Having an alarm set and having Pogo taking up most of the bed I hardly slept. I eventually gave up trying to sleep and came downstairs where I chivvied Sid out into the garden before making myself some toast.
Fudge scrounged for the crusts. Bearing in mind he ate hardly anything yesterday I saw this as a good sign and gave him (probably) far too much.
I settled him and Sid, and taking care not to disturb "er indoors TM" I set off on a little mission. Usually geocaching is a dog walk for us, but today’s plan was far loo long a distance for Fudge, and we had far too much planned to be having any “Pogo episodes”, someone had to stay at home to look after Sid, and Treacle just goes looking for her mummy when "er indoors TM" isn’t along. So today it was just me from our tribe.
I left home early; so early that the BBC World Service was still on the radio. The so-called news was little more than sycophantic sucking up to America, so I turned the radio off, and once I’d narrowly avoided being run of the road by yet another lorry driver who wasn’t watching what he was doing I made my way to Sittingbourne. I took a wrong turn but wasn’t *that* late getting to Karl and Tracey’s house.
We set off just as it was getting light and made our way north along some rather busy motorways. It wasn’t long before we were at the Duxbury McDonalds where we had a socially distanced and COVID-19 secure McBreakfast. You really can’t beat sausage and egg McMuffin.
Whilst everyone else used the facilities I quickly deployed and capped (you dare not let the geo-brigade know about the Munzing, you know), and then we carried on to Barrington where we parked up and set off on a rather ambitious geo-mission following the “D’oh” series of geocaches (and twenty others which were on our route). We had a good walk. We followed well-marked footpaths and lanes. There were some small sections on busier roads, but that was unavoidable really. But at no stage did we have to contend with farm animals or use any stiles.
As we walked we saw squirrels and buzzards and deer. The deer were odd – my photo didn’t come out that well, but they didn’t look at all like the deer we get here in Kent. We saw Jake’s bee hive. We saw a rather impressive radio telescope. And I am still chuckling at the two young ladies who cycled past. They were *loudly* discussing how the padding of their saddles was perhaps not what it might be as both were getting “excited” where the saddles were doing quite what they’d not been expecting.
As well as unmoral cyclists we met quite a few fellow hunters of Tupperware. Some were chatty; some not so. I did keep smiling about the young couple we saw. He was dead keen on rummaging for film pots under rocks; she was utterly disinterested. I can’t see that relationship lasting. Perhaps she too wasn’t keen on the wasps nest that we fell foul of.
Geocache-wise we had a good walk. We’d gone up having agreed with the chap who’d set most of the geocaches that we would do any necessary maintenance (to save him a job) and he’d warned us that he’d had reports that most of the paper logs were over half full.
They weren’t.
People seem to be unable to write on the back of a sheet of paper for some reason.
Having gone out armed with loads of spare log sheets and replacement caches and stuff we found all of the caches we looked for. Maybe a third of them needed new paper logs, and one needed a minor repair. But all are good now.
I took a few photos as we walked. We walked a shade over sixteen miles in just under nine hours, and found a hundred and twelve geocaches as we went, including my thirteen thousandth find.
We made good time home. We would have made better time had there been a few less idiots on the motorway. For some reason everyone wanted to be in the fast lane regardless of what speed they were going at.
I think I shall have an early night… I caught the sun today, I’m feeling rather worn out and I’ve got to work tomorrow…
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