Norfolk’s golden mile, and the ‘going nowhere but home’ incident!

Over the past couple of weeks we have really been hitting the geocaching trails in a bid to get to the golden milestone of 10,000 finds.  

We had been missing the seaside after our week away enjoying some of Somerset’s scenic coastline, so we decided to head out for the day to Norfolk’s golden mile - Great Yarmouth.  

 

We are fairly frequent visitors to the town so there are very few geocaches left that we haven’t already found, but there was one particular cache that has evaded us for quite some time - KittyWitches sneaky, difficult 5 ‘Fruits de mer’ cache.  

 

The tiny micro was located somewhere within a decorative arch sculpture at the entrance to St George’s Park. However, despite various lengthy attempts in the past to locate the little blighter, we had always failed to find it.  

 

Today with renewed energy we tried again. After 20 minutes of examining both sides of the intricate sculpture, which featured an array of seal life all cast in metal, we still hadn’t found it.  

 

The other half was starting to get a bit bored and wandered off to sit down on one of the nearby benches to eat his sandwich. I was tempted to do the same, but I really wanted to find it, so I decided to persevere for another 10 minutes.  

 

Finally, after thinking I’d searched every possible inch of the reachable parts of the arch, I put my fingers inside a small part of the structure - that I obviously hadn’t delved into before - and felt something move. Seconds later I was holding the tiny black magnetic micro in my hand. Oh, the joy! A very happy jig followed, along with a big sigh of relief from the other half!   

 

I soon had the tiny log signed and the cache carefully returned it to its sneaky little hidey hole. To say we were relieved to tick this one of the list is an understatement.  

 

We also stopped off to do the new War Memorial Earthcache, also located in St George’s Park, which was fortunately nice and straight forward and didn’t take too long to complete. 

 

After a spot of lunch we headed for another of KittyWitches caches ‘Itacwbgh – world’s oldest football stand’ and were so glad we did. Such an interesting piece of history that we would never have known about, or have seen, if it hadn’t of been for this cache. Thankfully it was a much quicker find than the CO’s other one. 

 

After a few hours milling around the beach front, amusements, piers and shops, we finished the trip with a couple of caches and dashes, which were both simple hides and finds. 

 

A few days later I had a section of RYO62s huge ‘No Cheese, Gromit’ series in my sights, along with his ‘Nuthampstead Nutcracker’ trail. It was a nice dry day and I really enjoyed the long walk of just over 11 miles through the pretty and quiet countryside. 

 

I bumped into a couple of dog walkers along the way, and had a nice chat with one of them who knew a little about geocaching. He even told me where I could find one of the caches, as he’d observed others searching for it in the past…I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I already knew exactly where it was.  

 

There were some nice caches in the series. Some were brilliantly cam’oed with fake leaves and fake grass on top of their lids. There were also some classic RYO62 custom caches, including small chunks of breeze block, sticks, and tubes with various bugs and spiders attached.  

 

It was a really lovely walk and I found most of the caches really quickly, enabling me to bag a brilliant 55 caches. 

Unfortunately, towards the end I did something strange to my leg, and ended up hobbling back to the car on the last mile or so.  

 

However, once back at the car I had a little sit down and managed to sort myself out enough to grab a few caches and dashes on my way home. They included some in RYO62’s ‘Congratulations’ series, which I’d solved at home prior to my trip. Plus, the standalone ‘Wallace’s red telephone box’ – I’m sure you can guess where that one was hidden! 

  

My next Geocache outing was to Newmarket to pick up GCZ Team’s brilliant ‘Size Matters Challenge’ cache. When it was first published I thought I must qualify for that, but despite having found almost 8,000 caches at that time, the checker said ‘No’! I failed to qualify because I hadn’t found enough Virtual caches in East Anglia. I was four short! 

 

Hence, over the following months I planned a few geocaching trips that would take me to areas in the region with virtual caches I hadn’t found i.e. Saffron Walden, Thaxted, Mundford and Sandringham.   

 

Soon I had the golden 10 Virtuals needed for the challenge, and today was the day to finally go and find the cache.  

 

I parked up in the handing parking area adjacent to the gallops and walked across the road into the little woodland. It didn’t take me long to spot the cache, and what a big cache it was. It was huge! It’s always really exciting to find a nice big cache. 

 

It was also really nice to see a new cache placed in this area, which I visited way back when I first started geocaching and had found some very innovative caches…sadly most are now archived.  

 

Afterwards, I made a little diversion to Saxon Street to pick up the nice ‘Fine Pair’ cache, which proved to be a lovely quick find as well.  

 

The following weekend, still suffering from a bit of a mystery leg injury, I decided to forgo a long walk, and give it a chance to heal, opting instead for a bit of caching and dashing around South Cambridgeshire and North Essex.  

 

As mentioned in one of our previous logs, Munsterrr has set a huge series of over 300 caches in this part of the world, called ‘EHB Series’. It was time for a return visit to find a few more of these great caches.  

 

I’d walked some of the previous stretches, but this time picked a section with slightly bigger roads and more places to pull in, so that I could grab as many as possible as caches and dashes.  

 

Altogether I picked up almost 60 caches during the trip, including some nice Village Hall and Church Micro caches at Great Chishill, Littlebury Green and Duddenhoe End, plus three of RYO62s ‘Congratulations’ caches. 

 

I made a return visit to the series a few weeks later, but sadly that one ended in disaster just 20 caches in. 

As I was driving along one of the little country roads, a speeding van came around a corner and headed directly for me. I narrowly missed him by swerving onto the verge, but in the process hit a rather large pot hole with quite a bang!  

 

Moments later my car was veering violently across the road…yes you’ve guessed it…I’d punctured the tyre . It was completely flat and had a huge gash in it. That’ll teach me for being lazy and caching and dashing, instead of walking the series! 

 

The other half soon put the spare on for me, but it was a toy sized ‘get you home’ wheel, so that put paid to any further caching and dashing that day. I will however be returning soon to collect some more in this mega series. It really is a great series, and I take my hat off to Munsterr for setting it and keeping up with all the maintenance so well.   

 

We finish this week’s blog with a final trip out on the ‘No cheese, Gromit’ geoart series. This was to complete the last stretch of the trail, around Reed and Barkway, and to pick up a few caches and dashes including a Moat Micro and Church Micros at Buckland, Heydon and Reed.  

 

It also gave me a chance to pick up my ‘Congratulations 2000 Sparky_Tarpi’ cache, which RYO62 had kindly placed after I recently hit the milestone of finding 2,000 of RYO62’s caches. 

It was lovely to see my caching name appearing on a cache in South Cambs, and I enjoyed doing the jigsaw puzzle. However, with that many hides, and all that maintenance to do, I really think it should be us thanking and congratulating RYO62 for his huge and ongoing contribution to geocaching in Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. Thank you RYO62! 

 

And on that happy note, I bid you farewell, and happy caching. See you in the new year.