22 October 2016 (Saturday) - A Walk round Essex

I woke up shortly after 3.30am and had a tiddle and then lay in bed wide awake. Realising I was thoroughly sick of laying in bed wide awake I got up and put on a DVD. The film “Evita” passed the time until "er indoors TM" got up. As I unloaded the candle stuff from her car I looked up at the clear sky and saw Orion and the Pleiades. I thought it was rather early in the year to see them, then I realised it was 6am. For all that they are winter constellations you can always see them if you are up early (or late) enough.
"Furry Face TM" flatly refused to eat his breakfast; he knew something was going on today.

We got our stuff together and pausing only briefly to get a sandwich from the co-op we sent off to Essex. In all honesty I can’t be more specific than that. Back when we were planning the twenty-four-hour geo rally I’d seen the cat walk series in Essex on the map and had thought about walking that series for the rally (till I saw how the points were awarded). I then saw the cat walk series again when we walked round Hanningford reservoir. Bearing in mind the distance and that the nights are drawing in, realistically if we didn’t walk it this weekend we’d have to leave it till next year.

So we made our way to the specified start point which was somewhere in Essex. We were met by the nice lady who had hidden the cache series; whenever I walk a big series I generally contact the owner to see if there are any problems along the way. If there are, I am only too happy to replace logs or caches or do whatever is needed (after all, other people help me enough). I had every intention of doing any running repairs with the spares I carry, but the nice lady provided us with a bag of stuff for maintenance.
Karl, Tracy and Charlotte soon arrived, and we set off.

I started with a minor disaster with my camera; I’d left the card in my lap-top. But my phone made for a backup camera. The walk was a tad fraught at times – there were perhaps one or two too many pheasants for my Patagonian Tripe-Hound’s nerves. But we had a really good walk. We saw tree-elves, wagtails, kitty and a snake. My dog did quite a bit of digging. We took a few wrong turns on the way, but such is life. We did take a little detour to find the Nag’s Head where a pint of Abbott’s ale and a pint of Lindy Lou’s Tipple slipped down very nicely.

Cache-wise it was a really good series. The multis were imaginative, a few tree-climbs, there were quite a few fun caches, mostly straightforward finds but a couple made us think. There were ammo cans. And we didn’t have to do any maintenance whatsoever. Billed as a walk of about eleven miles “Hannah” measured it as being thirteen miles. The other two sat-navs thought it was twelve miles.
However I would say to anyone thinking of doing the walk to look out for the nearby “musical girls” geocaches. We went for a few but couldn’t see how to complete them without crossing barbed wire.

We got back to the cars just as it was getting dark; I slept for much (all) of the way home. Once home I downloaded the piccies from my phone – they weren’t too bad. I then put the card back into my camera ready for next time.

I’m absolutely exhausted…


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