I ached when I got up this morning; taking that arbour apart yesterday must have been more like hard work than I realised.
I made toast and watched an episode of “Trailer Park Boys” in which Bubbles was terrorised by a samsquanch (!) then I sparked up the lap-top as I usually do most mornings. I had some messages – yesterday I saw that there are a few geocaches on today’s walk which looked to be missing, and I asked the owners if they would like us to replace them if we couldn’t find them. They all said “yes please”. According to the rules, replacing a missing cache is the responsibility of whoever hid it; according to common sense why should they give up a couple of hours to make a special journey to do what we can do in less than a minute?
There
wasn’t *that* much kicking off on Facebook this morning. Perhaps I was
too early on a Sunday? There were on or two amazing things being asked on some
of the work-related Facebook pages though. In the UK there are national
standards concerning all aspects of blood transfusion; in the USA it would seem
that every individual lab makes it up as they go along and there were “how
do we…” and “do we have to…” and “the lab down the road says…”
All were questions about things which in the UK are standard practice, and have been for
years.
With “er indoors TM” off to visit “Daddy’s Little Angel TM” and “Stormageddon – Bringer of Destruction TM” I got Treacle into her new harness, and we set off to the car. As we walked down the road there was some strange woman dragging half a dozen tree branches down the road. Each must have been over five metres in length. Assuming she wanted them as firewood I wondered if she might want the fragments of the arbour I disassembled yesterday, so I asked her. After a few minutes it became clear she didn’t speak English. At all. This (sadly) isn’t uncommon and bothers me. I like to think I’m not racist, but how can anyone live in a country where they don’t speak the language (not even the tiniest amount)? It just can’t be practical, can it?
We drove out to Marden; I’d deliberately set off early so that we could drive to a couple of locations to collect information needed for a field puzzle, and having counted bollards and found the right telegraph pole I sat in the car park with Treacle working out the puzzle until Karl, Trace and Charlotte arrived.
We set off on our walk. The ground was nowhere near as muddy as we thought it might have been. We had a good walk with very few hills. There were perhaps a few too many stiles, but Treacle managed them without too many problems. Mind you we did have one or two issues with Treacle. She was continually stopping; wanting to pick up bigger and bigger sticks. And there was a “near miss” event when a Dalmatian got in her face. If the dog had come up slowly, all would have been fine.
We had another “episode” at lunch time. Having found an ideal spot about twenty yards from the road we had just sat down to have our picnic when some “delightful fellow” walked up and told us we were trespassing in his woods. I think he was looking for a fight and he wasn’t quite sure what to do when he didn’t get one. Seeing we weren’t the gang of vagrants and ne'er do wells I think he was expecting he said we could stay and have our picnic. Which we did. Though to be honest if I was that fellow, I would sell the woods and use the profit to buy a full set of teeth.
Shortly after lunch we walked past the Hush Heath winery. We considered having a look at their shop; I’m glad we didn’t. have you seen their prices? At thirty quid a bottle, they ain’t giving it away.
As we walked I found myself looking in admiration at the amount of frankly wonderful garden ponds we saw, and we all spent a few minutes looking at the model railway set-up someone had going round their garden; complete with railway bridges over the pond. The very next house had alpacas in the garden…
Geocache-wise, the series we followed was perhaps not the easiest. Many of the caches were in places that were rather overlooked. Some of the hints didn’t seem to make much sense to me. And we felt that some of the GPS co-ordinates were a tad awry. But a bit of a challenge is never a bad thing. Someone had taken the trouble to set out a guided walk for us in a rather pretty area, and I am very grateful for that.
After having walked the series we hunted out two multi-caches.
One of them was one we didn’t find when we were last in the area since it had been almost (but not quite) in someone’s back garden and had been “muggled” (found by the normal people and thrown away as rubbish). Since our last visit it has been relocated and we found it deep in a thicket.
The other was one that hadn’t been found in over a year; we found it. Because it hadn’t been found in over a year it qualifies as a “resuscitation” and there is all sorts of gloating that goes with that (if rummaging in hedgerows for small pots floats your boat).
I took a few photos as we walked. Once home, as Treacle snored on the sofa next to me, I posted them on-line.
“er indoors TM” came home, and hot on her heels was the builder chap who is going to be fitting the new kitchen in a few weeks’ time. They made all sorts of plans; I agreed to everything. And shortly after the builder went so someone else was at the door. I was thinking it was the new garden bench. It was actually the grocery delivery. It turns out that the new garden bench hasn’t been ordered yet. Yesterday when I wrote “I’m reliably informed the new garden bench will arrive tomorrow evening” it turns out that I had been reliably informed that the groceries would be arriving.
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