Dodging thunderstorms and finding real treasure

After publishing my own Treasure X cache last week, I was delighted to get a message from FolkFen this week saying they had also won a special promotional trackable and were planning to place a Treasure X cache.

Excited by the prospect of getting another sticker, and finding real Treasure, as it were, I headed out to Fordham as soon as it was published to grab the find and a blue sticker. 

It was a lovely walk to GZ and I had just enough time to finally seek out Potty Training. Located just a bit further up the track, i soon realised why it was called Potty Training. It turned out to be a rather fun cache with multiple film pots, but of course only one housed the log. Luckily there were far fewer than Tube cache...found a few weeks back...and the log was soon located in the fourth one I opened. 

Buoyed by my success with a four stage multi last weekend I had hoped to find the Fulbourn Church Micro this week. It’s another orange dot that has been glaring at me on the map for a very long time, but sadly it wasn’t to be. However, I enjoyed the little walk around the prettier parts of the village collecting all the numbers. GZ was soon calculated, but I just couldn’t spot this sneaky cache. Even a double and triple check of my numbers didn’t help, GZ was definitely GZ. I will return! 

A couple of nights later, as I was heading out of work I got an unexpected phone call from my dad who was calling with the local traffic report. He’d apparently been at a standstill for over an hour due to an accident so had kindly given me a call to suggest various alternative routes. Contemplating which way to go and realising another major trunk road was also in chaos, I decided to avoid the whole lot by heading off caching for a couple of hours.

Half an hour later and I was in Milton searching out my first cache. I’d pretty much cleaned up the village caches a few weeks back but there were still a handful of traditional caches left down by the river, including Baits Bite Lock and Key. In fact it proved to be the only cache at ground level, the rest were all tree climbs and I decided against tackling those without some assistance. 

After grabbing another traditional cache up the road on a brand new recreation ground it was off to Landbeach to pick up four more including another in the Village Hall series, which was a nice quick multi, and the Baptist church micro.   

  

In no time at all the much anticipated bank holiday weekend was upon us. I love a bank holiday, it always means there’s even more leisure time to go caching. That said unfortunately this year’s bank holiday lived up to the great British tradition of being rather wet, but that didn’t stop me from getting out and picking up an additional 66 smilies. 

With the Saturday predicted to be the best weather wise I headed off to Alconbury, on the A1 to do some of the infamous Marcus Maximus caches. Parking up at the village hall I set off on my longest walk for months, taking in Alconbury, Alconbury Weston, Upton and back again. 

The three trails proved to have lots of nice quick finds but also a few sneakier hides. The first was a little custom cache made from a small block of wood that neatly fitted into a sneaky square hole in a gatepost. The next was a small rock, with a cache embedded into it, again sneaky and clever.

Arriving at Alconbury Weston I stopped for a little break on the village green bench and sat admiring one of the pretty little bridges. It was quite unusual and surely deserves its own Little Bridges cache one day.  

  

After grabbing the village sign and failing to find the church micro, I was soon on my way again, collecting caches along the footpath to Upton. Suddenly I started to feel quite chilly, the wind was picking up and a cold pool of air was definitely approaching. 

   

As I retrieved a cache under an amazing footbridge, which crossed a high ravine (well high for East Anglia) I looked down and realised the river had completely gone, there was barely a puddle on the river bed. Clearly another casualty of our two month heatwave, hopefully the river wildlife had managed to find alternative homes and meals. 

As I speculated as to what might have happened to the river’s previous residents, I suddenly heard a loud clap of what sounded like thunder. I dismissed it as farm machinery or a gun shot, but then I heard it again. No it couldn’t be, I thought to myself, they said the weather was going to be great today. As I disembarked from the bridge, i set off across the next field footpath, only to hear the loud clap again. It was definitely thunder!

I looked up to see a massive black cloud fast approaching behind me, with what looked like rain pouring down from underneath it. With no coat, no umbrella, and no tree cover nearby, I was not about to get caught out in a thunderstorm! To say I picked up the pace a bit, is an understatement. I was almost running, hoping I was heading away from it and would reach some type of shelter before it caught up with me. 

Needless to say the next cache was a very quick find. And whilst the odd sight of two, fairly new looking, abandoned wellington boots near GZ, would normally have got a little more of my attention, there was no time to investigate. I wasn’t hanging around. 

 

In no time at all I was in Upton and somehow had sidestepped the storm clouds. Well almost. After collecting the village sign cache and calculating the numbers for the church micro multi I realised I was surrounded by black clouds in three directions...getting wet, now seemed inevitable! 

Deciding not to waste anymore time diverting to collect the multi I began the long walk back to Alconbury. A great letterbox cache complete with a Hello Kitty stamp broke up the trail of traditional micro caches and the largely downhill walk meant I was making good time. In fact I almost made it back into Alconbury when the rain arrived...and it was heavy. Fortunately a large oak tree protected me from the brunt of it and after a 15 minute delay I was finally on my way again.

Able to enjoy the walk again, with much bluer skies above, I was greeted in the next field by a group of friendly horses including a baby foul, who was exceptionally cute! 

After a few more finds I arrived at the church and realised there was an Earthcache up for grabs. Being a fan of this particular cache type I began analysing the exterior stone walls of the church for signs of acid rain erosion and long buried fossils. It was great fun, and as with all earthcaches I learnt something new about the geology of the stone we used, to build these magnificent buildings so many years ago.

After a short walk around the village collecting a few more caches, I finished the day by picking up some caches and dashes, which completed the third series of the day. 

All in all I managed over 10 miles in under 6 hours and found some great landscapes and wildlife along the way. I’ll be back to collect the missed multis and the mystery caches very soon. 

That’s it for this week, until next, happy caching!