were nearby today. Our first call was at the ‘Monkey Puzzle’ series. The names of the caches related to the names of islands from the Monkey Island computer games. These were my absolute favorites and I have fond memories of playing them on our very first PC. 1.2GB hard drive, 128mb RAM and a Pentium 133 processor, but it ran monkey island 1 and 2 and that’s all we needed! No need for all the fancy graphics we have nowadays We thought this would be a circular walk but it turned out to be a bit over the show and we had to move the car 3 times. We only ended up grabbing a couple as we wanted a nice big walk…

Our first letterbox

After this we headed over to do our first Letterbox cache, ‘Eleanor’s Sweetie Jar’. In a previous blog entry I’d done about ‘Special Caches‘ I mentioned not being too sure what a letterbox cache was. The owner of this cache, Slightly Tall Paul stepped in and left a comment on my entry explaining better and mentioned this cache. Well, how could we go up here and not grab his cache after he was so kind as to comment and fill us in on letterboxes? So after the Monkey Puzzle cache attempt we headed over here. It took a little while to find as although it was quite a big sweetie jar it looked like it’d been coated in about 2 rolls of camo tape! When we opened it up it was jam packed with swag. More than you could ever imagine. Inside were not 1, not 2, not 3, BUT FOUR travel bugs!!! We swapped 3 with what we had, but left one as it was quite a different TB. It was a “Cache 2 cache TB” and actually a little tupperware container with a logbook and some little swag items in it. An interesting idea, but not something we wanted to carry around with us.

A very different Travel Bug

We don’t have a stamp for logbooks, but I did a little doodle of Teddy, our Geodog instead. It was a bit crappy. I’ll have to practice for future letterboxes It was a brilliant example to get us started with letterboxing. [...]

Our mark in the logbook

Caching on the way to Sherwood Forest

Notable caches found today: Wimpole Woods and the CCP (Colwick Country Park) trail

So up we went to Nottingham! We had the bikes on the rack on the back of the car as we had our eye on a few bike trails. On the way up there we had our eye on a very special cache. It was the only one we needed to complete our row of 2.5 terrain for all difficulties as it was a 2.5T and 4.5D cache. Surprisingly there are only 12 caches of this level within 100 miles of our home coordinates! This was the only one that was reachable without going very far out of our way or south of London. It was ‘Wimpole Woods‘ The full circular trail around to the cache was 3 or so miles long, however we cut it in half and approached at a different angle. What we didn’t realise was the massive hill we’d have to bike up to get to it. I think this must have upped our terrain to about 3.5!!!

View from the top

The cache was quite easy to get to and we found it without any problems. We are not able to get a cache in London that we have our eye on called ‘Gridlocked‘ that requires completing a terrain or difficulty line (Like bingo!) before you’re allowed to log it. So on our next trip to London we will grab it. I think a very cool little goal would be to get a cache of every difficulty and terrain rating combination (There are 81 combinations) and think I might have a go at planning to do this. [...]

Bingo line