Winning, losing & saving the planet one duck at a time

This week saw the rise and fall of England’s young footballers in their bid to bring home the prestigious World Cup trophy more than 50 years since our last win. It was so exciting I actually abandoned my caching activities for an afternoon and an evening. 

The entire nation was gripped as they defeated the rather laid back Sweden, and as we all rushed home from work a few days later, with the sound of ‘Three Lions’ ringing out on every radio station to watch their Semi-final game, high hopes that we might go all the way soon faded as Croatia swept to a 2:1 victory over our boys. 

Nevermind...whilst we might have lost out on the World Cup again, it was a winning week in other ways. 

We started by grabbing three new Challenge caches, by EcoPuffinParents. As I’ve said before we usually don’t meet the high requirements of Challenge caches, but out of the four new publications, we qualified for three so it was fantastic to head out and grab them along with a new letterbox cache.

Now getting the fourth could take a while, social butterflies we are not! To claim it we need to have attended 30 events and unfortunately we’re pretty poor at getting ourselves along to such social occasions. I think we’ve missed six opportunities this year already and our total in three years stands at a meagre 11! Shame on us!!

I also had an enjoyable evening out to Burwell with DannyJGB this week, who was keen to collect a variety of caches. They included Judy’s Hole, an interesting historical spot on the outskirts of the village, as well as some new caches by Burwell House. 

   

We also made a successful return attempt at solving the Wherigo, ‘In search of Edward’s Jane’ which was rather different to others we’d done before. It used an established reverse-geocache beta programme and basically required us to head off blind to try and find the cache, checking the programme as little as possible for how far away we were...a bit like the hot and cold game we used to play as kids. 

I have to put my hands up, the temptation just to keep checking if we were heading in the right direction was just too much and I lost count of the times we pressed the little button to re-evaluate the distance we were from GZ. Hence I doubt we scored highly, but we found the cache and that’s all that matters. 

Another great cache that evening was the GCZ team mystery ‘Where’s Wally’s Wellies?’. I finally got back into puzzle solving mode this week and set aside some time to play a game of spot the difference, but only after emptying the other half’s ink cartridge printing out the 100 or so colourful wellies - he was of course thrilled that it helped me solve the puzzle, not! 

  

After a nice little walk to GZ we soon uncovered the appropriately themed cache! A cute welly! Just brilliant, where do people find such innovative containers.

As the weekend hit, the temperatures soared again but I was determined to get out and find the final ten caches needed to get the last Hidden Creatures souvenir - the elusive Turtle! 

So whilst the other half stayed at home to watch England lose another game, I hit the half empty roads and headed to Wrestlingworth in East Bedfordshire. I was sadly a week too late for Ryo62’s fabulous Hidden Creatures event, but it was great being back in Ryoland to do some more of his great trails.

I’d set my sights high and was hoping to smash our 78 finds in one day record, however, health and heat got the better of me and I managed only a measly 43 caches. Nevertheless, it was one of the best caching afternoons I’ve had in terms of numbers for a very long while. 

It was also great to find such a good variety of cache types and sizes in one day. Not only did I grab all the caches on the Waddle and Wander trails, but I also managed to pick up the War Memorial and Village sign multis, two letterboxes, a couple of mysteries and the new village hall series Wherigo - two in one week now that is good going! 

Similar to the one in Burwell, it also used the reverse-geocache beta programme and similar to my antics in Burwell I kept pressing that button!! Well you can’t waste valuable caching time going in the wrong direction!

During the trip I also picked up two TBs and found one of the biggest caches I’ve ever seen, the almighty Tube cache. Boy did I get a surprise when I pulled out that bottom bung. Not to spoil it for others I won’t say what happened but a short search and the log was soon in hand. 

As was the Turtle souvenir.  My haul of caches at Wrestlingworth sent us souring past the 100 cache mark in the challenge and the Turtle is now sitting happily alongside the other 12 Hidden Creatures on our souvenir page.

The final caches this week were after work caches and dashes. The first, the new Studlands cache, where I met a very friendly ginger cat and FF no. 17 An excellent puzzle, near Kentford. Another mystery that I just hadn’t put time aside to solve, but finally did this week, as it was the only FF puzzle still on our unsolved list and one of the closest unfound caches to home. 

Now we have just one other FF puzzle to collect to wrap up this excellent series...for now anyway. I’m reliably informed, from the horse’s mouth, that some new FF puzzles will be coming soon. 

So I can’t sign off this week without mentioning our new hobby...saving our garden wildlife from the searing heat. Yes, whilst we’re all loving this unprecedented heatwave and walking around with tans we’d normally only get after a two week holiday abroad, our poor wildlife are struggling. Yet, just the simple act of putting a small bowl of water out can be a life line to many, especially the hedgehogs.

Thanks to our eccentric initiatives over the past week or so we’ve had a whole host of garden visitors including two little hedgehogs, who have been stealing the cats’ food from under their noses, as well as an exceptionally friendly mallard duck! She’s taken up residence in our front garden after being evicted from the village pond by two overly sensitive parent geese and their 7 gooslings. And now she’s got her own pool and frequent supply of duck food she ain’t going anywhere!