July: Venturing into the fictional world of mythical creatures, fairies, Star Wars and Harry Potter!

What a great month July has been for weather and caching. Once again we smashed our monthly total finds, hitting a brilliant 186 caches. We’ve cached in the big smoke that is London, and the sunny shores of Great Yarmouth and we found four challenge caches.


Highlights have included completing the Geocaching HQ Summer challenge ‘Hidden Creatures’, and the two new trails at Santon Downham that included some innovative hides and caches including the brilliant Fairy House and two big ammo cans.


A work trip to London had us rediscovering the magical world of Harry Potter at Kings Cross station with the great virtual Platform 9 3/4. 

Out in the Fens we picked up more caches in Soham, including a number of Star Wars themed caches. And just down the road in Isleham we were thrilled to grab three new challenge caches which we actually qualified for. Plus a further one just outside of Burwell. 
  

Some after work caching trips took in the sights of Cherry Hinton, Hinxton, and Quy, including a variety of church micros, war memorials and village sign caches amongst others.

Work’s annual team away day saw me taking to the water in a punt and picking up a riverside cache. And another evening out saw us visit the very new, futuristic Cambridge suburb, Eddington. We found some great caches in the new Eddington series, plus some stalwarts that included the puzzle Fine Ants, which I’d solved many a moon ago, but only just got around to collecting. 


Our weekend caching adventures saw us complete two new Wrestlingworth circuits, and find the biggest cache we’ve ever seen...Tube cache! What a surprise that had in store! And we found our first cache in the Village Hall series, which turned out to be a fun, but fairly simple Wherigo. 


Talking of Wherigos, this month we completed four! I think I may have mentioned once or twice that I’ve picked up the Wherigo bug of late and it’s currently my favourite cache type.  

Wrestlingworth Village Hall Wherigo was a reverse beta, which was great fun, but I certainly didn’t score any points for the number of checks I made on distance from the cache. I was hitting the button every few minutes.  


Similarly, whilst out in Burwell with DannyJGB, we completed the In Search of Jane Edwards Wherigo, which worked on the same programme, and again we overused the ‘where’s the cache button’! 

Two other Wherigos completed this month at Stanton and Burgh Castle were absolutely brilliant, very good fun, but I’ll let you read this week’s blog for more details on those.


Whilst visiting Burgh Castle we also paid a visit to the bright lights of Great Yarmouth and discovered  another side to East Anglia’s number one seaside spot. Caching really does take you to places you wouldn’t otherwise see and we found some great historical and cultural landmarks in Yarmouth that we would never have discovered with out our favourite hobby, including the old gaol and a sofa made of Portland stone! 


I think all that’s left to mention is our trip to Melbourn, Meldreth and Kneesworth. It was one of the incredibly hot afternoons we’ve experienced this month so we did a fair bit of caching and dashing. However, two short circular walks had us in high spirits after discovering a broom handle, a long string of sausages and two luminous springy things that popped out at me quite unexpectedly.  


We finished the month just 20 caches short of the big 5k mark. The achievement geocoin is already on its way from the US, so we better hit it next month! Until then, I leave you with our stats for July.

Total: 186 caches 
11 Multis
11 Mysteries (4 Challenge caches)
4 Wherigos 
3 Letterboxes 
1 Virtual
1 Earthcache 

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