Facebook told me today was my nephew’s birthday. It lied; presumably he lied to Facebook. I wonder if the youngsters today are taught to give fake birthdays to social media as some sort of security thing or whether he has just been playing silly beggars? This cyber-security thing is a pain in the glass – it has effectively made my phone useless as it takes (seemingly) an age to get the thing to work every time I pick it up.
There were also a few memes on Facebook this morning about not letting dogs onto the sofa… what’s the point of having a dog if they can’t come up on to the sofa with you? I once went to the home of an acquaintance whose dog wasn’t allowed on their sofa – I sat on the floor with the dog.
I also saw that there is one of these new geo-meets (Community Celebration Event) happening in Margate next month to celebrate the geocaches which have been put out as part of the Creative Coastline project. I might go, if only to find out more about these geocaches – a series of twenty-one geocaches stretching from Eastbourne to Ipswich. But bearing in mind this is in the function rooms of the Turner Contemporary I doubt we’d be allowed in.
That is two geo-meets in November which aren’t dog-friendly… I realise I’m paranoid but is this deliberate?
We got ourselves and the hounds organised and drove down the car par in Kingsnorth in separate cars. We left my car there and drove on in the “er indoors TM”-mobile to Ham Street where we met Karl, Tracey and Charlotte. Today’s plan was to walk the entire stretch of the Greensand Way on which “er indoors TM” had put out geocaches starting at Ham Street railway station and ending up where we’d left my car. There had been reports of issues with some of the caches and other hunters of Tupperware had been rather abusive in some of their logs, and so “er indoors TM” wanted to have a look-see.
We’ve walked this part of the Greensand Way before, but in sections. We’d never walked all the way from Ham Street to Kingsnorth in one go. It was a rather good walk. Mostly flat and all on mostly well marked footpaths. And at about the half-way point some kind soul had put out a picnic table so we could have our lunch in comfort. As we walked we met a very cowardly bull; the cows weren’t bothered by us but this bull was running in terror. And Pogy got something stuck in his paw – minor surgery extracted it, but getting him to keep still took some doing.
There was a dodgy five minutes when we appeared to have acquired a third dog; we met a pup (all on his own) standing in the middle of the path in the woods looking rather forlorn, so we fussed him. We could find no tag on his collar, and as we moved on so he followed us at a distance. After a hundred yards we came past a house and it turned out he lived there. That was something of a relief; I would have brought him home with us rather than leaving him on his own out in the woods.
Geocache-wise it was a good walk. I have to say that or “er indoors TM” will unleash a case of whoop-ass on me. But it *was* a good walk. Mostly footpaths with one or two quiet lanes and so ideal for walking dogs. And we dealt with most of the reported (supposed) issues. One or two caches had rather iffy given co-ordinates. But I’d used my GPS to help with those co-ords when the things had been hidden. Back then there were no leaves on the trees. Today there were a lot of leaves, and that made a lot of difference. Caches which were more in the open were spot on; those in the woods were somewhat awry. One of them giving a location twenty yards away from where it told me earlier in the year.
We had had reports of someone having removed a cache as he didn’t want it on his land… Bearing in mind none of the caches were on private land we did wonder what this was all about. About three quarters of the way along the route the Greensand Way goes across someone’s land. That person really doesn’t like the fact that people can walk it, and there are all sorts of signs making that clear. There were also signs saying he was a naturist… I’ve seen him – I wish he wasn’t.
But the cache which was supposedly removed was actually where it had been placed.
We couldn’t really do anything about the more patronising and sarcastic logs that had been written though. There’s a relatively local pair of Tupperware hunters who (judging by what they write in their geo-logs) seem to look down on the rest of the world. Having found over twenty-six thousand caches between the two of them they clearly get a lot from the hobby. Sadly they also seem to get a lot from the attitude they put into their written logs too. I suppose we’ll always have the keyboard warriors with us though…
But it is a shame that (together) these two have hidden less than forty caches, and only two of those have been in the last six years. And people say I’m being pessimistic when I say that geocaching is dying on its arse.
I took a few photos as we walked, and after six and a half miles we were back at my car. We piled in, and what had taken us five and a half hours to walk only took five and a half minutes to drive, and we were very soon back where we’d left two thirds of the cars.
We said our goodbyes and came home. “er indoors TM” went via Tesco so I took the dogs with me. They were distraught that “er indoors TM” wasn’t with us, and they both cried until she came home. I suspect that had I gone shopping and “er indoors TM” taken them home they would have gone straight to sleep, and slept very peacefully with no concerns at all.
Whilst “er indoors TM” boiled up dinner I had a look at the monthly accounts. To be honest I am far from skint, but I am even further from rolling in money. Is it *that* greedy to want to have far too much money?
We’ll have dinner in a minute… I hope.
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