What not to wear when caching

Every so often you hear these amusing stories of women happily walking down a busy shopping street, completely unaware their skirt is tucked into their knickers! Don’t worry I haven’t yet made that embarrassing mistake, but I discovered to my horror that I had done something almost as daft whilst caching last weekend. 

Skipping over Saturday - I’ll come back to that later - this week’s tale begins on a dull, but fairly dry Sunday. I’d spent most of the morning trying to get the lazy other half out of bed, telling him he was not lounging around all day in his pyjamas! After numerous failed attempts to get him to get dressed and at least venture downstairs, I gave up and decided to go caching.

Grabbing my equipment filled rucksack and my car keys, I headed off to Soham for some caching and dashing and a few short walks. The weather was certainly cooler than it has been of late, and rain kept threatening, so I had a thin hoody on in case I needed to whip the hood up in the event that it did actually rain.

I’d been out about half an hour in the centre of the town completing a couple of multis, the lovely War Memorial and Methodist Church micro. Both had parking not far away and proved to be quick finds once the numbers had been collected and calculated. 

Before long I was back on familiar turf to the North of the town, walking along the riverside footpath to collect the final cache in Eco Puffin Parents’ SW series. It was the only cache that DannyJGB and I had missed whilst doing the trail last year, as there had been a couple of muggles sitting nearby.  

      

After a quick find of the little tin in the big Oak tree I was starting to get a bit hot, so decided to take my hoody off for the walk back. As I unzipped it and looked down I let out a huge gasp and a loud swear word or two...I was still wearing my M&Ms pyjama top! “Oh ****! ****!”

Now it did look rather like a T Shirt so I might have possibly of gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for the fact it had a rather large, childish, bright yellow, M&Ms face on it, not what someone of my age should really be wearing in public! A second later, the hoody was zipped back up before any passing muggles saw it. I spent the rest of the day, a little on the warm side, but that was far better than the embarrassing alternative! You can probably guess what the fully clothed other half said when I got home...something about a pot and a kettle!

The rest of the afternoon was less eventful, but rewarding. I managed to grab the last traditional Star Wars cache, despite being watched the whole time by a curious family of geese.  With the final number in hand I soon had the co-ordinates for the brilliant bonus cache. What a lovely surprise when I opened the lid on that one, a must do for any geocaching Star Wars fans.  

   

I also collected another sneaky cache by my late friend, Mark, one part of Quacker666, before heading off towards Ely to pick up the fun ‘The Lion, the Witch & the way in’ cache by Picklepop. 

  

I was soon making my way along part of the new Ely bypass - which is impressive - to collect the mystery cache,  ‘The Legend that was’. Due to all the new road reconfigurations I wasn’t able to park where I had planned, but I managed to find another suitable place and was soon heading along a pretty lane to the final. And what a great final...a field puzzle! I do enjoy them, if I’ve got the time and it’s not too taxing. This one was good fun. A lot of twisting and turning later and finally the log was in hand and signed. 

I rounded off my trip with FolkFen’s Soham Horse Fen North. I actually thought it would be a DNF as their previous hide there had been rather tricky, and required three visits, but despite the clever camouflage, I soon spotted the sneaky hide. 

Rewinding to Saturday, I also went out to the Fens on another solo afternoon caching trip, this time to Sutton. The primary purpose was to attend Rapunzel=)’s 10th Biannual Sutton Cache Fest. Arriving at the church on the hill I was greeted by a large number of hearty beer drinkers, sitting amongst the gravestones enjoying a few pints. Having never attended one of these events before, I hadn’t realised that it is organised to coincide with the village’s Beer Festival. Such a shame the other half hadn’t joined me. After saying hello to some new and old faces, I bid farewell and set about collecting  some more smileys. 

Highlights included, a fun magnetic letter cache, which involved spelling out your cacher name and the great Sidetracked cache, where you can still see the now defunct raised platforms - a rare find on a long forgotten railway line these days. I also picked up another Horcrux cache and a TB that’s in need of some TLC - I’ll be getting my sewing kit out this week. 

I also finally managed to find another long solved mystery ‘I can do a puzzle cache’. I’ve no idea how I solved it, it’s been on the list for at least 3 years, but the find was fortunately much quicker, despite it being a teeny, tiny, sneaky hide. 

This week’s caching adventures finally got us to the big 5,000 finds milestone, so I sign off this week very happy.

Next week we’ll be reviewing the latest M&Ms night caching clothing line...perhaps not!