After two terrible nights
I slept from 11pm last night right through till 6.30am this morning.
I was rather pleased about that. For the first time in ages I wasn't
wide awake and wasting time watching telly for hours whilst waiting
for the rest of the world to wake up.
I did have a quick look
at the news this morning. The election results are in. The winner
is.... well, I think the
polls are deceptive. With only one third of the electorate
bothering to vote, I can't help but feel that the resounding winner
of the recent European election is apathy. Why did so few people
vote? Were there no candidtes worth voting for, or did people
*really* not understand what they were voting for? After all,
how many of the noisy UKIP voters actually realised that sending them
all back on the next banana boat goes hand in hand with privatising
the NHS?
And so on with our walk.
Every weekend we go off geocaching with the dogs. It's a good hobby;
it's always a clearly marked guided walk. Today was different...
Should the Cache Owner of today's series ever read this I'm sorry for
any offence caused. It is not my intention to be rude. I realise a lot
of effort goes into preparing a geo-walk. But...
We drove quite a long way
away today. We went to the furthest reaches of Essex to do a series
of fifty geoocaches. Billed as "a core circular walk of about
8 miles ..... For the more adventurous there are also two loops",
I looked at the map. The two loops were quite small in comparison to
the main walk. And so bearing in mind that the distance of geo-walks
is always under-estimated I expeected a total walk of about ten to
twelve miles.
So we set off. We saw an
adder. We listened to skylarks. We admired quite beatiful scenery.
But... despite GPS technology we struggled to find our way. Footpaths
were not maintained on today's walk. We found several footpath signs
pointing into jungles which were over six feet high with weeds and
nettles. Many of the geocache sites were found today by blindly
following the GPS arrow rather than attempting to use non-existant
footpaths.
And the geocaches
themselves... I'm all for a tricky hide. But fifty of them in one
series? A series of caches along a path should be just that - along a
path. Under a rock, in the bole of a tree. Not ten yards deep in
inpenetrable thickets. Especially not when there are plenty of
obvious hides. For example when faced with a footpath signpost, the
obious place for a cache is at the base of that signpost. Not six
feet away under a brick which is surrrounded by nettles which are
four feet high.
There's no denying that
the raiin didn't help; we did get rather wet. We got back to the car
rather later than planned; the car being at the start of one of the
optional extra loops of the series. In retrospect we should have gone
home there and then. But I for one wanted to see all of the series;
surely it couldn't all be that bad... So we did the final loop. (And
got soaked)
Part of finding a cache
involves a hint. "Up a
tree", "under a rock". One cache
described as being "waist height" was in the roots
of a tree. Another described as being "low down" was
chest height in a tree. One of them involved me forcing my way
through one hundred yards of jungle with no paths to be seen
anywhere.
We went expecting a walk
of ten to twelve miles; the recorded distance at the end was
nineteen point two miles. I'd hoped to finish sometime in the late
afternoon; we got home at 11pm.
I realise that someone
somewhere put a lot of effort into preparing today's walk. But (I'm
sorry to say) I cannot recommend it to anyone...
But, as always, I
took a few photos whilst we were out. If nothing else it was
rather scenic.
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