3 March 2013 (Sunday) - Not Out

My alarm woke me at 6.30am this morning. What sort of time is that to be getting up on a Sunday? I had a quick bite of jam on toast (again!) and then we set off before 8am. To Essex for a change. Earlier in the week some caching friends had said they were going on a series of geocaches around Hornchurch and put out a general invite to anyone who would be interested.

We met up at the designated parking spot (eventually) and nine of us (and two small dogs) spent a little while looking for a cache that probably wasn't there. But it wasn't one of the series that we had planned for the day, so not finding it didn't really matter. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

And then on to the main business of the day. The "Not Out" series is one of forty geocaches over eight miles of Essex countryside. It was one of the better walks in that there was no roads at all. It was all fields and footpaths. Along past rivers and across golf courses. Apart from eating poo and going in the river, Fudge behaved himself (mostly), and only barked occasionally at passing muggles.

At the second cache one of our number got his two thousand five hundredth cache, and as we went on there were quite a few other milestones passed, including my very own one thousand three hundredth cache find, and my most northerly find too.

We found a rather pleasant spot to have lunch, and I got busy. There were three puzzle caches on the way. I'd tried to solve them last night but had missed a vital clue. With that clue provided by a fellow cacher today I was able to get busy, and came up with some required co-ordinates. I had the same solutions as everyone else - it was a shame that all three of these puzzle caches were missing.

But despite that mishap we found all of the forty caches we'd targetted.

The "Not Out" series was good. Perhaps slightly longer that the usual caching walk; taking seven hours to complete. And the caches were rather more difficult to find than those on the average cache walk. And I did find that my gps was somewhat at odds with the cache hider. But with good clues, fine weather and good company we had a very good day out. Two small dogs slept well on the way home.

As always, there are piccies of our outing on-line.

And so home where one of those small dogs went straight into the bath where we washed the fox poo off of him. And then with "er indoors ^TM" off out bowling I settled down in front of the TV with a very tired Patagonian Tripe-Hound...