12 August 2017 (Saturday) - For Duck's Sake



The alarm woke me at 5am. A shame really as I’d been awake for much of the night. I got up, and over brekkie watched a lame episode of “Dad’s Army”. Much as I like the show it is somewhat formulaic; pretty much everything which happened in this episode was predictable.

We got ourselves organised and fed the dogs. I say “fed the dogs”; Treacle yummed her brekkie but Fudge knew something was going on and had to be hand-fed every morsel.
Eventually we got out of the house and set sail to Brenchley where we met the rest of our team. Karl, Tracey and Charlotte were waiting for us, as were Wayne and Lynne. We’d all decided to walk the “For Duck’s Sake” series of geocaches. The series was one of over a hundred caches and we knew we’d have something of a mission today.

As we walked we saw alpacas and cows. There was beautiful views, and chocolate-box cottages to be seen. Half way round we found a rather good pub, and it was a shame that my dog had to burst the football in the beer garden. There was a worrying five minutes when "er indoors TM" took a tumble; for a worrying few seconds I thought she’d dropped dead, but all was well (eventually).
We’d been told the walk was one of eighteen miles; ”Hannah” (my sat-nav) measured the walk as a shade over nineteen miles. We started walking shortly after 7.30am, and got back to where we started some twelve hours later feeling something the worse for wear. We had a couple of pints in the Castle Inn, and I can thoroughly recommend the place.

As for the walk; we’d started well by walking along a quiet lane, but soon ran into difficulties when we went cross country. We struggled to find the footpaths. Before long we were walking the lanes again, and were dodging the cars as they hurtled past, before again desperately searching for footpath markers. This was something of a feature of the day unfortunately; unmarked footpaths and dangerous roads. It wasn’t really put out with dogs or children in mind.
Also I don’t think there was a single stile which was actually fit for purpose either.
I must admit I wasn’t keen on the way that finding the bonus cache was dependent on finding rubber ducks in other caches; some of them had gone and the bonus cache was only found by educated guesswork.
But all credit to the chap who hid the caches in the first place; he did more than many have done.

We came home, and the puppy immediately piddled on our bed…

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