Fudge had something of a restless night, and consequently so did we all. Treacle was a funny thing though. When she is restless she stomps about all night long. When she is not restless, she growls and grumbles at anyone who dares make a sound.
I made toast (by running it through the toaster twice) then peered into the Internet. It was much the same as ever. I had hoped to see lots of children preparing to make themselves sick with far too many Easter eggs, but there wasn’t very much of that today. Instead the same picture of Lego Jesus appeared on several Lego Facebook pages. The same Sparks song had been posted to several Sparks Facebook pages. A couple of students had pasted their homework assignment to multiple work-based Facebook pages.
I wandered down the road to get my car. It was where I’d left it, and it assured me its oil level was fine. We loaded up dogs and luggage and set off, and within minutes Pogo as whinging for a tiddle. We stopped, he had a tiddle, and then the car suggested I might like to top up its oil level.
We drove up the A20 since the A20 is now a far faster moving road than the motorway, and were soon at the car park in Sutton Valance where we met Karl, Tracey and Charlotte. What with lockdown rules we’ve not walked together for months; it was so good to be able to meet up today.
Since lockdown was lifted on Monday several geocaches had gone live south of Maidstone, and we sort-of cobbled together a decent route from what had appeared.
We had a very good walk; I did wonder what the ground would be like. Would I need my wellies? I was fine in my walking boots. What with lockdowns and Tier Three this was only the fourth time I’ve worn them on a decent long walk in the six months that I’ve had them. I spend longer polishing them than I do wearing them.
As we walked we met other friends also walking the new series of geocaches. It was so good to be able to catch up.
Treacle found several huge branches to carry around. She does love carrying a huge stick.
Fudge did very well today. He’s been very ill recently, but we couldn’t leave him at home; he would have been heartbroken. He came along and I was fully expecting to be carrying him for much of the way. But he walked ninety-nine per cent of the route. He did get Charlotte to carry him for a bit, but I could tell from his expression he was just being lazy. He does that; he knows how to get his way.
Geocache -wise it was OK. I don’t want to be discouraging as someone has taken the trouble to put out loads of geocaches in the area, but many of the ones we hunted out were in small loops. There are those who want smaller loops of caches; for the littluns these would be ideal, but we like a much longer mission. Cobbling the small loops together into longer route for a a day’s walk took a little doing, and consequently we had possibly a little more road-walking than we might have liked. But then, that wasn’t how the series were designed.
Mind you I would have a little whinge about the size of the hides. The unwritten etiquette is that ideally you should hide the biggest cache you can at the given location. We were finding thimble-sized caches where bucket-sized things could have been stashed.
And the difficulty setting – all geocaches have a “D”-rating. That’s how you can tell how hard they are to find. Some of today’s were fiendish; some easy. But all had the same “D”-rating.
But we had a good outing because someone had put in the effort to hide the caches for us. And that is the main thing. Any gripes I might have is just me being picky.
I took a few photos as we walked today. Today was something of a test for my new phone’s camera. I thought it did OK. Sometimes I wonder if I should learn more about photography, but “point and press” seems to do OK for the computer, lap-top, tablet and phone screens on which they are viewed.
With walk walked we said our goodbyes and came home. The dogs had their tea and were all soon snoring. They hadn’t been that quiet for ages. Perhaps I should walk them for nine miles more often?
er indoors TM” sorted our tea; chicken, parsnips and stuffing. All the best bits of a roast dinner with none of the carrot and pea nonsense.
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