Covid-19: To cache, or not to cache, that is the question?

As the Covid-19 worldwide pandemic had an ever greater impact on our daily lives and Governments around the world forced ever greater restrictions on our civil liberties, it was harder and harder to decide whether to go out caching or not. 

Unfortunately, I’m not one of those lucky UK residents being paid 80% of their salary to sit outside sunbathing all day. Oh I wish!

For the past few months I’ve been holed up inside my house glued to a laptop for hours a day, barely seeing a soul or the outside world, other than by video conference.

And what’s worse my job has become increasingly manic and stressful as the worlds media hunt for new angles on the pandemic story. 

More than ever I really needed time out of the house to go for an occasional weekend walk, to relax, clear my head and keep me sane!

As the first weekend of being confined to ‘work from home’ status approached, I decided to head into Norfolk for a caching walk away from it all. (I hasten to add this was before Boris’ Bombshell, for anyone tutting at reading this right now).

I set my sights on another couple of recently published Poshrule series’ at Marham and Narborough.

Altogether there were 38 caches on the two trails, plus a few extras. I was soon parking up at the church at Narborough and setting off through the graveyard. 

First stop was to grab the numbers for the war memorial multi. They were quickly obtained and I headed to stage one of another multi - the church micro.

Getting the numbers for this one was really good fun and it made me take notice of several signs and objects that I perhaps wouldn’t have seen otherwise. The clay jar in the wall was particularly fascinating.

I decided to pick up the final caches for the multis at the end of my walk, and set off down the quiet path out along the field edges. 

As usual with Poshrule’s hides they were very quick and easy to find, so the smileys came thick and fast. And the fact I barely saw a person all day meant I had no problems with social distancing. 

The Marham loop was through a very pretty wood and I thoroughly enjoyed that part of the walk. As I returned to the village, I saw a couple of sets of muggles...the first signs of life all day. 

The first were a family walking their dog and we gave each other a wide birth, maintaining the 2m rule. 

The second encounter was with a cyclist who came from behind me and for some reason felt the need to scare me half to death by ringing his bell a few feet away shouting “cyclist coming through”! 

Seeing as the path at this point was almost wide enough for two cars to pass one another, it all seemed a bit unnecessary! “Pratt coming through” might have been more appropriate! 

The walk back along the river was really lovely and it was nice to find the additional Bone Mill cache. The mill itself was also really great, very picturesque. 

Back at the church I grabbed the cache for the Church Micro, which I’d worked out earlier. I struggled a bit at GZ due to my height and I really couldn’t spot the cache, but after reading a few older logs, I started to feel along the top of the fence and soon had a rather scary rat in hand! It did make me laugh. 

Of course, my happiness at still being able to cache throughout the crisis, because it was so easy to social distance in the countryside, was short lived when Boris dropped his bombshell and decided no one was capable of adhering to the social distancing rules and announced lockdown!

As I now need to travel up to half an hour to get a decent number of caches, the new rules of only being able to leave the house for one short bit of exercise, close to home each day, put paid to most caching trips.

I have to say this piece of news hit me harder than anything else I’ve seen or heard during the pandemic. I felt quite upset & de-jected and found it very hard to keep going without my caching trips. 

I’m sure other UK cachers must have felt the same way. I reluctantly accepted it and decided to concentrate my spare hours on DIY projects, and gardening!

I noticed some local cachers disabled their caches around lockdown and I did consider whether it was the right thing to do with mine. But after weighing it all up, I decided not too. After all, HQ hadn’t stopped all caching activity, and most cachers are old enough to decide whether it’s safe for them to cache.

It also meant local cachers or new cachers who hadn’t yet found mine, could perhaps do so as part of their daily exercise. And it was nice to see a few doing so. 

My only caching trip during lockdown was during a short bike ride on my birthday. Usually I would have gone to the coast for a full day’s caching, but instead found myself cycling along the river near a Worlington picking up one of Crazynannie’s caches. 

I also attempted elfozzo69s unusual AI cache in Worlington, but sadly when we reached stage two we just couldn’t get the character to talk to us, so had to give up.

Finally, after almost two months of paint, mud, sanding and digging, I left the house for the first time to grab an after work cache. 

Yes Boris has announced we could now go for unlimited exercise further from home so I drove to Risby to pick up a new cache on the recreation ground. It was brilliant to be out again and it was the start of my return to caching! 

More on that next time, but for now stay safe and keep the antibac to hand.