Caching Tales

So the nation has gone a little bonkers this week as England got off to their best start in a World Cup since before I was born (all of 18 years ago...I wish)! Meanwhile temperatures outside the pubs and tv lounges has reached fever pitch...a whopping 30 degrees in some places...so much so that the thought of climbing into the trusty four-wheeled red box to go caching really hasn’t appealed.  Nevertheless, I’ve made a few meagre attempts this week to keep up with my favourite hobby and keep fit ready for the challenges of ‘Hidden Creatures’!  I kicked off with a lovely evening out on the Lavenham Walks series with the other half. I know I always say it, but this really was a beautiful walk with incredibly diverse scenery. From dense woodland and a cool winding stream, to a humid tropical jungle paradise and a hot dusty wheat-lined farm track, this series has it all.    The caches were diverse too, with scatterings of customs, mixed in with mi...

This week we’ve seen England get off to a great start in the World Cup and the longest day of the year finally arrived. Midsummer is always a time for merriment in our caching calendar as it means we’ve got more daylight hours to grab caches after work and we certainly did just that this week.  As England kicked their first ball into Tunisia’s net, I was making my way to the Five Bells in Burwell to attend another great Flamingos and GCZ team event.  Unusually for me I arrived early at ‘A not so quite Midsummer reality’ and began chatting to some familiar faces as well as a few new ones - although not entirely new as I’ve visited many of their great caches. As the evening progressed more and more cachers poured in, and it was great to chat about caches and series’ they’d recently completed and hints on how to solve some unfound local mystery caches.  As always we got onto the topic of Despair Trap’s evil mysteries, and whilst sharing hints on a couple I’d...

This week aside from publishing our biggest series to-date we’ve also found time to grab a few caches and surpass 4700 finds. A mini milestone I know, compared to some of the achievements of other local cachers, but as all new cachers eventually discover, caching becomes more of a challenge once you pass the thousand mark and find you need to travel further afield to grab each new cache. Hence, every one hundred new finds, is a small celebration for us. However, that said, every so often caching is made a little easier by the publication of a few new local caches saving travel time and enabling us to pick up some after work.  This was exactly the case with our first trip out this week. Three green dots at Stetchworth and Saxon Street had appeared on the map a little while ago, amongst the sea of yellow smileys, and it was time to go and get them. Despite being clothed in my smartish clobber, I decided to grab them on my way home from work. Sporting my plat...

So we’ve been teasing you for a few weeks about our brand new trail and finally this week we hit the submit button on 37 brand new caches.  Based on the much loved children’s classic The Wind in the Willows (WITW) the trail takes you from Toad’s caravanning adventures on the Open Road, to Ratty & Mole’s boating adventures along the River Bank, to Badger’s House in the Wild Wood, to Toad’s escape from gaol and finishes with the battle to reclaim Toad Hall. A few cachers who have visited it already have described it as ‘epic’...they have no idea! It really has been about a year in the planning... Summer 2017 : Following the success and popularity of our ‘A not so fishy trail’ we wanted to create a new geocache series that brought one of my favourite books to life - ‘ The Wind in the Willows ’. We also wanted cachers to be able to see the beautiful local landscape and wildlife, from the River Lark, to Mildenhall Forest to the open dusty byways and heathland of Ick...

This week we bring you the tale of three counties - from water pipes in Cambs, to getting lost in Saffron Walden Town Hall, to actually losing an Iphone in Herts... We start on a sunny evening in Cambridge at the picturesque Cherry Hinton Country Park. Famed for hosting the annual Cambridge Folk Festival, it is also home to a number of caches, which we haven’t found. So after finishing work, still in my work clothes, I decided to try and grab a few more smileys. The first cache was one that had alluded us on a previous visit, but this time I was determined to find it. Other found it logs mentioned the co-ordinates as being a bit out so I focused on potential trees further away from where the GPS was pointing. After a 20 minute search I finally found it tucked into a tree about 12 metres out.  The next was rather high up in a tree and required a tool to reach it, fortunately I had just the thing, but unfortunately I stood in a dog turd whilst retrieving it...that was my...

So May was one of our best months of the year so far. Almost 140 caches found, from Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire in the East, to Somerset’s motorway services and the misty shores of Cornwall in the West. Our 10 day holiday to Cornwall helped give our caching numbers a nice boost along with our terrain ratings as we embarked on various adventures. From walking precarious cliff top paths to discovering abandoned mines, beautiful caves & stunning beaches. We found a wide variety of caches including nine earthcaches and two wherigos.  Who could forget the ‘pub quiz’ Wherigo that literally had me tearing my hair out and used up 80% of my mobile data allowance as I desperately tried to identify 200 quiz questions and photos!    Then there was the ‘puzzling predicament’ Wherigo at Tehidy Country Park, which had me physically moving a virtual squirrel, Fox and nut from one side of a large lake to another!  But most of all we won’t forget...