30 April 2017 (Sunday) - Sixteen Miles

Yesterday I was whinging about how my elbow was hurting. I then went out and played silly beggars going one-handed on a rope swing. I shouldn’t have gone right-handed on that rope swing.
Five o’clock was a rather early time to be up and about this morning; over brekkie I looked into cyber-space. There were a *lot* of photos from yesterday’s mega-event at the Hop Farm. And I had an email claiming to be from the Nat West bank telling me they had done some maintenance and I had to log in to my account to re-activate it. Needless to say they gave a link into which I could put all the details they would need to clear the account out. Equally needless to say I don’t have a Nat West account. I reported the email to the Nat West using their phishing@natwest.com email address. The email immediately bounced back to me as “email rejected”.
Personally I would see this as a good reason to pack up with the Nat West if I had any accounts with them.

We got the dogs leaded up, and set off at 6.30am. What with there being a Bank Holiday tomorrow (and me not working) we thought that maybe a serious walk might be a plan for today. We perused the geo-map and Karl suggested a walk down Shoreham way. We took the motorway route to Shoreham and started walking at 8.15am.
The first part of the walk was rather steep; it nearly killed "er indoors TM". It was windy too. I keep forgetting just how windy it is on the South Downs. As we walked we saw jays and buzzards, and even some deer running loose on the runway at Shoreham airport. We kept meeting up with a gaggle of runners who were doing a marathon. Sooner them than me. And we even found a “toy graveyard”; a garden full of unwanted toys.
We found a river which had a rather thick laver of aquatic-planty-stuff on the surface. The stuff was so thick that it didn’t actually look like a river. It looked as though you could walk across it. Fudge tried to, and fell in.

The weather had been ideal for walking in the morning, but as time pushed on the forecast rain came. We tried to sit it out in the Red Lion, but that didn’t work. We braved the drizzle and got back to the cars shortly before 6.30pm; ten hours, sixteen miles and ninety five geocaches after we had started.
I took a few photos as we walked. It was a good way to spend a day. Perhaps a little long for the dogs (and Charlotte)? I had wondered, but both dogs (and Charlotte) did well. I was rather impressed when they sprinted off (like bullets from a gun) chasing sparrows at the fifteen-mile point.

Cache-wise the series was good; caches all were straightforward finds on a (mostly) well-marked route. We had a minor issue between #23 and #24 when we found ourselves on the wrong side of the river, but that was soon solved

As we drove home I could see there had been heavier rain in Kent. Perhaps it was as well we hadn’t been camping…

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