I slept till after eight o’clock this morning. I’ve been feeling rather exhausted lately. Too many late shifts perhaps?
I took the puppies round the garden where we tiddled, but didn’t poop, and the puppies then sulked when they had to come into the bathroom with me whilst I shaved; they weren’t going into carpeted areas unsupervised whilst “still loaded”.
I made toast and had a look at the Internet. Not that I would be going, but I was sad to see that this year’s Brighton Kite Festival had been cancelled. Apparently the membership decided to cancel at their AGM as there wasn’t enough people willing to offer help and support for the event. Such a shame there’s not more input from the club’s members… Mind you there never was. Ten years ago much of the help and support for a Brighton-based club used to come from miles away. We don’t do a two-hour journey to get there anymore. Have others stopped too?
I miss the days of Brighton Kite Festival.
We got ourselves and the dogs together and set off to Biddenden where we met Karl, Tracey and Charlotte for a little walk. A series of geocaches had gone live in the Biddenden area some time ago and we’d spent the last year thinking about going out there. A couple of weeks ago I drove out to the suggested parking and saw it was far better in reality than it appeared on Google Street View, and so today we thought it might make a good short walk for the puppies. And it did. As a walk for small dogs it did the job, Despite the footpaths being rather vague in places we found our way around without too many problems (even if we did have to carry the dogs through the stinging nettles at one point). It was a rather pretty walk with no farm animals on the way. We stared in frank amazement at the parachutists dropping through the sky. And the dogs were able to run free for most of the route. We walked two and three quarter miles in just under two hours, it wore the hounds out and it built up an appetite. I took a few photos as we walked.
However geocache-wise I must admit to an amount of disappointment. The series was billed as being unusual and home-made caches, and on reading the previous “found it” logs I approached with high hopes. Sadly I was reminded of a cache at which I was First to Find on 16 August 2014. That one was a bird box which was opened by fiddling about with the perch, and was already broken when I found it, and I was also reminded of a similar series in Maidstone which I walked with “er indoors TM” on 20 December 2014 when I wrote “We made our way back to the car via five other geocaches. All of which looked to have been good in their day, but all of which seem to have suffered from the passing of time... This is the trouble with so-called "clever" caches; they are fragile and break.”
I think this was possibly the case today. Those of the caches that were home-made did seem rather worn. The paper log of one of them was wet. One of them was a film pot laying on the ground with what we thought was the home-made cover laying on the ground some yards up the path (we took the liberty of re-assembling it how we thought it should have been)..
There are those who sneer at the film pots that I put under rocks, but unless you are prepared to be doing maintenance runs on a very regular basis these “clever caches” are going to break.
With walk walked we drove down to the Three Chimneys. I can’t remember how long it has been since I last visited, but with beer poured straight from the barrel and rather good food I can’t recommend the place highly enough. It was a shame that once the dogs had had their rice the puppies had to bark quite so much, but there it was. We had a rather good afternoon in the sunshine and had a very good plate of dinner washed down by three pints of Goacher’s best and four large glasses of port. We would have stayed longer had rain not stopped play… Rain… Despite the BBC’s weather app claiming only a two per cent chance of rain when we said our goodbyes.
Once home “er indoors TM” gave Bailey a bath to wash off whatever foul stuff she’d rolled in, but there was a minor disaster as the water pressure suddenly fell to non-existent. Did we have a water leak? I could find no leak anywhere, but the water to the upstairs tank was noisily pouring in to it. Had the toilet done its thing again where it keeps pouring water down the pan until you fiddle with the mechanism to stop it and drained the tank?
I fiddled with the mechanism and the toiled stopped pouring water down the pan. It seems fixed… is it? Time will tell – it always does…
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