I was woken by a huge
crash at 3am.Sid (our house guest) had opened the stair gate
and was trying to jump onto the bed. But he's not of the most
athletic physique and couldn't make the jump. I got up and chivvied
him back downstairs where "Furry Face TM"
was sitting in the sofa with a look on his face not entirely unlike
that which behaving cub scouts used to wear whilst watching the
thicker of their companions failing to misbehave.
Seeing no little
accidents in the living room (yet) I sent both dogs outside
for two minutes, then went back to sleep. Amazingly I actually got
back to sleep, and slept until 5am when I woke in a cold sweat
following a vivid dream in which because of my involvement with the
astro club I had been given the task of providing the late Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher practical advice on dealing with nose
bleeds.
Over brekkie I checked
out the Internet, and then had a rather irate text from "Daddies
Little Angel TM". Apparently Sid *is*
house trained. He knows how to tell people that he needs the loo. But
if everyone is asleep when he needs to go and consequently no one can
see him then what is he supposed to do?
I spent a few minutes
solving rather fiendish (I thought) geo-puzzles until "er
indoors TM" was ready and then we set off
on today's mission. Usually we go for a serious walk on Sundays, but
there is other stuff on the agennda for tomorrow so today we went
down to Peasmarsh. Often when we walk we go mob-handed but bearing in
mind that today was something of an experiment (Sid's first
serious hike) we thought we'd keep things low-key just in case I
ended up carrying a pug for several miles.
We drove down to Bixley
Woods and we hadn't even left the car before I wrenched my back by
swinging up my haversack. But I soldiered on; we wandered up the lane
and into some woods. I was brave and let Sid off of the lead. And he
was as good as gold. Whilst the other two were their usual excitable
boisterous selves, Sid pootled along sniffling and snuffling.
Whenever he got more than ten yards behind I could see panic set in
and he would run to catch up.
There was a dodgy five
minutes when we could hear F-birds (pheasants) in the
distance, but we got the dogs onto their leads before they reallised
what was happening. There was a funny five minutes when Fudge fell in
a stream. There were some rather tricky geo-hides to find, and there
were some rather clever ones too.
We found twelve geocaches
along a well-marked route over a couple of hours and found ourselves
back at the car much earlier than I had thought we would be.
We scoffed our sandwiches
and with time on our hands we drove a mile down the road to a
smaller geo-series of eight caches. We thought this would fill the
spare time nicely...
I don't want to be
negative; someone has gone to a lot of time and effort to hide these
things for me to go hunt them. But, on reflection, the first series
seemed so much better. For all that there were a couple of really
good ideas on this second loop, the GPS units didn't settle down, we
struggleed to find caches, and when we did the co-ordinates of the
caches seemed to be rather out. Also there didn't seem to be any
clearly marked footpath route; at one point we found ourselves doing
a "follow the arrow" through the jungle for two
hundred yards when it became apparent that the path was going in
entirely the wrong direction.
Or perhaps I was just
sulking as I nearly (but not quite) bent my knee backwards
when struggling with one of the two caches we couldn't find.
I slept most of the way
home, and when we got home I forrgot that I'd done for my knee and
nearly fell out of the car when I lunged out. Woops. I hosed the mud
off of both dogs and it wasn't long before they were both snoring.
I
took a few photos whilst we were out today. I put them on-line as
the dogs snored.
The plan for th evening
was to go out on a night walk. But I ached; my right elbow's not been
right for some time and after my little episode in the mud today my
right knee was playing up too. So I backed out of the night walk and
stayed indoors.
Hope it gets better
soon....
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