30 June 2013 (Sunday) - Strolling round Somerhill

Yesterday was something of a milestone. Yesterday 's witterings was my two thousand five hundredth blog entry. I've recorded history (as I see it) daily since 10 September 2006. That's over six and a half years. Not bad going really.

I gave Fudge some of his new mixer for his brekkie - he yummed it up. Maybe he'll be getting that stuff more often.
And so out for a walk. What else would we do on a Sunday? Originally the plan had been a walk round Ringmer, but Ringmer is a long way away, and it would be daft to go there when the Brighton contingent are deployed elsewhere. There was talk of going on a geocaching mission round Robertsbridge, but instead we went to Somerhill near Tonbridge.
It was a sunny day; perhaps a tad warm to be walking, but it was good to be out walking without being so cold that my nose was constantly running. We started off by walking a series of eighteen geocaches; Mole's Somerhill Stroll. Not a bad walk really. Billed as six miles it came out a shade under nine miles. One thing I have learned about series of geocaches is that the distances given are always seriously underestimated. Whilst we walked the dogs attempted to chase rabbits, we saw wrens and buzzards, and we caught the sun qite spectacularly.

Regular readers of this drivel may recall that a few days ago I was whinging about my knee hurting. It was getting better. I say *was* - I think today's stroll hasn't done it much good. It's rather tender again. On the way back to the car we found a geocache specialising in trackables - it had four. I've never seen so many in one cache before. There are some photos of our walk here.

We had planned to go on to pck up a puzzle cache on the way home, but we had a problem. Our planned solution involved answering questions about a nearby hospital to get some numbers. With those numbers we would do some sums to work out the co-ordinates of the hidden cache. My calculations had one of the digits as being minus two. Something was obviously wrong. I emailed the cache owner, but had no reply so we didn't bother with that cache. We might try again when we are next in the area.

We came home via Wateringbury; a new cache had gone live there during the day and there was just the outside chance of getting a "first to find". We didn't FTF; we were beaten to it. Mind you I had a result in another way. I say "result" - it wasn't really. Something negative is hardly a result. Some time ago I hid a geocache and submitted it for publication. It was turned down because it was too close to a nursery school. I would have thought that it was quite far enough away not to cause any problems, but I was over-ruled. Shortly after that I had another cache turned down because it was within sight of a play park. I suppose it was. If you had a rather powerful telescope.
Since then I've been keeping a little list of newly released geocaches with fail the "playground rule". I would suggest that the one we found today fails in that the suggested parking is in the car park of the local scout hut. Personally I couldn't help but feel that a recommended parking place should be near the cache, and it was rather annoying having parked half a kilometre from the cache to walk past several good parking places.

And so home. I am finding more and more that having walked for a few hours and then having been driven home I can hardly move when the car stops. Old age, perhaps? But it really hurt to get out of tha car and hobble the few yards to the front door. Daft really, as I'd walked nine miles earlier. With er indoors TM" of to a meeting of the Honourable Association of Candlemongers I spent much of the evening falling asleep in front on on-line psychology lectures. Tonight we were touching on hypnosis and childhood development. it seems that there are various stages of mental maturation that we all go through as we grow up. I'm not sure I've done quite as many of those stages as I might have done. Which would explain a lot...

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