Goodbye 2019 and Hello 2020

Yes it’s that’s time of year in the caching calendar when two souvenirs are up for grabs, one to bid farewell to 2019, the other to welcome in the new year - and in this case a new decade. 

Due to various family engagements over the festive break I hadn’t got out caching as much as I’d hoped. 

My key day out had been on Monday to Warmington in Northamptonshire, to complete another of Poshrule’s soon to be archived series - ‘Poshrule’s Preambulate Warmington’ - where I picked up over 40 caches.

It was a great walk, although a little muddy in parts due to all the recent rain. Caches were mainly tubes and film pots, and were on the whole quick finds. 

Three appeared to have gone walkies, so I did put out a few replacements, which was hopefully ok and will enable other cachers to complete the trail before its archived. 

There were a couple of well placed rock caches, which blended in really well. And the final cache, custom made, look like part of an old wooden stick, and blended into its surroundings really well.

On New Year’s Eve I needed to pop into Bury St Edmunds to return a couple of unwanted gifts, which gave me the perfect opportunity to do the new lab caches there. 

Set by FolkFen, the Haunted Bury St Edmunds series comprise of five lab caches at the town’s key historical landmarks. Each had a rather eerie story to tell...I do love a good ghost story...which made the series even more fun. 

It started at the pretty Guildhall on the market square and after finding the info needed for the answer I was off to the second lab cache site.

It wasn’t long before I found myself loitering outside - the rather busy - smallest pub in the world, The Nutshell. I quickly spotted the required information but it took me several attempts to input it correctly, due to a spelling error on my part!

The beautiful Abbey was next and then after a visit to the fifth lab cache, in the very appropriate setting of a churchyard, I had all the numbers I needed to get the bonus. 

It was a picturesque walk to the final, and after a bit of rooting around at GZ I uncovered a nice ghostly container. 

A great series, with some interesting stories that I never knew. I highly recommend it to other cachers. 

The lab caches on New Year’s Eve earnt me HQs ‘Goodbye 2019’ souvenir, so it seemed only fitting to do some more lab caches New Years Day to get the ‘Hello 2020’ souvenir. 

This time accompanied by a rather hungover other half we drove to Newmarket, where another five lab caches had recently been set by GCZ Team.

Called ‘Newmarket’s Great & Famous’, the series took us on a very nice walk around the centre of Newmarket, visiting landmarks linked to a king, a queen and a genius.

I had actually never even realised that there was a monument to Bill Tutte or that he’d had links to Newmarket. The sculpture was incredibly clever, standing at just the right angle we could clearly see his face. 

It was also nice to see Nell Gwynn’s house, I’d never really noticed it before, despite having worked or lived in the Newmarket area for over 30 years. 

The next stop was the pretty Palace House, which was a more familiar site. As was the Jockey Club, although I had never noticed the object that we were required to examine to get the info for the fourth answer. It always surprising how we fail to take much notice of what is really around us, as we go about our busy lives. 

The final stop was the stunning tribute to Queen Elizabeth II and her love of horses and horse racing. 

Again, I have driven past this at least once a week over the past 4 years, but had never noticed it! Shocking!

It really is a beautiful statue and after inputting our final answer, we quickly had all the numbers for the bonus multi. The cache was soon spotted at GZ and our babes added to the log.

Another fun and informative set of lab caches, which again I’d highly recommend visiting.

Last year we set ourselves several challenges:-

• To hit 8000 caches, sadly we didn’t achieve it, but did hit nearly 7000. 
• To find 100 caches in 24 hours - we did it! 
• To fill our grid of 365 days caching, and finally achieved it, finding the last few days in December 2019. 
• To attend our first CITO, which we did by attending the Thurston CITO back in March. 

We also wanted to attend our first mega, which we did in Manchester.

And do our first lab cache - by the end of year we had actually clocked up a brilliant 44 lab caches! 

So what’s left for to do for 2020?

Well we’ve still not completed our difficulty/terrain grid, so we’re hoping to find some more 4.5 and 5 caches this year. 

We’d also like to complete EPP’s social butterfly challenge to attend 30 events - just 6 to go. 

We’d like to do our first web cam cache. And our ultimate goal for 2020 is to reach 10,000 caches by the end of the year!

Check out our future posts to see how we get on. 

Our key 2019 Stats:

Total caches found: 1,493

Mysteries: 165

Letterboxes: 84

Earthcaches: 25

Virtuals: 22

Lab caches: 44

Wherigos: 2

Events: 11

CITO’s: 1

Mega’s: 1