It’s Party Time: birthdays and a carnival!

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 Cromer I suddenly spotted exactly what I needed, a trail of caches on the Felbrigg Hall estate that were obviously creative, as over the years they’d totted up a fair number of FPs. 

After a tasty birthday breakfast and a few birthday pressies, we headed north for Felbrigg. Parking up in the estate’s main car park, for a nominal parking fee, we were soon heading off across the fields to find our first caches on the Felbrigg Foray trail. 

There really were some fantastic hides along the route, I can well understand how they have clocked up so many favourite points. 

At the church there was very clever nano hidden in a long old rusty bolt, pushed into a fence hole. If the GPS hadn’t of taken me straight to the spot, I think we might have been here much longer, it really didn’t look like a cache.

Further along at no.5 The Lake, we were almost stumped by an ingenious little hide. Another nano, hidden very cleverly in a tree. If only I’d concentrated more on the spot the GPS took me to instead of everything else around it, but eventually the tiny container and log was in hand.

It wasn’t long before the other half was on his knees crawling under a bridge to grab another nicely hidden cache. And his triumphs continued at a pretty metal bridge across the far end of a lake. I’d walked all the way along looking in obvious places, but he spotted the clever cache wrapped around one of the black spindles. It blended in really well, another clever hide.

As we headed back to the house we met a few friendly cows along the way, quite amusing to see them all grazing on the large lawn in front of the house. 

By this point the cafe was calling so after a pit stop for refreshments, we then attempted the fun multi - The Hall.

Standing in front of the house at stage one, it quickly became obvious what we needed to count and how we got the numbers from it. A clever idea and very interesting to see this cleverly built into the house’s infrastructure.

At stage two the cache was quickly found and it wasn’t long before we were heading off on the track into the woods behind the house. This was also a lovely part of the walk and more great caches were found on the CS and Panda Hide series’. 

These included a cute panda, appropriate for a series called ‘Panda Hide’. The CS series also took us to a very interesting old building, which we had a good look at whilst picking up ‘CS3 Thomas Corbett’.

The final walk back to the Hall and car park was along a wide tree lined drive/path and was one of the prettiest parts of the walk. 

Back at the car I realised we’d clocked up enough points to claim all the remaining souvenirs in the Cache Carnival (with the exception of the event one) thanks to so many of the caches being so popular. And it was great to see all the souvenirs popping up on our profile. 

After leaving the Hall and it’s huge grounds, we made a quick detour into the nearby village to grab a letterbox cache. It was located right next to an old WW2 pill box - always nice to see so many of these still standing throughout the East Anglia. Sadly no stamp in the cache to stamp out book with, but a nice sized box. 

Back on the road we headed off for Cromer just a few miles up the road.    It was quite windy on the seafront, but with an hour or so of daylight left I began seeking out a few more caches. 

‘The mad hutters tea party’ was first up, and quickly found. We then decided to tackle the multi ‘Cromer Remembers’. Such a nice idea for a cache, and we learnt a lot about all the lives the town’s lifeboat men have saved over the years as we hopped up and down the steps locating the numbers. 

After a nice stroll along the pier we left the beach and went to grab Church Micro St Peter & St Paul. I’d solved the jigsaw puzzle earlier in the week and fortunately made a quick find at GZ, before heading off to view the beautiful church...so big! 

And finished our walk by picking up Henry’s View located at the town hall near a lifeboat. 

All in all a great day, and it gave us lots to celebrate.