I had an early night, but was wide awake after four hours sleep. So rather than laying wide awake I got up and spent an hour sorting yesterday’s photos (which sorted very quickly compared to earlier this week). With photos sorted I prepared “Hannah” for today’s excursion, and after an hour I was feeling tired again and so went back to bed where I didn’t sleep well. There was a very loud repetitive sound which sounded for all the world like the ticking of a clock. After laying awake listening to it for well over an hour I realised that it was the sound of Treacle sucking the blanket.
I got up, made a cuppa, and took it and my boots outside where I gave them a good polish. They soon looked as good as new; you’d never think they had been soaked right through a day or so ago.
Pausing only briefly to retrieve my sock from Treacle we had brekkie,
We then drove off to… I’m a bit vague as to where it was, Having pulled up on a grass verge there was a minor hiccup as one of our number took a tumble into a ditch. But soon we were on our way. Two days ago we’d got soaked in the rain; it was a glorious day today. We walked down a beautiful canal, and (as only a dog can) Treacle and Pogo found the only stagnant bit and both dunked themselves in the mire.
As we walked down the canal, people coming back the other way warned us about nesting swans. Whilst everyone else diverted along behind the hedgerow I carried on alone so as to get the nearby geocache without disturbing the swans with the dogs. Most of them were on the water, but one was on the nest. It didn’t attack me, but it made it clear that I should shove off. Seeing how the swans had built their nest practically on top of the geocache I was after, I abandoned the search for that one.
We continued our walk down the canal, then across a field where we picked up an old train line and followed that in a circular loop through some pretty countryside. It was only a shame that the bottles of beer we’d taken were all bottle conditioned and so were full of yeast, but we didn’t burp *that* much.
Geocache-wise it was a fair walk. We found all of the caches we searched for except the one by the swans. All had good co-ordinates given. Several had no hints provided which was a shame on a series with so many caches; we didn’t really have time to mess about like that. One or two didn’t match the description given as over the years they had been swapped and replaced.
We’d gone knowing of issues having contacted one of the cache owners and having arranged to replace a missing cache. We replaced a few wet (soaked) log sheets, but the series of geocaches is eight years old. It needs a serious maintenance run with all the caches being cleaned out, logs replaced, and descriptions amended to reflect what the things are like now as opposed to what they used to be. Had this series been in Kent it would have been archived and replaced, but they don’t seem to do that up here in Lincolnshire.
After seven and a half miles we realised we’d parked not too far from a pub. We had a crafty pint, and stayed for dinner. Salmon teriyaki was very nice, as was two more pints. I slept most of the way home.
Once home the dogs got scrubbed. They weren’t dirty; just smelly. And then we sat outside as the sun set. The dogs barked incessantly at the sounds of whatever it is that lives in the tree over the road. We have a theory that it is an owl. There is certainly something that scares small birds living nearby. We’ve not seen a single sparrow all week, and the seeds (from the bread) that we put out this morning had remained untouched all day.
As always I took a photo or two. After the second glass of port I found myself falling asleep… we’d had a busy day today…
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