I suppose I had a reasonable sleep last
night, I must have slept for five hours before waking shortly before 6am. I
scoffed my brekkie before my dog came downstairs, and I tried to get him to
scoff his brekkie. He didn’t seem keen.
I watched an episode of ”South Park”. Ike was going through Canadian puberty, which is
apparently rather different to puberty in the rest of the world. One lives and
learns. (To any offended Canadians, take
it up with the writers of the show…)
And then I put the lead on my dog and we went
out. Last night a friend I met though the Geocaching in Kent Facebook group
asked if anyone fancied tacking down elusive Tupperware today. With nothing on
the agenda that couldn’t keep I set off to Borstal. When one hears the word “Borstal” one immediately thinks of
prisons for wayward adolescents. Borstal is actually the village where the
first such prison was built. It’s somewhere I’ve never actually been before; it’s
rather beautiful.
I soon met up with Kalle, and with Kieron. I
wondered how Kieron would get on; being rather new to this game. Mind you I’m
always apprehensive about meeting anyone for the first time, and there is never
any need to be. It’s been my experience that most people are good company, and
today was no exception. Three of us (and “Furry Face TM “)
wandered along the river Medway where we found a dozen or so hidden sandwich
boxes. We also found a very odd tree. It was a tall tree, about thirty yards
tall, and from hundreds of yards away it looked wrong. When we got closer we
could see what was wrong. It was artificial. It was a fake tree concealing a
phone mast.
We then got into the cars and carried on
along what looked on the map to be a footpath but turned out to be a tarmac-ed road.
I don’t know if we were supposed (or
allowed) to drive along it, but we did. We picked up a few more caches as
we went, and then after a quick stop in the village of Eccles we went up to the
top of Bluebell Hill. There was an Earthcache there; I did that one to get
enough of those found to qualify as an Earthcache Master (Gold level) (it sounds far
more important than it actually is). And there was a multi-cache.
Oh how we laughed…
This one required us to find the monument,
get the date on the monument and do some sums with that date. From those sums
we would have the co-ordinates of the actual cache. I’d done this cache last
December, but was only too happy to go along for the walk.
Kalle did the sums. I checked her sums. My
GPS had the cache half a mile behind us; Kalle’s had the cache a mile in front
of us. Down Bluebell Hill. For those of my loyal readers who don’t know the
area, Mount Everest was God’s provisional attempt at a steep hill; he then went
on to make Bluebell Hill.
I blame myself really. I’d done this cache
before. I had a vague idea where it was. Whilst I was sure that I hadn’t got
the sums right, I wasn’t convinced that Kalle had them right either. But she
seemed confident, and it was a good day for a walk. And walking downhill is
easy. So we walked downhill. Down and down. Once we reached the supposed site
of the cache and a good search had shown it wasn’t there we looked at the GPS
again. Not only had we typed in the co-ordinates wrongly, we’d stuffed up our
sums as well. The cache was about a mile and a half away from us. Back at the
top of Bluebell Hill. Personally I thought it was quite funny, but Kalle did
say that if she’d been on her own she would have cried.
I
took a few photos whilst we were out. I do that.
I got a little bit cross on the way home. The
petrol station on Bluebell Hill was advertising some sort of deal with lego, so
I filled the car with petrol (three pence
a litre dearer than I pay in Canterbury) only to be told that the deal only
applied to diesel sales. Once home my little dog took himself to his basket
where he went straight to sleep, and I played with html scripts until I dozed
off as well.
Meanwhile in
another plane of reality Arbuthnot Fink is drinking meths…
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