Finding
ourselves a couple of hours ahead of our geo-schedule we arrived in
Surrey feeling rather smug. The plan for Surrey had been a spell of
night caching. Personally I'm not a fan of hunting tupperware after
dark, but you have little choice when doing a twenty-four hour
session. After all every twenty four hour session has a night.
I'd
located a series of several puzzle caches all as close to each other
as it was possible for them to be; all of which looked to be
relatively easy finds. So we arrived at where we'd decided to park
the car, and three of us set off whilst "er indoors TM"
had a little sleep.
The
first cache took a little finding in the dark. The second one
involved scrambling down a rather treachourous bank in the
pitch-darkness. Finding ourselves a little off course the third had
us scrambling over barbed wire fences at 1am.
And
then....
I
suppose I only have myself to blame. I should have planned more
carefully. But climbing trees at 2am was rather good fun.
There
was only a little blood on only one of us when we got back to the car
(now two hours ahead of schedule). We made a bit of a hash of
a cache hidden near a railway, then moved on to Berkshire.
We
arrived just as dawn was breaking. The plan was to get two easy
finds. One find wasn't that easy and eluded us, but having time on
our hands we took a little divesion into Oxfordshire.
Some
regatta or other had been going on yesterday in Henley-on-Thames.
I've never seen such a mess, and clean-up crews were working at 4am.
It
was at this point that the schedule began to slip. A short trip to
Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire took rather longer than it should
have due to a failure by the navigator (I fell asleep) but we
were by the train station and rummaging in a hedge before most normal
people were awake. And another failure by the navigator (I fell
asleep again) had us heading back to Oxfordshire rather than on
to Hertfordshire.
We
got to Hertfordshire; we found our first target. We managed to
disturb a dog. I don't think his barking woke the *entire*
village, but he certainly was noisy. We moved quickly on a secind
find, and then on to South Mimms services for brekkie.
I
didn't know there was an Ed's Diner at South Mimms. It was a good
find. We had a rather good bit of brekkie. But it was at this point
that i realised that although I'd intended us to have brekkie I'd
not allowed any time for it. Consequently we were running half an
hour late when we got to Thorndon Contry Park in Essex.
Thorndon
Contry Park has loads of earthcaches (which were worth lots of
points to us) and on the map it looked as though the place had
well-marked footpaths. It was with something of a sense of
disappointment that we found that the maps of Thorndon Contry Park
bear little (if any) resemblance to the reality. After an hour
and a half of hacking through thickets we gave up and headed to the
coffee shop for a cuppa, and then back to meet all the other
competitors.
We
arrived back at Farthing Corner with ten minutess to spare having
travelled three hundred and twenty eight miles through nine counties.
We thought we'd done well. but others had gone further through more
counties, and some had even gone abroad. However when the points were
totted up we found we'd come a respectable fourth. I was quite
pleased about that.
We
came home for a bit of a kip. And having had a bit of a kip (despite
next door's piano) we collected "Furry Face TM"
from his sleep-over. I then posted some
photos of our adventure on-line, and we had a rather good bit of
tea.
I
was in bed shortly after 7pm...
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