Third time lucky, a postman’s nightmare and the incredible Spaceman

This week, I had some time off work and nothing planned, so it was a great opportunity to get out doing lots of Geocaching. The weather was fantastic too, which always makes Geocaching a bit more fun. I had my sights set on a few local series’, but also managed to fit in a trip further afield to the seaside.   

First up was another visit to Cambridgeshire and Essex to grab some more in the epic EHB series and the short linear series nearby named after the local road, ‘B1038’. 

I arrived at the first section around midday when the roads were pretty quiet, so I decided to grab as many by car as I could, in order to make more of a dent in both series’. 

 

Lots of quick finds followed along the narrow country roads, and at most GZ’s there was a place to pull-in– I only had to run back for a few.  

 

A few hours later, having had enough of jumping in and out of a car, I decided to head to nearby Newport and have another crack at the Wherigo there, called ‘Postman’s Nightmare’. I do enjoy a Wherigo, they are still my favourite type of cache. 

A few years ago I’d attempted to do this particular Wherigo with my elderly mum in toe, but she was by then in the later stages of dementia, and it was a bit of a struggle to keep a close eye on her and follow all the instructions on the Wherigo. We had managed to complete it, but clearly mis-understood or miscalculated the final and never found the cache.   

Today, I decided to start the Wherigo again and carefully run through each stage, to ensure I didn’t muck up the final GZ calculations again. Having done the Wherigo before proved to be very helpful, as I remembered most of the locations I needed to get too, hence I didn’t waste any time going the wrong way along the High Street as we had done the first time. 

It was a really good Wherigo taking in some key places of interest and I thoroughly enjoyed doing it a second time. And, better still, this time I managed to find the tiny final, nano cache at the end. 

 

My next Geocaching trip was to the seaside – well it has to be done when you’re on holiday from work! I hadn’t been to Hunstanton for a while so I persuaded the other half to take the day off and we set off for a warm and sunny day out at the beach.  

 

As we approached the seaside resort I knew there were a few caches in the surrounding area and on the edge of the town to find, so we did a few little diversions to grab them as caches and dashes. 

They included a very interesting cache called, ‘Sweet Ocean Cloud – Donald Allum’, who was apparently the first person to row across the Atlantic and back again. It’s aways great to learn something new whilst geocaching. The cache was located in a pretty little garden dedicated to him, which appropriately had a rowing boat in the middle of it and the cache was sneakily hidden at one end of it.  

 

After a sit down in the sunshine on the beach, we took a stroll along the sea front to collect a couple more caches, including the cleverly hidden ‘St Edmunds Chapel’ cache. It was a nice sized Tupperware box hidden under a rock in the gardens near to the beautiful white lighthouse, which sits on top of the cliffs.  

 

On our way home we also made a quick stop just outside Weeting to try and find number one in the Linnet and Shadow Forest Hack series. 

The mystery cache had a clever puzzle, which I’d solved quite quickly a little while back, but I had failed to find the cache at the final location on two previous occasions. With the other half’s sharp eyes available to help today, I thought I stood a better chance, but after almost 20 minutes we still couldn’t spot it. 

 

I was about to give up again, but I decided to check one more potential host that I hadn’t looked at much before, and seconds later there was the bison hanging amongst the branches! How on earth had I missed that so many times? I have no idea, but it was third time lucky for me and really nice to finally turn the sad blue face into a smiley and tick off another cache in this challenging, but brilliant series. 

 

A couple of days later I managed to persuade the other half to come out on another Geocaching adventure, this time to Knettishall Heath. 

Set amongst beautiful forests, not far from Thetford, it was our third Geocaching visit to the heath. Weston Wanderer had been hard at work, setting another new series on the beautiful nature reserve and like his previous two series’, this one was very well designed and full of interesting custom made caches. 

Altogether we managed to pick up all 20 of the new Knettishall Heath Stroll caches and a few others on route. There were some brilliant caches along the way. 

My personal favourites included the great little acorn, the rat, and the nano in the fungi, which was hanging on a tree and blended in so well. 

 

The other half, being a big lover of hedgehogs and a volunteer at the local rescue centre, loved the cute hedgehog hiding in the tree. The creative basket with kinder egg inside was also great, as was the final at the mystery cache GZ – a locked tube that you needed the secret code to open. 

 

The walk was also lovely, through stretches of forest, across the heath and along the river. We saw plenty of wildlife along the way, including grey squirrels; a muntjac deer and we even got a glimpse of some of the beautiful ponies who live on the heath. 

 

I finished my week off with a maintenance run. A few of my caches had clocked up a few DNFs over the past week or so, hence I decided to pop along and check on them. 

The beautiful Packhorse Bridge in Moulton was my first stop, and the cache hidden on a road sign nearby had sadly disappeared. I popped a replacement cache on the sign and then headed off towards Kentford to my Boy’s Grave cache. This had also gone, due to the installation of a new fence, but I soon had it back up and running again, with a slightly different hide.  

 

I can’t finish this week’s blog without mentioning our triumph at Eurovision! I’ve been a fan of the show since I first sat down as a 6-year-old to watch Bardo take to the stage in Harrogate in 1982. 

Over the past 40 years of watching it, it really has changed a lot, and whilst I have only ever witnessed the UK winning once during those 40 years – Katrina and the Waves in 1997 – I still love it! It is without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most entertaining things on TV, there is nothing else quite like it.  

 

This year’s show was made even better by the fact we very nearly won! Sam Ryder, rocked the Italian arena with his belting hit ‘Spaceman’…which dare I say, I’m not entirely sure is actually about a man in outer space like so many believe…but a great Eurovision song nonetheless. And in a nail biting hour or more of voting, he scored countless 12 points and took first place in the Jury vote. An incredible feat considering the UK has rarely been awarded any points by the countless juries in recent years.

 

Sam was unfortunately pipped at the final post, when the audience tele vote swung the entertaining Ukraine entry into first place. But it didn’t matter, we still celebrated the fantastic result in our house, as I’m sure did many other people in the UK. It was one of the best results we’ve had in many years and one of the most exciting Eurovision nights of my life! I have never cheered and danced about so much during Eurovision voting. Huge congratulations to Sam Ryder. You did us all very proud.  

 

Next week we’re off on our holibobs to Cornwall, to grab some of the west country’s more adventurous caches, in a bid to fill our terrain grid. We’ll be grabbing caches hanging on the edge of cliffs; discovering a secret blow hole and crawling into a pitch black cave in order to find a difficulty 4.5 terrain 5 cache. Don’t miss it.