Caching Tales

As I sit writing this week’s blog, I am looking out the window of a turn of the century train carriage, admiring the beauty of the North Yorkshire Moors as steam billows past. Yes this week we are holidaying in Yorkshire and no visit to the stunning dales and moors would be complete without a trip on the spectacular North Yorkshire Moors Railway.  Setting off from Pickering, we are travelling to the beautiful seaside town of Whitby with a few stops in between, before heading back to Pickering again.  A drive back along parts of the line later on enabled me to pick up some railway themed caches, including the Sidetracked cache at Grosmont.  But the best steam themed cache had to be the virtual ‘Film set 10 Harry Potter’. It was located at Goathland Station, which was the real life set for Hogwarts station in the Harry Potter movies. Looking about I recognised buildings and features on the platform that appeared in the film, even though the station now...

This week I headed back to the eighties! And it gave me an opportunity to do some caching on the South East Coast of England for the first time. Having booked the Friday off work I set off in the red bug for the southern resort of Butlins, on the costa de ‘Bognor’ coastline.  The main aim was to celebrate everything great about the 80s, on the Absolute 80s weekender.  Now I’m sure many will scoff at the thought that there was anything great about the 80s, but I have to disagree. It was probably the most fun decade in history, from totally over the top clothes - rara skirts, leg warmers, puff ball dresses, and anything illuminous was a must have - to wacky hairstyles - mullets, perms and back combing - to lively and very individual pop artists and tunes - Madonna, Boy George, Bucks Fizz, Kylie to name a few! I consider myself incredibly lucky to have grown up in the 80s. There’s been nothing like it since, and I doubt there will ever be again!  Howe...

I always love an Easter bank holiday. The two extra days off work to get out and about caching are just brilliant. As Good Friday arrived so did our elusive electrician! A DIY project to extend our house had gone on rather longer than expected (over three years!!) in part due to the fact our electrician has had more excuses for not turning up than a desert has sand! But today he did arrive and finally we might actually have all our new sockets and lights working. Deciding I wasn’t too keen on hanging around the house with no electric all day - literally no chance of watching a Carry On film, or supping a hot drink - I left the other half to supervise the final works and headed off for Steve4789’s event in Coton. However, due to getting up a bit late and then getting blocked in the driveway by the sparky, I was running rather late. By the time I arrived in the South Cambs village, the event was all but over.  Deciding not to arrive an embarrassing 10 minutes before ...

A friend of mine has been busy building a new business and as part of that he asked me to test out the navigation features of a new app. Quite excited to be one of the first to try it, I headed to Newmarket High Street after work this week, to test it out. After some fun playing around with it, I had enough time to grab a couple of caches nearby. Just around the corner was the newish Church micro All Saints, and I made a swift find of the tiny micro at GZ.  I then headed up the High Street to pick up the multi ‘I-Spy History Ghost Signs’. I’d enjoyed collecting the numbers for this one a few weeks back during a shopping trip to the town with my mum. It was nice to return today to claim the cache at the final GZ and it’s such a great idea for a new series. There are so many of these old manufacturing and shop signs build into the walls of old buildings throughout our towns, but I have to admit, these days I rarely take much notice of them. As the weekend arrived...

The week started with a bit of maintenance on some of my caches on the Wind In The Willows trail.  One of the slight down sides of cache ownership, especially when they’re deep in a forest, or halfway along a river path. However, these are my two favourite parts of this walk, and after seeing a variety of wildlife from muntjacs, squirrels and baby swans it was well worth it. And it turned out all the caches, but one were still there, just rather well hidden.  So the weekend was my birthday which always means a caching trip to the coast. This year I had set my sights on the North Norfolk coastline...Cromer to be exact.  However, it was already 10 days into HQs new souvenir challenge ‘Cache Carnival’, and i’d barely totted up 10 points out of the target 500! As points were focused on caches with lots of FPs, if I was going to make up ground quickly, and achieve all five souvenirs I needed to find some very popular caches. Looking at the cache map around...