A combination of having walked twelve miles
yesterday together with that fourth pint last night made getting up at 5.30am
seem to be not the best idea I’d ever had.
As I scoffed my brekkie I checked out my
emails. I had another scamming email; this one from Mrs. Fadhilah Hassan who
was writing to me “with tears and pain in
her heart”. She can get stuffed. I spent a few minutes writing up more
minutes of last Thursday’s astro club meeting, then got myself ready for the
rigours of the day.
We collected Suzy and her entourage. Apparently
Suzy had disgraced herself overnight as only a dog can. We then set off for Hanningfield
in deepest Essex where we soon met up with Jo, Sam, Mark and Martin. Boots were
put on, loins girded and we set off on a geo-stroll.
The NoCMoC (Nuisance
of Cats - Murder of Crows) walk was billed as a series of seventy geocaches
over fourteen miles. We knew time might be tight so we’d arranged to start walking
at 8.30am. And walk we did. Near Hanningfield there is a humungous reservoir –
this walk follows around the reservoir. But not closely enough so you’d see
much of it
We had a rather good walk. Beautiful scenery,
and we even saw a hare. You don’t see many of those. And we all laughed when Suzy-pup
jumped into the smelliest and most stagnant water I’ve ever smelt. And the
church with the floral depiction of the burning of Joan of Arc was really
impressive.
However after a mile or so I had to stop. My
boot felt uncomfortable. I took it off to find an AA-size battery in it. How
did that get there?
And it was shortly after that when I became
slightly miffed. On Friday I bought a new jacket, and in Friday’s instalment of
this drivel I actually wrote (about this
new jacket) “I wonder how long this
one will last”. It lasted about two and a half hours. The stitching on one
of the pockets had unravelled before 11am. That will go back to the shop
tomorrow.
And we did have a dodgy five minutes at the
Hanningfield reservoir visitor centre. We’d parked at the north of the lake so
the visitor centre would be about half way round. Ideal for an ice cream we thought. And it was.
Having had an ice cream at the café at the easterly part of the centre we then
walked through the grounds of the visitor centre. There were some wonderful
forests. A couple of miles, an hour or so. The *ideal* place to walk a dog. The two dogs in our party seemed to
think so. But now I come to think of it we didn’t see any other dogs there. It
was only when we got to the gift shop at the westerly extreme of the forests
that some irate old biddy told us in no uncertain terms that dogs were banned
from the Hanningfield reservoir visitor centre’s grounds. And we found
ourselves being thrown out. It was probably as well that we were thrown out
just as we were leaving.
Despite the hound problem, geocache-wise this
is a walk I would recommend. Billed as seventy caches over fourteen miles I
ended the day with a total of seventy-two finds. There was one DNF, but we could
probably have squeezed in another half dozen caches without too much diversion.
Billed as fourteen miles, “Hannah” measured
it at 15.8 miles. Mind you none of our sat-navs agreed that closely on the
distance walked, and I have always said that the lengths of these geo-series
are always under-estimated. (I myself
have three such series which are always reported as being far longer than I think
they are). Having read fourteen miles on the route descriptions I actually
went out expecting to walk eighteen miles.
There was a variety of cache types and hides.
Some fun ones, some rather more challenging. There was a chirp cache on the
route; these are really rare. In over seven thousand geo-finds I’ve only seen
three of them. This would have been the fourth - it was a shame none of our GPS units picked up
the chirp. I suspect the batteries of the thing need changing. This happen from
time to time (or so I’m told).
Mind you Sam did hit a milestone – she got her
eight thousandth find.
After ten hours (nine hours fifty-three minutes to be precise) we were back at the
cars. Boots were pulled off; goodbyes said.
Within half an hour of setting off homewards it
was getting dark.
I
took a few photos as we walked. Once home I posted them on-line. I do this
a lot. Being home rather earlier than anticipated "er indoors TM"
set off bowling. I didn’t. I collapsed in front of the telly and scoffed pizza
whilst watching “Dad’s Army” as my
dog snored.
It wasn’t that long ago he was in dog
hospital..
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