5 July 2017 (Wednesday) - Greenwich



There is something wrong with my lap-top. It is running oh-so-slowly. I set it going on an anti-virus scan last night at 11pm; this morning at 7am it was only a third of the way through doing it. I’ve been through the task manager and shut down what looks like unnecessary background jobs, but still it is nowhere near as fast as it might be.

Over brekkie I had a (slow) look at Facebook. Not much had happened overnight, but I saw that some friends had been out for a geo-walk yesterday, and others had been out hunting tupperware at the weekend. Sometimes I feel that I can’t so much as go to the toilet without attracting a stream of comments about “you didn’t say you were doing such-and-such” but the very people who whinge at me never think to ask if I’d like to join them on what they are planning.

"er indoors TM" took the day off today. What with a couple of days leave and some rostered days off I’ve had a lot of time off work myself recently, but I couldn’t face another day’s gardening.
We took the dogs round the park for a walk. The walk went well, even if Fudge did straggle. As we walked we saw the little tribute/monument to Countess Mountbatten of Burma was still there. Someone set the thing up a couple of weeks ago. It was a nice gesture, but now the flowers have died, the bits of paper have curled up; it is time for it to go. Have you noticed how people put out these public tributes but never clear them away. And because no one wants to do so, the things just go manky. Which is a shame.

We came home, settled the dogs, and set off to Greenwich. We found the car park we’d targeted easily enough, but didn’t have enough coins for the parking ticket machine. The machine had a phone number you could ring to use an automated system. I tried, as did several others. We would all have done better had some fat idiotic woman not been screeching about how difficult it was to use the automated system. All I needed was to be able to hear what the system was saying to me; I couldn’t hear anything over her shrieking. Eventually she shut her gob and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

And so with four hours on the parking machine we got busy. We’ve not been geocaching for a while so today we set ourselves a little challenge; not so much the numbers as the types. How many different sorts of cache could we find today? We once did eleven in a day and that was hard work. We thought we’d see how we got on.

Not thirty yards from where we parked was a virtual cache. What was the number of the house next to Starbucks? We then admired the Cutty Sark, and found a multi-cache not far from there. There was another virtual and a geology lesson to be had from the Greenwich foot tunnel. A foot tunnel under the Thames was quite an adventure.
We came up on the north side of the Thames not far from a little café; paninis made for a good lunch, even if the café was run by one of the dopiest women on the planet.

We rummaged a short way up a tree for cache type #4, then went back across the tunnel to do a Wherigo. This was a fun little GPS adventure which took us all around Greenwich. The views from the observatory were stunning; looking down across the river to where we’d eaten only an hour before. And as we walked we even found a puzzle cache too.
With six icon types found (and no more to be had in Greenwich) we went to McDonalds for iced coffee. They had none, so we went to Starbucks. "er indoors TM" had a simple iced latte. I had something with a six-word name, and after one sip I gave it back to them. It was the worst thing I’d ever tasted. But they gave me an iced latte without quibbling, so all was good.
As we sat in Starbucks we looked at the map. We’d found six icon types; a trip to Bexley would find us a seventh. Bexley wasn’t *that* far out of our way. And so we ended the caching day with a letterbox hybrid (as one so often does!). Seven icon types; not too shabby. I suggested driving to Leeds for the closest web-cam cache (to go for eight) but "er indoors TM" wasn’t keen.

It didn’t take long to get home; we came home to find the dogs asleep. I would have liked to have taken them with us today, but it would have been too hot for them. I’d taken a few photos as we’d walked about; once home I posted them on-line and then "My Boy TM" called. We spent half an hour reviewing our plans for “Operation Pergola”; we are pretty much in agreement for how we are going to progress. "My Boy TM" is going to do all the work, and I am going to make the tea.

"er indoors TM" boiled up a rather good bit of dinner. We scoffed it whilst watching last week’s episode of “The Crystal Maze”. The first episode of the re-booted show had been awful; this one was rather good.

I’ve got to go to work tomorrow…

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