Lincoln let-down

On Friday Patrick, Donna and I had all arranged to do a long walk near Lincoln which tracked due West along a long-disused railway line.

I set off at 8:15 (getting up earlier than on a work day!) and did the 45 minute drive down to the end of the walk near Newark. Donna, Patrick and Dizzy the dog then arrived in the van, parked up and got into my car and I drove to the start of the walk, about a further 30 minutes away.

It was a very cold day, somewhat surprising after the day before, but fortunately I had packed my gloves and hat just in case.

The cache owner here had placed four consecutive series in a straight line, with each series having a bonus cache calculated from numbers placed in the preceding caches.

We set off in good spirits and found the first few with no problems but then the proverbial started to hit the fan.

Number 5 was obviously a tough one as proven by the ~55 did-not-finds (DNFs) against ~70 finds. The hint was near useless so eventually we resorted to phoning-a-friend who told us exactly where it was. Except it wasn't. I'm not sure if it's been stolen (highly unlikely given where it's meant to be hidden) or if it was pushed too far in or frozen into the surroundings but we simply couldn't find it.

Frustrated we headed to the next.

Number 6 couldn't be found anywhere and to add to our frustrations the given hint was meaningless; I guess it might mean something to locals but to us it meant nothing. There was also a previous DNF logged.

Frustrated we headed to the next.

Number 7 couldn't be found anywhere and even with the hint there was no sign of it. We think this one has beeen muggled as there was also a previous DNF logged.

Frustrated we headed to the next.

Number 8 couldn't be found anywhere and even with a (finally!!!) useful hint there was no sign of it. There was also a previous DNF and again we think this has been muggled.

By now plain annoyed, we headed to the next cursing the cache owner for not maintaining his series (ie. checking caches after DNFs), for having mostly useless hints and we were all beginning to think that we'd wasted a day's holiday.

THANKFULLY number 9 was found and indeed for the rest of the day we found every cache (except for one and the bonus for each series) and slowly, as we progressed, our frustrations eased although we were still disappointed that each bonus cache was behind us. I guess the series owner wanted people to walk (maybe cycle?) 9 miles west, picking up ~30 caches, and then walk 9 miles back east to pick up 4 bonuses - rather a strange plan given that it's possibly the most boring walk I've ever done - nine miles on a perfectly flat track, on perfectly flat landscape, with nothing to view except empty fields.

Needless to say I won't be returning to pick up the 5 DNFs and the 4 bonus caches.

However the day wasn't a complete washout because of the company - we did a walk that would likely drive a solo walker to suicide but the three of us entertained ourselves and the walk, after cache 8, passed by quite quickly.

In the end we logged 30 finds (no idea how, I thought we'd done about 16!) and almost 9 miles walking. It was also a great real-world test of my new GPS and I'm getting the hang of it now.

Last but not least we then had to reverse the vehicle procedure of the morning and despite it being Friday afternoon the traffic was great and I was home quickly.