On Saturday Patrick worked out a plan to do some caches at Castleton on the Sunday. I was busy so quickly created a Pocket Query (a list of caches that match your desired criteria in a certain area) which I downloaded on to my GPS without having the time to actually read about any of the caches.
We all (Me, Patrick, Hannah, Donna, Adam, Jade, Christianna, Bethany, Jordan and Dizzy the Dog) met up in the main Castleton car park at 12 noon and headed off to the chippy for a sandwich to set us up for the walk - we didn't eat too much as the hills would be hard work.
Patrick, Hannah and Bethany wandered off to find the nearby cache-under-a-bench, that I had already picked up last summer, whilst Donna and I ordered half a ton of chips for nine.
We set off up to the 'fallen road' (the abandoned A625) on Mam'Tor. A good brisk walk through bracing winds and we soon found a couple of caches, got confused about waypoint clues and also took a couple of required photos for two Earth caches (no physical cache but photo and answers to email to the cache owner).
Once walking I quickly got frustrated with my lack of preparation as one of the caches had 4 waypoints I didn't know anything about, and also Patrick was looking for 3 caches which had been disabled but he was sure were still fine as there were recent logs - presumably the cache owner hadn't removed the disabled flag after the caches had been maintained. Anyway, these caches also weren't in my GPS and because of this I felt I was being led blind, didn't know where I was going and consequently felt a little lost. (This does make me wonder if the kids might enjoy walks more if they had a GPS? Do they get bored because they've nothing to do?)
Walking along the broken road the wind got stronger and stronger and was now being accompanied by a light rain which was being driven into us. At one point, whilst I was at the back figuring out waypoints, I saw Jordan literally get thrown over by a gust of wind - fortunately he didn't land flat on his face and just managed to catch his footing.
We rounded the corner, after I think it's the Blue John Cavern car park and back onto the working road, and whilst walking directly into the wind we decided to call it a day. Had there just been the adults we would have carried on but it was getting too much for the kids. We backtracked down the road and hill, picking up a further clue we'd missed coming up the hill, and back into Castleton.
A frustrating and cold day but a great way to clear the cobwebs out of your head - one of those days where you get back home and feel like you've really done something.
Overall we walked 5.4 miles and somehow, thanks to Patrick, bagged 6 caches.
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