The road to 10,000 geocache finds
Determined to get to it asap this year, I’ve been heading out on some afternoon caching adventures to parts of the region that have an abundance of unfound caches, in order to grab as many as possible, as quickly as possible.
The first trip I have to mention, because of all the brilliant custom cache containers along the route, is Disa Urq’s ‘Fen Rivers’ series.
It was set on the footpaths, along the banks of the huge Great Ouse River and its relief channel, between Stowbridge and Wiggenhall St Mary, not far from Downham Market. Altogether, there were a brilliant 31 caches to grab in the series, plus a few extra older caches.
I parked up in a familiar public car park – visited just days earlier whilst doing Poshrule’s Stowbridge Scuttle – and set off on my chilly adventure. It was a really nice walk along the banks of the huge river, at points I almost seemed to be surrounded by water.
The caches were great, nice easy finds and lots of really nice customs. An awful lot of work has gone into this series.
They included a cute porcelain fish, a rather nice tortoise, chunks of branch, sticks and a very pretty porcelain kitten – my favourite!
I also bumped into quite a large tribe of fellow geocachers at number 23, who comprised of Puddlehopper, Nantuckets Dreams, LL+2 and ViHRos.
It turned out this was one of the tricker hides, up a rather steep bank, and some of the group had already made it up there by the time I arrived. They shouted down and kindly offered to put my name on the log. How’s that for timing! Really nice of them…I think I might have struggled getting up there in my rather soggy trainers!
Whilst two of the chaps did all the signing, replacing and slipping and sliding back down the bank, I got chatting to some of the others who were watching from the safety of the footpath.
They kindly gave me some advice on how to approach the next cache which was up on a footbridge. It was lovely to meet them, and always nice to see other geocachers out doing the same series.
Fortunately, the rain held off for the rest of the walk and once back at the car I just had time to grab a couple of caches by car including the brilliant mystery cache ‘Vacancy’!
I had poured over that puzzle for many years trying all number of things, then in the last lockdown, whilst sat at a proper computer, I found myself solving puzzles that had baffled me for an age.
I decided to revisit this one and within minutes of looking again at the thing I suspected contained the coordinates, I had them! So, so happy! Such a clever way to hide them and I’d not seen it done before. I definitely need to make sure I don’t spend hours trying to solve tricky puzzles on my phone in future.
At a very quiet GZ I made a quick find in amongst the trees just before it got completely dark! Very, very pleased to finally tick this one of my list and learn a new technique for a puzzle cache.
A few days later I was out hiding one of my ‘High’ Snag the Tags near Lakenheath Air Base and decided to take a slightly longer route home via the forest at Elveden.
It enabled me to grab the lovely quick cache and dash near the entrance to one of the forest trails. Set by crazytom2001uk, it was appropriately named ‘cache and dash’ and was quickly spotted on the black barrier.
The next trip out was an afternoon’s caching and dashing around South Cambridgeshire. I had two Snag the Tags to hide and had spotted a couple of interesting locations on the map that fitted with the ‘High’ and ‘Low’ theme.
My first stop was not far from Haslingfield, at a country track that ran alongside the impressive Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory.
It was the perfect spot to hide my second Signal on Mars Snag the Tag, and also had a couple of caches along the route to grab, which I hadn’t picked up previously.
The first was the impressive Christmas 2018 letterbox cache, set by Ryo62 and Heidirose4789. Upon finding the old tree, I soon pulled out the huge ammo can…I do enjoy finding these!
The second was the appropriately named ‘Up Scope Too’ by the Stirley’s, and maintained by S&AT, which was also nicely hidden.
After hiding the tag, I headed of to Haslingfield to pick up a few caches including a couple of ‘Little Bridges’ caches, a couple of church micros, a ‘Congratulations’ cache and the ‘Book Exchange’.
I then headed on to Wimpole, Arrington, Croydon, Cockayne Hatley and Wrestlingworth to grab lots more caches in the ‘Congratulations’, ‘Little Bridges’ ‘Milestone’ and ‘War Memorial’ series’.
RailwayFan’s Congratulations cache was a particularly great custom!
I was also able to pick up some other long solved mystery caches like ‘The Rock’ and ‘Hatley Heart A Very Merry Christmas’.
I had a really lovely day, and it’s amazing how many you can pick up by car, with the odd short walk to break up the driving. It was certainly a slightly warmer caching option than being outside in the biting wind all afternoon.
With just 22 Geocaches to find until the big 10k milestone, I was eager to get out on my next caching trip. I decided to head to South Cambs/Bedfordshire again, given the wealth of caches still waiting to be found out there – in large part due to RYO62’s continuous efforts to keep refreshing his caches, thus keeping us all entertained with new hides and finds.
I decided to start not far from Wrestlingworth, picking up various solved ‘Congratulations’ mystery caches along the road to Steeple Morden. All were lovely quick finds and before long I was in Ashwell.
I decided to park up and walk the new ‘Ashwell Acrobatics’ series. Altogether there were 15 caches to find and RYO62 had made sure there were some nice customs mixed in with the more common tubes and mircos.
Some had fake ivy or mossy looking material attached to help conceal their identity and others were micros in pieces of breeze block.
I really liked the little magnetic tube that fitted perfectly into the groove in a pebble. And the bug attached to a magnetic tube, carefully placed underneath a large metal box, was quite a surprise!
About halfway along the route I reached a very familiar tree – the site of the dead fox incident a couple of years ago!
Anyone who read my blog back then, will remember that I was caught out by a muggle as I went to grab the cache, and whilst talking to her, I found myself in the rather embarrassing situation of standing on a dead fox! She pointed it out to me eventually!
Fortunately, there were no dead animal carcasses at the foot around the tree today, just the cache, and a very special cache! Yes, I had finally done it…I had found my 10,000th geocache!
I’m so pleased to have finally reached this great milestone and I’m look forward to many more adventures on the way to finding my next 10,000!
Back in the centre of the village, I paid a visit to the very pretty, tucked away, Ashwell Springs. RYO62 has set a lovely series of lab caches at the beauty spot and it didn’t take long to discover the great locations and information required for each lab.
I particularly enjoyed seeing and crossing the stepping stones. It was also nice to read about the history of the Springs, and the stories of local people stopping off to let their animals have a well-earned drink many years ago.
There was also a bonus cache – always nice to have one at the end of a series of Adventure Labs. It didn’t take me long to crunch the numbers and find the great custom spider cache, snuggled away at the final GZ.
I finished the day by grabbing a few more caches and dashes including ‘Ashwell Welcome’, which was a nice bolt and nut on a sign, and ‘Nuclear Fallout’ which was a film pot containing an interesting film roll log.
Altogether my four-hour adventure had added another 49 finds to my total, as well as getting me across the line on the long awaited 10k milestone.
That’s it for this week. Stay safe, don’t get blown away by Storm Eunice…no doubt we’ll be out doing some cache maintenance next week, in the wake of the biggest storm we’ve seen since 1987.
And don’t forget Tuesday 22.2.22 is ‘Deuce’s Wild Day’ and there’s a souvenir up for grabs for anyone finding two caches that day! I’m certainly planning too even if it’s dark by the time I finish work :-)
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