Ooh it's been 5 days since I wrote; I'm slacking.
I had actually started a post last Thursday but realised I had little to say; I'd simply been out the night before (during my son's guitar lesson) and picked up a puzzle cache to which I'd found all the clues the week before but had then run out of time to get to the final location. I was also going to mention running out of local caches, so...
We've decided, with the nights drawing in, that we're going to keep doing local caches in the evenings but make an effort to go somewhere more distant at the weekend. To this end Hannah randomly picked a place, York, and I set to work planning a route or two.
York seems to be inundated with caches and a "pocket query" of the area brought up hundred's within a few miles so I loaded this into my MapSource application and set to work with my electronic scissors. I deleted all the ones outside the walls and also all the mystery & puzzle caches, which left me with (I thought) 31 to do. It seemed a reasonable amount so I arranged these into 2 walks, one to do in the morning which led into the centre of town for lunch, and then a second to do in the afternoon. These came in at 1.7 and 1.4 miles as the crow flies point-to-point so I guessed we'd end up doing about 5 miles total.
(Incidentally I only deleted the mystery and puzzle caches to save time - normally I would plan these in too but as we were already doing so many I decided to keep it simple and not run the risk of running out of time.)
Well what a trek! It transpired that, somehow, 4 of the caches were still mystery types so we dropped those once we got to the location and realised each was invalid without the prior work having been done. Secondly, part of the wall was closed and we had to take quite a long detour around one section and back, doubling up that section's distance. And thirdly we also got lost trying to find HMV for my daughter (and I also doubled up that part again looking for a shop selling drinks while she was in there looking for a specific CD.)
So how do I summarise events without a whole diary for a single day?
We had a nice Steak 'n' Ale pie and a rather filling spiral-sausage-and-mash-in-the-hole for lunch in a good pub. We hunted high and low for caches in film containers, nano caches (magnets about 1.5cm round, with notepaper rolled inside) and hidden magnetic key-holders on lampposts, drainpipes, walls, holes and monuments. We met and chatted with some newcomers to the sport who were struggling with a find in a packed shopping area near the Yorvik centre. We tried not to look guilty in front of muggles as we oddly studied drainpipes, piles of bricks and ivy trees around the city. And we seemed to walk non-stop until 5:15. It was a good but tiring day and the weather was excellent throughout.
On the last quarter mile to the car we all tried to guess the mileage we'd walked. We were thinking it was further than previously estimated because our feet were aching, so guesses ranged from 6.3 miles to 8 miles but we were staggered to find we'd done 9.5 miles.
One final error I had made was in my counting. Of the 31 waypoints in my GPSr I had forgotten that the first one was only the car park and not a cache - but we still happily smashed our single day record with 26 finds!
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