Pogo had gone somewhere else during the night. I’m not sure where but it gave me a bit more space. It was a shame that Treacle had to suck the duvet quite so noisily for much of the night, but there it is.
Once I’d composed yesterday’s blog entry I then tried to tell the world about yesterday’s antics. The photos went up to Facebook, but the Internet connection wasn’t working well enough to be able to talk to the Blogger website. After fifteen minutes we finally made contact.
After a bit of brekkie (only one today for me!) we drove out to Little Bedwyn where we went for a little walk… I say “little walk”; it was probably about ten miles. I can’t say for sure since I stupidly left my sat-nav back at base. But after the rain of yesterday it was good to get out. Pogo seemed to hurt a paw at one point, but I fiddled with it and found a piece of grit. Once that was out he seemed to walk better.
We walked along lanes and across footpaths and followed the canal for quite a way. There were cows and horses. We saw a flock of chickens which had gone rogue.
Some of our number saw deer; I didn’t but I heard them crashing in the crops. It was a glorious day to be walking; we had a rather good picnic, and saw hardly anyone else.
And along the way "er indoors TM" found her eleven thousandth geocache.
Geocache-wise… It has to be said that during this little holiday in Wiltshire we’ve been rather disappointed with the geocaching. With one exception we’ve found very old series of caches in various stages of neglect (which in Kent would have been replaced years ago) but today’s series…
It certainly wasn’t the worst series of geocaches I’ve ever done (that was a series in Essex). It wasn’t the second worst (that was a series near Bluewater). But is was quite possibly the third worst.
It started badly. The first hide was right outside the house of the chap who had hidden the series. We couldn’t find it, and no one else had found it for a couple of months. The description said that the neighbours were all aware of the cache and were happy with it. Two of the neighbours came out; they knew of the cache and clearly weren’t at all happy about it. And unfortunately that set the tone for the rest of the series.
Many of the caches we found didn’t match the given hints for location or size, having clearly been replaced by passing cachers over the years. One cache was no more than a scrap of paper in a bank bag stuffed behind a road sign.
Many were probably accessible when hidden five years ago but are now deep in thickets which have grown up. A few caches were on random spurs off of the route when they could have all been along the route (with no need for confusing back-tracking). Some were way off of footpaths, seemingly stuffed behind random hedges and trees. And one was a hundred yards from the nearest footpath and behind an electric fence.
At one stage we could see from our maps that the route left the footpath and started following a parish boundary.
The given terrain grade for one was a tad low; a T2 cache is *not* twelve feet up a tree.
But this seems to be geocaching in Wiltshire. In Kent there is a large community of people who delight in stuffing film pots under rocks. In Wiltshire there’s a few who go looking for them, but not so many keen on hiding them. And consequently those that are there are old and in sad need of attention.
We came back to base where I immediately fell asleep. It had been a hot day, and although I’d taken a bandanna, I’d not put it on. My whole head was glowing red. I slept for a couple of hours until Tracey called us for a particularly good but of dinner.
We followed dinner with a game of “Cluedo” which I am finally beginning to understand, and then I had something of an early night. I’d had too much sun.
As always I took a few photos of the day.
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