With laundry needing
washing, ironing needing doing, lawn needing mowing and all sorts of
domestic trivia pending I had a full day ahead of me. Over a spot of
brekkie Lisa messaged via Facebook saying she wanted to do a special
geocache to be her six hundredth find. So domestic trivia went out of
the window.
With "er indoors
TM" off to work I left Fudge in the care
of his Mummy and Daddy and was soon in the Lisa-mobile. We went to
Hoads wood where a new cache had gone live. We had hoped to be first
to find it. We were second. We stopped at the toilets at Hothfield
common for another cache, and a third at Hollingbourne church before
on to part of the main business of the day.
Geocaches are rated on a
scoring system for difficulty to find and the terrain on which they
are hidden. The scores go from (easy) to five (nearly
impossible). Most of the caches I've hidden are rated 1.5/1.0.
Generally I think seriously about going for a cache rated 3 or higher
on either criterion. Too difficult!
"Arachnophobia"
was rated 4.0/4.0. It took us a little while to find the entrance to
the tunnel, but eventually we found the cover. I suppose that for
most people going into disused tunnels is rather nerve-wracking. And
it can be. But what with my experiences of being a hardened
tunnel rat I must admit that this wasn't too bad. We climbed down
a rather rickety ladder to find two rooms and a short tunnel. The
geocache was soon located, and I then scrambled along the tunnel to
see what was down there. (Unky Bear would not forgive me if I
hadn't). It turned out that there wasn't much down that tunnel at
all.
The cache as called
"Arachnophobia". Admittedly there were spiders down
there, but as many as you would expect of any comparable tunnel. It
was a fun cache to do, incorporating two of my hobbies, but a 4.0/4.0
rating? I'm not sure about that.
Whilst in the area we did
a few local caches then moved into Maidstone to do some more.
One of the things which
really boils my piss about geocaching is the inconsistent way in
which rules are applied. A good friend of mine had one of his hides
disallowed because it was too near to a playpark. We came across one
that was actually
in a playpark. We also found another
one with a high rating (2.5/4.5). We felt rather pleased with
ourselves for that find; even more so when we realised that the Bat
had tried for it unsuccessfully. I shall gloat at him when next I see
him.
A few more caches, then
we collected Earle from the station. We would need him for the day's
finale. A cache with a 4.5/5.0 rating. "Shrek"
is so named because like Shrek from the films, it lives in a swamp.
Earle's job was to run "mission control" from dry
land, take photographs, guard the clothing we'd taken off, and phone
the coastguard if required. And because he was wearing his hi-vis
work clothing he'd make it look like we had a bona-fido reason for
being goolie-deep in a swamp.
We were soon goolie-deep
in a swamp. Or that is those of us with goolies were goolie-deep.
The cache was found within five minutes; cache was signed and we
were back on dry land within ten minutes. And for all that it was fun
I couldn't help but feel that the difficulty was over-rated. The
terrain (a swamp) wasn't really anywhere near as challenging
as the ponds into which I've assisted floating duck houses. And the
cache wasn't that well hidden. I can see it would be a challenge for
most people. Most people don't relish going goolie-deep in swamps.
But as I'm sure my loyal
readers now realise, I'm not like most people...
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