I slept well despite a nightmare in which a gang of thugs were having a picnic in the back of my car because it was warmer than my front garden.
I set another negative COVID test going, made toast and had a look at the Internet. It was still there. This morning’s Facebook argument was a strange one. Someone was on the “Upstairs Downstairs” Facebook group asking for money for a friend who was supposedly stuck in China. The friend had a brain tumour; the chemotherapy had worked but the tumour was still there (?) and because of the tumour the airline officials won’t allow this friend to fly home. So there is a fundraising campaign to fly her home. Presumably the fundraising is to bribe the airline officials? However this request for money for getting a friend with brain cancer home suddenly became a request for money to decorate her house, and in a totally inexplicable turn of events became an argument about the ethics of trading in stocks and shares.
I checked my emails and sighed. Someone had been out locally and found some of my Wherigo geocaches and had written in the “Found It” logs “Found but forgot pen”. On the one hand according to a strict interpretation of the rules I should delete their log and insist they go back and sign it. On the other hand the hobby is demonstrably dying on their arse and do I really want to be discouraging people who are new to the silly game? Personally I’m not that bothered if someone assures me they took a photo of what they found, but on the New Year’s Day Wherigo session I had some people claiming that others were logging finds they hadn’t made and strongly suggesting I deleted logs there and then.
Geocaching is supposed to be fun… I shall hope that those who take the moral high ground didn’t see these logs.
Pausing only briefly to find “er indoors TM”’s trousers (!) and to bark at every bird seemingly within a five-mile radius we got ourselves organised and drove out to Mersham where we met Karl, Tracey and Charlotte and went for a little walk.
The “Mersham/Aldington Walk” series of geocaches were originally published a couple of years ago but what with one thing and another we’d never got round to going to walk the series. And then several of them had fallen into disrepair. But last week some friends of ours walked the route and had done some maintenance for the person who’d originally put the series out (why don’t more people do that ?!), so seeing the geocaches were as good as they were ever going to be, we thought we might go for a walk round then today.
We had a good walk despite a biting wind and being helped by one of the normal people. To be fair the chap who’d set the walk had said it wasn’t especially dog friendly, and we did have to throw the dogs over a couple of the less well maintained stiles. And it has to be said that in some places the paths weren’t as well marked as they might have been, but nothing that a bit of map-work and idiot enthusiasm couldn’t overcome.
Geocache-wise it wasn’t a bad series. Some of the caches are rather spaced out, but what can you do when there is a humungous field with nowhere to stash a Tupperware box? I must admit that some of the hides weren’t where I would have put them, but I am in no way complaining. Several of the hints given don’t match what is there now, but these things really do evolve when you aren’t looking. But the bottom line was that someone had taken the trouble to plan out a day’s walk for us, and I am very grateful.
After six miles we got back to the cars. We’d parked by the Farrier’s Arms, and so we thought we might have a craftly half. With their own home-brewed beer on the hand pump together with two from the Ringwood brewery we stayed for three pints.
I took a few photos as we walked (and drank). Once home there was a minor disaster when I saw that my phone had saved them as .heic files rather than jpg. With absolutely no idea what to do I just pressed the “upload” button and they seemed to work.
“er indoors TM” boiled up a very good bit of dinner which we scoffed whilst watching the second “Austin Powers” film… it was a shame I fell asleep half way through…
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