Caching Tales

The lovely August bank holiday was almost upon us and whilst the other half was preparing to head to some rather boring motorsport weekender, I was planning a couple of exciting caching trips to Hertfordshire.  Slightly guilt ridden that he wasn’t going to be about much during the BH weekend, he offered to join me beforehand on a caching adventure around Royston. My aim was to pick up a number of long solved mystery caches, continuing my ardent efforts the week before to get some ticked off my list.  To start our adventure we decided to do a reasonable sized loop of caches on the south-eastern side of the town, set by several different cachers. It was a really enjoyable walk, along fieldside paths, through woodland, country tracks and reasonably quiet roads, part of it following the Hertfordshire Way. Caches included a pretty little fairy house, a stick and ‘Fizzy Log’ a brilliant log with fake ivy attached. We also began collecting some of...

This week it was time to get out and find some long solved mystery caches. Yes, I’m talking about those gleaming blue dots on the geocaching map which are often the very last to be turned yellow. I have lost track of the number of hours I’ve spent trying to find those hidden co-ordinates on cache pages. Not being one to admit defeat and ask for help, I have literally spent months and even years contemplating how to solve some mystery caches. But when I do eventually get those hard to find co-ordinates the sense of achievement and self pride is immense.   However, despite all this work I’m a bit of a beggar for not going to find the final cache. I currently have over 300 caches in a 40 miles radius of home sitting in my solved list! And to my horror this week I realised a few of those have been archived recently. With a new found determination to actually start ticking some off the list I headed to Kingston - not the one in Jamaica - in South Cambridgeshire to ...

Yes this week it was well and truly time for a party. The week kicked off with one of those well loved work away days!  Yes anyone who works in an office will know them well. You and your colleagues all get to spend the day together, in a meeting room, usually somewhere outside of work and you basically do ‘work’ but under the guise of ‘fun’ activities. Our away day day this year was once again at Jesus College, a labyrinth of beautiful old buildings, and lush green courtyards. And it presented the opportunity to grab a cache.  Somehow last year I’d forgotten to go and find it so as soon as time was called on the ‘fun’ activities I headed off to find the ‘1946 and all that’ nano cache.  It was well tucked away, in a tiny courtyard which required some skilful maze navigating skills to get to, but once there the tiny magnetic nano was quickly found in the only obvious place. A couple of nights later I was back out after work for some caching...

Back out on the hunt for the Geocaching jewel thieves, this week  I headed for Thornham Woods in Suffolk accompanied by my very own Watson...aka the other half.  With just a handful of jewels still to find we set out on this great series.  It was a lovely trail with many clever and inventive hides and the scenery was lovely from the lush damp woodland to the dry, yellow cornfield edged footpaths.  The caches and hides ranged from a teeny nano on a footbridge; to a clever stick cache that blended in so well that I missed it...thank goodness for Watson’s eagle eyes...to a snake in long grass. A tiny cache hanging by an invisible fishing wire between the boards of a wooden footbridge bridge, also alluded me, but after 15 minutes Watson spotted it.  The box full of dozens of nano caches...only one of which contained the log...was another clever cache.  Along the walk we came across some interesting wooden sculptures whic...