19 April 2015 (Sunday) - Trosley

I had a frankly awful night's sleep last night, wide awake with the guts ache at 3am. I blame far too much Chinese last night. I finally dozed off only to be woken by the alarm and a wet nose in my armpit. I got up feeling really ill with the world's worst hangover. A worse hangover from Doctor Pepper than from stout? Something odd here.

I spent a little while playing (fighting) with the CacheSense app on my tablet. What it does on my phone (without any problem) it won't do on the tablet. What is acheived by pressing a button doesn't happen the next time the same button is pressed. There is no sense to it; and cannot ask for help as the CacheSense forum has identified my email address as a malicious source and has rejected it. After an hour's frustration I got it working by pressing the same buttons I'd pressed in the first place. Very frustrating...

The original plan for the day had been a quiet one doing the family thing. But mid-week the option for a walk presented itself, and as time went on so I fancied a walk more and more.
We set off a little later than expected, but were soon at Trottiscliffe (pronounced Trosley!) country park car park which was the meeting point for today. We arrived to find a minor disaster; one of the tyres on the Moonstone2001mobile was flat. Fortunately it was only flat on the bottom and the problem was soon resolved.

Before long everyone was together and we all set off. We'd gone to Trosley where there were three geo-walks which (supposedly) could be combined into one big walk. Most of our number went along only intending to do one loop, but five of us (and two of the dogs) thought we might do all three walks.
In retrospect it was a rather ambitious plan; and bearing in mind that the car park would be locked at 8pm put a definate time scale on the day. It was when we realised that we'd only done twenty of the one hundred (and more) targetted geocaches in one third of the available time that we admitted we'd have to re-think the plan.

We had a rather good picnic lunch eaten sat on the steps to Trosley church. As we scoffed we chatted first with the vicar and then with the churchwarden; neither of whom seemed at all bothered about half a dozen of us (and two small dogs) picnicing on their steps.
Dave had a phone call; he'd not realised he was supposed to be at kite club committee. Woops.
We looked at the maps and revised our plans. By judiciously revising our route we could leave little series of geocaches which we could find in future walks. So we did that; and made our way back to the car park by a rather circuitous route. On the way we bumped into those who had started with us earlier in the day. We also found Coldrum Longbarrow; and spent a few moments having a look-see before making our very own shortbarrow.

We were right to have cut our route short; by the time we got back to the car we'd done over thirteen miles and it was past 5pm. It had been a good walk; and having only (!) found fifty-one geocaches we've plenty of scope for a return visit.
I think it's fair to say I'd given my new geo-app a serious workout today. It seems to do the trick, but off-line mapping and waypointing still need to be refined. In order to get the maps working I had to piggyback my tablet off of my mobile phone's wifi hotspot, which is all very well if you can do that sort of thing. Luckily I seem to be able to do so.
As I so often do, I took a few photos whilst we were out.

Once home "Furry Face TM" had his tea, took himself to his basket and slept like a log. I set the washing machine onto my smalls and watched some telly. I say "watched some telly"; the telly was churning out drivel. I didn't really take much notice; I was busy solving geo-puzzles for next weekend's geo-expedition until Poldark came on.
I do like Poldark. In tonight's episode Jud got the heave-ho for being pissed-up, and Miss Verity ran off with a sailor. Mr Francis got knobbled and spilled the beans on Captain Ross. Meanwhile wanton bosoms heaved in the general direction of Doctor Ennis, but things turned nasty when Karen's sordid secret was uncovered..
Some people have all the luck.


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