21 July 2019 (Sunday) - Sissinghurst


Sometimes I wonder what goes through my dogs’ heads. At three o’clock in the morning Pogo insists he must be on my pillow with every extremity stretched to its fullest extent and all thrashing about as though he is having a fit. At seven o’clock he is happy to be curled in a tight ball at the end of the bed.

I got up and made my toast. As I scoffed it, I had a look at the Internet. There were a few photos from the “Create” music festival which took place in the park yesterday. I’m no expert on the subject but it does seem odd that the council plan the “Create” festival to clash with a similar event in Maidstone. And it niggles me that there was an almost identical festival in the north park last week which was self-funding, but the “Create” festival gets fifteen thousand pounds of council money.
I also saw the trailer for the new Star Trek series: “Star Trek: Picard”. It looks intriguing, but isn’t it a sign of our times that the show will be aired on Amazon Prime? Personally I don’t care – as of yesterday we can stream shows on Amazon Prime to our telly. Bearing in mind how for many years I’ve been advocating recording TV shows and fast-forwarding through the adverts, I wonder if those in the TV industry have finally wised on to this, and free-to-air TV has had its day?

I spent a few minutes writing web pages for the geo-series I’m currently planning. All the web pages are now written. I’ve got my pots and camo tape and paper logs from Amazon; I just need to put them all together, and (if all goes to plan) I will go shove them under rocks on Friday.
I then hung out some washing, and got ready for the day’s mission.

With all of our gear and all of our dogs organised we drove out to Sissinghurst. A month or so ago a new series of geocaches had gone live out there. As luck would have it I was actually not far from there at the time they went live. I managed to get got First to Find on one of them, but thought that I wouldn’t bother hunting for the rest there and then. I thought I might come back with company on another day. However, by doing this I rather annoyed another hunter of Tupperware who clearly was hoping to get First to Find on the entire lot of them. But… I must admit I’ve given this (rather trivial) matter a lot of thought over the last month, and I’ve decided that the day when that chap actually contributes to the hobby is the day when I will listen to what he has to say.

We had a very good walk today. The terrain was mostly flat with only a few ups and downs. The dogs liked to run and dig in the woodlands, and all of them seemed to enjoy eating sheep dung (I wish they wouldn’t). As we walked we met other dogs. Pogo had one or two “episodes”, but none anywhere near like those that he used to have. As we walked we found some picnic tables in an orchard so we got to sit nicely to have our picnics. As we picnic-ed the dogs found fragments of a pheasant (yuk!) that they thought they might have for lunch, but we put those up an apple tree where they couldn’t get at them. And we found collapsible fences too. Rather than climbing over a stile, the fence pushed down. Sheer genius – I’ve never seen anything like it before.
Geocache-wise some of the hides were rather tricky, and (to be honest) I would have put a few more caches in the series. Billed as a walk of two and a half miles, our sat-navs all measured the route as being just over four miles.
I took a few photos as we walked.

After three hours we found ourselves back where we’d started. We adjourned to the pub and despite the best efforts of the local people we got a pint. Why do some people insist that they sit at the bar when the pub is at its busiest? Why can’t they take their drinks and go and sit somewhere else where they would not be in everyone’s way? Interestingly they’d cleared off when we came back for a second pint.
We found a rather pleasant table in the garden away from the normal people. It was a shame that the dogs (Fudge) wouldn’t stop barking at the aquatic chickens and maritime turkeys (ducks to most people), but the waterfowl had realised that they were safe behind their fence and were deliberately provoking the dogs.

We came home, and "er indoors TM" boiled up a rather good bit of dinner which we scoffed whilst watching two episodes of “Red Dwarf” that I don’t remember having seen before.
I’m not feeling quite on top form… I wonder if I’ve had too much sun today? I seem to be feeling like this more and more just recently…

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