Pages

19 January 2014 (Sunday) - Fordwich

After a surprisingly good night's sleep I shared my brekkie toast with my dog whilst we watched a frankly incomprehensible episode of South Park. I am sure it was hilarious to most Americans, but I suspect the rest of the world will watch that episode with the same level of "wtf" that I did.

We then popped round to Singleton for Fudge's pal and "Gordon Tracy", and then went out to the far side of Canterbury for today's helping of hunting tupperware. The "Woodland Walk" series of geocaches has only been in place for a few months, but in that time the chap who hid them would seem to have given up on hiding and hunting sandwich boxes. The series had several caches that hadn't been found for some time, so we went fully expecting to have a hard time. But if nothing else it would be a guided walk along new (to us) footpaths.

The first two caches we hunted for weren't there. So we replaced them. Were we right to do so? What do you do when someone's hidden caches and given up on them. Some feel the wider caching community should take on maintenance. Others think the things should be archived to make space for someone who can be bothered to do the job. There are things to be said for both points of view.
The fourth cache on our list wasn't there either, and bearing in mind we had by now run out of spare caches I put up a request that the thing be archived as it wasn't there.

Finding ourselves on the wrong side of the fence for another cache we thought we'd come back for that one later and we carried on into Fordwich. Yesterday at work I'd mentioned to a colleague about our planned walk. He'd told me tha the place might be wet underfoot. It was. Fields and footpaths were under six inches of water. Fudge was chest deep. As we walked into the village many of the houses still had sandbags at their doors from the recent floods.
We carried on our walk which was then along a large circle through some woodlands with rather spectacular views. We had a picnic lunch on tables at the rugby club; no one was there to stop us. The mud was quite thick in parts, but before long we were back in the village of Fordwich and on the return leg of our journey. Back through flooded fields to the car.

We came back on the right side of the fence for the cache we'd missed earlier, and after sending er indoors TM" into a flooded deep ditch we found the cache in question a few yards away from that ditch. Oh how we laughed.
And then I had something of an embarrassement. As we were passing we thought we'd have one more try for that geocache that clearly wasn't there (and on which I'd logged "Needs Archiving"). We found it. Woops! So I logged an apology.
We ended up finding all of the "Woodland Walk" caches. Some were quite hard finds. The series is there; it is do-able, but needs a little care and attention. But don't we all? However with an absentee C.O. I can't help but wonder how long this series will be do-able. Perhaps it might be better to take the bull by the horns and archive the lot? I'm glad I don't have to make the decision.

Back to the car. It would have been good to have done more walking today; it was only 3.30pm. On summer days we would have five more hours available to us. Being January we didn't. We came home via two drive-by caches and once home I hosed the mud from a rather wet and filthy Patagonian Tripe-Hound.
As always I took some photos whilst we were out. I then put them on-line.

With er indoors TM" off bowling "Furry Face TM" fell asleep on my chest as I watched a documentary about the late John Le Mesurier. It's amazing how loud a small dog can snore...

No comments:

Post a Comment