The mad British weather and hitting another geocaching milestone

Who would have thought we would get such cold and atrocious weather this summer here in the UK! Usually by now we are all basking in some much warmer sunnier days, with the odd bit of cloud and rain in-between, but this year the weather certainly seems to be as in as much disarray as the world’s health.  

Returning from my holidays, I was very eager to get out geocaching again – despite spending much of the holiday chasing down geocaches. The key reason…I was just three geocaches short of hitting the big milestone of 9,000 finds.   

 

So the day after getting home I headed up the road to Reach and Burwell to grab a few finds. First stop was Reach where a couple of additional caches had been published in the Fiesta series – which is entirely film pots all inventively decorated.   

 

Next, I was off to Swaffham Prior and on the way a little stop to grab a challenge cache that I qualified for early last year – GCZ team’s ‘Searching High and Low – an elevation challenge’. 

I realised I qualified after a trip to the Grand Canyon last year…and I didn’t even need to climb a mountain! It was very exciting to finally pop my name on the log and get the smiley, especially as just last year I’d told the lovely COs GCZ Team that their challenge caches were too tough for me. Definitely not the case after all! 

 

I rounded off my little jaunt out with a few caches and dashes including War Memorial Swaffham Prior and the Sidetracked cache at the old Burwell Tramway Terminus.   

  

A few nights later, with a very excited dog in toe – my dad’s dog Bobby - I set off on a new walk in Kings Forest called the ‘King’s Dozen’. 

Set by Georovers110 it was in a lovely quiet part of Thetford Forest that I and Bobby hadn’t visited for years. In fact, the last time I was here was when I first started geocaching back in 2015, and had taken my mum and a much younger Bobby to find some very nice caches by The Owen Gang, which sadly are now long gone.   

 

The new series was great fun. The first part was along a very long, wide sandy track and you could literally see trees lining it for miles ahead. As Bobby ran back and forth, I grabbed the caches as I went and there were some nice customs mixed in with some more traditional tubes and pots. 

 

As we were about two thirds of the way along the first track I suddenly realised that just behind us were thick black rain clouds and then thunder! Oh heck, we were quite a way from the car and I stupidly hadn’t even brought a coat with me.  

 

We decided to pick up our pace and almost made it to the nice large box at the end of the first stretch when the rain hit. Hurriedly I signed the log and dropped off a TB, and then took the path to the right to start the next part of the trail. 

Fortunately, the storm seemed to be coming across in bands, and we soon found we were now out of the first set of clouds, but up ahead could see another!  

As luck would have it, we pretty much missed getting caught by many more, as each time we seemed to near the next heavy rain clouds we turned in a different direction along the big circular trail.   

 

The caches came almost as thick and fast as the storm clouds and there were some great customs.  One of my favourites was Oh Christmas Tree. It was a decent sized stick that has a screw and nut, which you loosen, in order to turn the top and reveal the log book inside. I’d not seen anything like it before, it was very clever.  

 

There were some other nice caches including a rock in a stump, a tube in a slice of bark and a bison on a stick cleverly placed within an old tree…it blended in really well. 

 

My next geocaching walk was with Bobby again and we headed back to Kings Forest to do the second Georovers110 trail, ‘The Baker’s Dozen’. It was a brilliant series, and even better than the Kings Dozen.  

 

As you’d expect by the title, there were 13 caches, but the title was reflected even further in the series, as every single cache was a custom container based on baking. From spoons to measuring jugs, forks and a pasting brush, each was great fun to find. 

 

One of the more innovative ones was a small grater stuck to the side of a pot, now you don’t find that in the woods every day! It made me smile. 

The DVD case disguised as a recipe book was also very clever, and I really liked the tiny wooden rolling pin with the micro tube containing the log, inserted into one end. 

Other favourites included the biscuit cutter in the shape of a star and the cupcake mould. 

The sugar container was also great…but took me the longest to find as it was cleverly hidden in a stump, but a little way off from where my phone kept insisting it was.  

 

A really lovely walk - not too long and just right for after work - in a really nice part of the forest, that I really haven’t explored properly before. I recommend this to others with a couple of hours to kill.     

 

As the sunshine returned at the weekend, more South Cambridgeshire caches were on my to do list set by the now infamous Ryo62. I decided to do his Great Chishill Gander series and it didn’t disappoint. 

It was really nice to walk an area I haven’t previously cached in and the quiet little roads and lanes made the walk all the more enjoyable. As usual the hints were great so I went straight to the caches, quickly stacking up a number of finds.  

As I was making good time, I decided to divert a little, and grab some in his nearby ‘No Cheese Gromit’ series as well. This part of the walk was really nice through some beautiful hilly countryside.  

 

I had to stop start a little as I realised my caching pals DannyJGB, who do all my jigsaws for me, hadn’t quite finished doing some of them in this series, so I stopped to quickly solve 3 or 4 of them on route, in order to grab the physical containers as I passed. 

 

There were a few other nice caches to get along the way too. They included the Windmill and some in the Congratulations and Little Bridges series’.  

That is it for this week. Next week, I inadvertently find myself in the middle of a Memorial Day tribute and I take a step back in time by revisiting my childhood haunts around Lakenheath Fen. Until then stay safe, stay well.