1 September 2014 (Monday) - Trees in Gravesend

Yesterday I had something of a rant about the standard of written literacy on geocaching dot com. There's no denying that the standard of literacy here leaves a lot to be desired. Partly because I can't find a UK spell checker for OpenOffice and partly because the keyboard on my laptop is on the way out. If any of my loyal readers could recommend a decent laptop, I'm all ears. In the meantime I am bodging through with a US-based spell checker so please bear with me.

Over brekkie "Furry Face TM" chased a spider round the room and I put some laundry in to wash. When we moved "Daddies Little Angel TM" the other week we brought home some bags of unwanted clothing. We thought we might wash them and take them to a charity shop. So I set to washing the stuff. I've now found where all of my missing socks went. What was that girl doing with my socks?

I put the lead onto "Furry Face TM" and we drove down to collect Lisa, then it was on to Gravesend Golf Course. We'd heard of some new geocaches having gone live up there recently; ones which were a little way off of the ground. It wasn't long before we were at the foot of a pine tree. We couldn't see any sign of a cache, but the thing had been listed as having a high terrain rating (i.e. difficult to get to); 4.5 out of a possible 5. So obviously the thing was going to be "up". The difficulty setting was rather low, in fact it was the easiest rating there is. And sure enough the cache was dead simple to find; if only you climbed high enough up that tree. The cache description said the cache was about seven metres up the tree; I would in all honesty have said that this first one was a tad higher.

The second cache was entertaining; we were deciding which tree to climb (to be honest on a day like today we would have climbed all of the trees; finding a geocache at the top was just an added bonus) when I heard someone telling my dog off. A passing normal person was shouting "Bad boy Fudge". Fudge wasn't doing anything wrong... that is my Fudge wasn't. His was. We'd met another dog called Fudge; this one was a Golden Retriever.
Once the normal people had cleared off, Lisa voomed up the tree to get the cache and bring it down. Once we'd done the secret geo-ritual I then "elegantly ascended" into the canopy to replace it.
This second tree wasn't quite so high as the first.

We then did some "usual" (*not* "normal") geocaching in which we both independently got stuck inside a bramble bush, and then found a "base of tree" cache before again scrambling some ten metres up a conifer; Lisa collecting the cache and me returning it. As I scrambled down I saw that Lisa was talking to some normal people. They were interested to know what I was doing up the tree. I made some glib comment about hunting for truffles. For all that everyone knows truffles are found underground, have *you* ever actually gone looking for a truffle underground? No - you haven't, have you? They may well be ten metres up a pine tree mightn't they? People believe any old drivel all the time that you spout it confidently enough.
We came home via McDonalds in Bobbing. We weren't hungry, but a McFlurry always goes down well.

Once home I put the photos I'd taken up on the Internet - I remembered to take some photos this time. I then did some C.P.D. (it's a work thing), ran round with the Hoover, and set about the ironing.
I always seem to do ironing when I have a day off...


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