The eggcellent geocache trail & the mind boggling field puzzle

This week we kick off with a nice circular walk at Rushbrooke by one of my favourite cache hiders SusieAndMaisy. 

If you like innovative custom caches their walks really are worth doing – you are always guaranteed to find caches you won’t have seen anywhere else.  

Their latest series was published earlier this year, just as the dreadful winter/spring lockdown came to an end in the UK. 

I decided not to head straight out, as it was only up the road from me, so I knew it would make a nice after work, summer evening stroll.  

Finally, that evening had arrived. I parked up in the very unusual hamlet of Rushbrooke - I say unusual because it doesn’t feel like any other village or hamlet I’ve ever visited, it almost looks like a model village. 

A small number of quaint cottages line either side of a very quiet concrete road. There was literally no traffic and in the middle of the road sits a stunning brick medieval wellhead, which almost looks like a tiny church with it’s strange cross on top of the roof.  

 

It was only after I got home, and googled the hamlet, that I discovered the houses are all privately owned and part of the Rushbrooke Estate, hence why it didn’t look like any other hamlet/village.  

 

Anyway, aside from all that, the actual geocache walk was brilliant. There were so many brilliant custom caches hidden along the pretty circular trail – I’ll come to those in a minute.  

The route was really nice and good underfoot. I started in Rushbrooke at number 6 and did the circuit in reverse order.  

The first section took me across the estate on a lovely wide gravelly road to the popular Rushbrooke Arms public house. Once I’d crossed the busy A134, the route then meandered along quiet footpaths and field edges to the perimeter of Nowton Park, before crossing the A134 again. I then made my way up the quiet North Hill country road and back onto the Rushbrooke estate road. 

 

The caches came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They included a small piece of fake grass - with log container attached - next to a post; nice sized Tupperware boxes, big enough for TBs; tiny magnetic caches on poles and gates; and bisons with fake ivy attached, just to make then that little bit tougher to spot.  

 

My favourites included the magnetic slug attached to a pole; a cute green frog under a log; a screw on a gate – where I spotted some wild deer running about in the neighbouring field; a spider wedged into a gate post; and a piece of tarmac with a tiny nano cache inserted into it.  

 

But the best three of the whole walk were the custom made squirrel which I picked up at the base of a tree in Nowton Park. 

The rather life like fake pooh very well placed at the edge of a hedge – I hardly dare pick it up!   

Plus…and this really was something I’d never seen before, and the most innovative cache I’ve found for a while…a box of twelve eggs! 

Ok they were fake, but they looked incredibly realistic and of course, only one had the tiny nano log container within it, so I removed a few from the box until I found the correct one. Just brilliant, I absolutely loved this cache. 

 

A few nights later another after work walk was needed, to help get my step count up for the week, and shed a few inches of the waistline…well maybe 1mm, not inches!

Geodog Bobby was eager for a walk too, so I stopped of at my dad’s house and picked him up before heading to the forest at Weeting to try and find a few caches in Linnet & Shadow’s Forest Hack.  

 

It was my second attempt at finding caches in this great, refreshed series. Like its predecessor, the series had many very clever caches and hides, some just way to tough for me and the other half to spot on our last visit.  

 

I only had about an an hour and a half of daylight left by the time I arrived so we headed straight for number 32, a difficulty 5 puzzle cache, which I’d solved in the last lockdown.

It was a brilliant puzzle, and I’d tried various things before hitting on the right one. But even then after spotting something, it took another 10 minutes for me to find the actual information to locate the cache.  

 

Of course, I should probably have sussed then, that there would be more too it…but I didn’t! Battling our way through the almost neck high ferns to get to the cache, Bobby and I arrived to find a really interesting metal box! 

Fortunately, I’d got the info we needed to get into it, and it was with great delight that I opened the box inside to retrieve the log container. And then my face dropped! There was a field puzzle to solve before I could get to the actual log…and I had absolutely no idea what to do!  

 

After 15 minutes looking carefully at everything in the box, and trying this and that, I couldn’t work it out. Bobby becoming a bit impatient to continue his walk…he’s almost as bad as the other half sometimes…so I decided to admit defeat and come back another day. Such a clever puzzle with some ingenious twists…but just too clever for me today!  

 

We carried on with our walk and managed to rectify a dnf at number 22. It still took a bit of spotting and in the end I actually spotted it on the floor. It was great to finally tick this one off. 

I also made short work of the hide at number 26. I’d missed it out on our last visit as I knew how sneaky the previous hide at this spot had been, and we had run out of time for any long searches. But, I actually wished I’d taken a look now, as somehow this time I went straight to the correct spot and spotted the cache immediately. 

 

Sadly, I failed to find the clever multi at number 20…I possibly got my numbers wrong at stage one, so I will return for that. And despite another extensive search at 24, I still couldn’t find it.

Despite those our failures, we had a lovely walk. Bobby thoroughly enjoyed himself and to be honest just managing to grab another 2 caches on this challenging trail, made it a successful trip for me.  

 

International Geocaching Day arrived at weekend, but being a bit under the weather, I didn’t have the energy for a long walk. Instead…and in order to achieve the souvenir…I decided to grab a couple of caches in Newmarket.  

 

We needed a few things from the big superstore, so whilst the other half was wrangling over which vegetables to buy and wondering why half the shelves were empty, I headed off on foot to pick up GCZ Team’s Church Micro at the Community Church. 

It was a nice custom cache and blended into its surroundings well, but it didn’t take me long to spot it. 

 

The second, was also a church micro at St Agnes Church. As it was on our route home, we picked it up as a drive-by and fortunately being late in the day on a Sunday, it was very quiet at GZ. 

The other half pulled up just a few yards from it and I hopped out of the car and quickly found the little tube cache nestled between the wall and the hydrant.  

 

That’s it for this week. Next week we’re off to a wedding…our first since the pandemic hit. We’ll also be finding some interesting caches near Leiston on the Suffolk coast, before meeting a vicar at an open air theatre. Until then, happy caching.