Having been up at five o’clock for the last six days I slept through till after nine o’clock this morning. Mind you I would rather have got up early to go for our usual weekend walk, but we’d cancelled because of the awful weather forecast for today. I must admit I was rather glad to see that it was raining when I finally got up – we hadn’t cancelled for no reason. The forecast had got the early morning weather right.
However that was all that they had got right. The rest of the day was dry. We *had* cancelled our walk for no reason.
Talking of weather forecasts I am convinced that weather forecasting has got worse over the last year or so. A few years ago we could rely on the BBC’s forecast. These days it seems to be little more than guesswork. I had a little look on-line and found that my feeling was right. The reliability of weather forecasting *has* got worse. The reason – coronageddon. Seriously. With far fewer planes flying about, the meteorologists have got far fewer observations of actual weather on which to base their predictions.
As I munched toast I peered into the Internet I saw the potential for a squabble on the local Facebook geocaching page. Someone new to the ancient and honourable pastime of sticking film pots under rocks had the arse. Having put out three caches in deepest Rochester they were a tad miffed that only two people had logged finds on them. Looking on the map these caches didn’t look to be easily accessible if you don’t know Rochester’s roads very well, but I wonder if this is just symptomatic of geocaching going the way of many other hobbies (kite-flying, astronomy and fishing immediately spring to mind) in that people don’t so much do the hobby any more preferring to pontificate on-line about it instead.
I then wrote a rather depressing obituary on the state of my profession (for a work-based Facebook group) and got dressed (at eleven o’clock).
Just as I was pootling in the garden so the phone beeped. A whole load of geocaches had gone live just down the road. Whilst I’m pleased that someone has taken the time to put these out, it is a shame that this has effectively done for the Greensand Way project that several of us have been working on. Oh well… such is life. Those who’d taken on that stretch of the Greensand Way have had over a year to get the job done.
But seeing the chance of a First to Find, er indoors TM” and the dogs charged out of the house. We set the GPS on a cache we could drive to, but as we drove so an FTF log appeared on it. We drove on to another cache where we saw those who’d got the FTF walking away from it. Our third attempt had us on the wrong side of a flooded ditch, but we got to be First to Find on the fourth attempt. Mind you I don’t think that cache will last. The people in the house over the road seemed absolutely fascinated with what we were doing.
From there we drove over to the back end of Park Farm where there is a little loop of nine geocaches. We had this plan that they would give us an hour’s dog walk before the forecast rain hit.
If ever you fancy hunting out a film pot under a rock, don’t bother with the “Love In A Cache” series. There are two types of people who hide geocaches; those that want them found and those that do not. These caches were clearly hidden by someone from the second camp. With rather poor GPS co-ordinates, frankly meaningless hints, one seemingly drop-kicked into a thicket and one looking to be in someone’s garden I think we were lucky to have found four out of nine (which is an incredibly bad success rate).
Interestingly the person who had supposedly found the caches before us hadn’t signed any of the paper logs, and after two minutes of stalking them on-line I was they had also claimed finds in Carmarthen on the day when they were supposedly in Ashford. Was he cheating? I don’t know. But rules are rules. He is supposed to sign the paper log.
We came home, and sat in the garden drinking beer and enjoying the afternoon sunshine. At five o’clock we hurried inside as the sky grew dark, but after two minutes it brightened up again.
er indoors TM” boiled up a rather good bit of dinner which we scoffed whilst watching Adrian Edmonson going round Great Britain. He was in Devon in today’s episode making walls and apple pies and gin.
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