20 February 2013 (Wednesday) - Birling

Just after I’d scoffed a rather late brekkie Steve arrived and pausing only briefly to collect Lisa we set off to Birling. Over the last few days I’ve been fiddling with a new geocaching app and I thought I’d try the thing out properly today on a series of twenty geocaches.

We soon arrived in Birling and we had a really good walk. Fields and footpaths, hills and dales. We even had a picnic al-fresco. I liked that. The geocaches were good; some dull, some trivial, two of them actually were missing; we’d found them on 23 September last year but as we were passing we thought Steve might as well do them. These two weren’t there to be done.

And we did two extreme caches. Geocaches are rated on a scale of terrain/difficulty. Most caches I hide are 1.5/1; not quite wheelchair friendly but dead simple to find. Today we did two extreme caches: a 4/5 and a 4/4.5. Both required a serious amount of scrambling up very steep slopes. On the second slope we tied Furry Face to a tree at the bottom for his own safety and left him there. We knew he was fine as we could hear him whining. Just as we were at the most dodgy part of the dodgy climb his whine turned to a snarl and then he went silent. I hollered and had no response from him. Expecting the worst I flew down the sheer cliff face like greased lighting. I had visions of someone having dog-napped him.

Imagine my relief when I found that the silly dog had merely barked himself to exhaustion and was having a breather.

Fudge ran off twice during the outing. I say “ran off” – I maintain he hadn’t run off. I am sure he knew where we were at all times and was actually rather close. It was just that we couldn’t see him. After the second time it was back on the lead for him, and there he stayed.

The crafty half we had in the village pub was well deserved: friendly service and three beers from rather obscure breweries. As for my new geocaching app: I love it. It does all that the other apps do, but easier, simpler and quicker. And it uses ordnance survey maps too. Can’t be bad.

And over a decent bit of tea we watched "Flight Plan"; a film I'd not seen before. It wasn't too bad really; I didn't see what was coming. Fudge spent the evening fast asleep on my lap. The poor dog was exhausted...