24 January 2019 (Thursday) - The Beacon of Disrepair


The dogs were rather restless in the night. And being rather restless made them all rather quarrelsome. There were several squabbles in the small hours.
I eventually gave up with trying to sleep, and instead had a look at the Internet. LinkedIn wondered if I knew Magda Kilby who apparently studied with the Open University at the same time that I did (thirty years ago). I don’t.

Leaving "er indoors TM" and the wolf pack I set off out on today’s little adventure once I’d scraped the ice from the car. The dashboard thermometer claimed it was minus five degrees when I left home.
First of all I went to Teynham where I failed to find a Wherigo. I say “failed to find” – I found it, but I couldn’t actually extract it from its hidey-hole. After ten minutes I stomped away in a bit of a strop.
Once back at the car I then made good time to Swale and the Kings Ferry bridge. So good that I had time to stop and hunt out a geocache that I was passing. Just as I pulled up, Aleta called out to me. She too had arrived with a little time to spare. We hunted out two caches, then drove up the road where we met up with quite a few friends. There is a geocache on the marshes there which I’ve fancied going after for some time. It has a rather unusual difficulty/terrain rating: difficulty one, terrain four and a half. Which (for those whose boats aren’t floated by film pots under rocks) means it is dead simple to find, but a pig to get to. I’d only found four other such caches in over ten thousand finds, and the D1/T4.5 rating was spot on. The cache was a very obvious container tied at the top of a disused beacon tower.
Fortunately Brian and Pam had brought a ladder which helped us get to the first platform, and from there it was a simple climb up another ladder.
A simple climb” … How easy it is to type this in the comfort of my living room with a dog cuddled up on either side. The reality of being rather high up on a bitterly cold day with intermittent snow flurries was somewhat different. But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. You can get a taste of what we did by clicking here. I love days like today; with a little adventure in mind, someone posts onto the “Geocaching in Kent” page to see if anyone would like to go along, and you get to have such a great time. The normal people have no idea what they are missing.
Walking out to the beacon had been easy enough; walking back was somewhat tricky. Despite the snow, the temperature had warmed up enough for the mud to melt.

Once back at our cars we said our goodbyes. Since it wasn’t that far I thought I might visit the Lego shop at Bluewater to collect that which I didn’t get on Monday. “Wasn’t that far…” I told the sat-nav to aim for Bluewater, and all was fine until we got to the M2 motorway when it announced: “continue for twenty miles”. Twenty miles!
I got to Bluewater; I got what I needed. As I was walking out through Marks and Spencer I thought I’d get a posh sandwich for lunch. Oh, how my piss boiled. The idiot woman in the queue in front of me watched every item of hers being scanned (supervising the scanning of many items) and waited to be asked to pay up before taking an age to search her capacious handbag and myriad of pockets trying to find some means of payment.

I came home to have all three dogs shouting at me. They knew it was time for a walk. We went round the park and home through the co-op field with absolutely no “episodes” at all. It was a delight to walk them all. Or (to be precise) it was a delight for me. I’m sure that there are several squirrels who would disagree.

With walk walked I dozed in front of the telly until "er indoors TM" came home. She boiled up a rather good dinner, and we scoffed it whilst watching “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”. I say “watching”; I gave up half-way through. This was the crappest Star Wars film I’ve ever seen, and being a Star Wars film it is up against some pretty stiff competition.

No comments:

Post a Comment