Mysterious stones, a lunar eclipse and a bag of dog pooh!

We started this week by finding a local cache for a much needed grid filler. We only have a few gaps left to fill on our 365 days caching calendar and this was one of them. 

I’d noticed the Beowulf’s stash cache published at West Row Country Park just up the road and it was really nice to return to this pretty park to grab this one. It proved to be a quick find thanks to the good co-ordinates and what a great little hide, nicely tucked away in a tree hole.

As the weekend arrived so did the sub zero temperatures, boy was it cold! However, we managed to prise ourselves from our warm comfy arm chairs to head out caching.

On Saturday after an eventful morning at the hairdressers - where a brief remark about my hair being rather light, ended up in me leaving the salon three hours later with almost black hair! - I needed to de-stress!

Not having seen my elderly mum since Christmas I decided to get her out on a brief shopping trip to Newmarket. Well that was the pretence anyway! In actual fact I was keen to head to the town as a number of new church micros had been published.

Parking up at the Rookery car park we set off for the Our Lady church micro and soon spotted the grey box and cache. Heading down the road we arrived at Christchurch, a very quaint, decorative, little church that I had never noticed before. 

We soon spotted the required numbers for the multi and calculated the final. A short hop, skip and a jump and we were at GZ signing the log. 

Next up was the very grand church St Mary. Once again we soon had the necessary information for the multi and calculated GZ a little way up the road where we made another swift find.

After popping into a few shops on the high street to warm up, we paid a quick visit to the town’s stunning war memorial to replace one of my own caches, before heading to stage one of the new multi I-Spy History 2 Ghost Sign. The co-ordinates took us to an old manufacturing sign that was built into the side of a building. I have to say I hardly ever notice things like this, so it was great that a multi cache had been placed here to remind us of times gone by. Again it was a quick job to find and calculate the numbers, but we were getting rather cold so decided to visit the final another time.

The following day I left the other half supervising an electrician and headed for Girton near Cambridge. Two new series’ had been set and I was excited as I headed out on the first trail across the fields from Histon to Girton.

The caches and hides were inventive, which made the day even more fun. I started by picking up the two along the guided busway. The first was quite tricky to spot, a sneaky little hide, but the second was easily seen on approach thanks to its blue lid.

On the new trail itself, the first cache made me chuckle. It was a rather life-like slug attached to the gate. A great nano cache.

A number of quick finds followed and before I knew it I was in Girton. After failing to find a cache in someone’s garden - I never like poking about on private property - I made quick work of Girton’s church micro and the village sign cache.

I was soon on the second new trail ‘Girton Corner’, where I made a swift start grabbing number 16 from the bowl of a tree. However, I came a cropper at number 15. The hint clearly indicated it was at the bus stop, but seeing several dnfs had been logged, I only spent 5 minutes looking in a few obvious places before moving on. 

Next up a nice little hide on the A14 bridge, where upon I decided to cut the loop short, in order to get back to Histon before dark. Hence my next find was number 5, a teeny weeny magnetic hidden on a lamppost. A quick find followed at 6 and 4, which was a very realistic looking pebble, but thanks to owning a similar cache myself, it was spotted immediately. 

As I started to make my way back into the village the next cache was a magnetic nano on a footpath gate. Now these can be problematic, but luckily it was a very clever, realistic looking snail, which took no time to spot. Number 2 was a brilliant homemade cache in a brick, and number 1, a lovely little hide in an old wrought iron post, at the end of a footpath. 

I had quite a walk to rejoin the Girton to Histon trail, but once at a bus stop, that almost seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, I soon had another magnetic nano in hand. Finally, I was heading back across the fields on the return leg to Histon.

More great caches came thick and fast including a large, homemade stick cache. Then something I really wasn’t expecting. 

The hint for number 10 had said something about the cute children’s storybook character Winnie the Pooh. Therefore, as I reached into a hole in a giant tree stump, I was expecting to pull out a cute yellow bear. Instead, I grabbed a dog pooh bag. Urgh! 

Dropping it instantly in horror and scrambling to grab my anti bacterial wipes from my bag, I glanced down and noticed a geocache sticker on the bag. “No surely, it couldn’t be the cache,” I thought. Knowing how inventive some of the hides had been on this trail, I decided to poke the bag open  with a stick where upon I revealed a very genuine looking turd, but...it had some brown tape stuck to it. “Hmmm that’s a bit odd” I thought, and another poke revealed the cache nicely stuck to what was clearly a plastic joke pooh! Panic turned to laughter as I reached in the bag for one log, to retrieve another. Very good! The bag certainly added to its authenticity!

As I walked to the next cache, a few runners came past, this was certainly a well used route by muggle keep fit fanatics, dog walkers and cyclists. On arrival at GZ - a farm gate - I had to wait a moment or two for another group of muggles to pass, before I could dive in and grab the sneaky magnetic screw on a hinge cache. 

Log signed and cache safely returned, I had just two more caches to go. It was at this point I noticed the moon rising in the sky ahead of me as the sun was starting to set behind me. 

I thought it was an unusual sight, but the day’s strange nocturnal happenings actually turned out to be even rarer than I had imagined. When I got home, my ‘in the know’ husband...only because he reads the ‘Sun’ every day and not the one revolving around the earth....told me it was a Wolf moon and a lunar eclipse that night. Very special indeed, although I decided not to stay up and watch it, but what a great phenomenon of the universe!

The final two caches were quick finds and I also had time to grab a long solved mystery cache - Cachetta Stone. The puzzle had involved a bit of jigsaw work and then decryption of some Egyptian hieroglyphics. It hadn’t taken too long and at GZ I found the cache hidden away in a brilliant location, an old pipe. Clever puzzle and hide, so it had to be added to my favourites. 

Back at my car, it was still light so I decided on a quick stop at Impington Church. As I pulled up, I could see the lights were on inside, lighting up the pretty stained glass windows. I wandered quietly across the churchyard to GZ, so as not to attract attention from anyone attending the evening service, and made a quick find of a decent sized cache in a tree. After signing the log I also dropped off a trackable that I had repaired and not had a chance to drop until now.

I finished the day with a lay-bys and drive-bys cache on the A10, which was swiftly found. 

All in all, it was a great day, 28 caches found and retrieved. But rather short of our new weekly  target of 57 caches...which are needed if we are to reach 8,000 finds by the end of the year.

More effort is definitely required next week, if we are to keep at least one of our New Year resolutions this year!