The kids and I popped out on Sunday morning to do the 10 caches I'd planned the other Friday at Rivelin Valley near Hillsborough.
I had set Adam up with my old GPS so he could get more involved with the walk - the deal was to alternate caches with Jade but as usual she wasn't bothered. However I shall continue to do this because it seemed to be quite a successful plan; I wouldn't go as far as to say Adam enjoyed himself but it did give him something to focus on.
We got there at 11am, a fair bit later than intended, in light drizzle and after finding somewhere to park set off walking up quite a steep hill through a muddy woodland to get the first of a small 3-part series. It was an easy find by Adam and we backtracked down the hill to cache #2 and then had both coordinates to get #3. This third cache has had loads of did-not-finds logged against it because of dodgy coordinates and also it being a tricky hide. Fortunately the cache owner has recently made a couple of tweaks to the coordinates and also added a 'spoiler picture' to the log.
Despite this, and after only 15 minutes of looking, I was ready to add this cache to my ignore list where it would have had the dubious honour of being my first ever on said list.
The spoiler picture had us as the right location - which was essentially a load of rocks and stones that had fallen away down a slope. The grass was slippy in the drizzle, the rocks were even slippier and the brambles growing through some of the cracks were invisible, yet painful, traps.
In essence caches like this are a lottery; there's a hundred stones in an ever moving landscape and the cache could be inside or under any single one of them. Cachers, including me, move the stones and in doing so scratch them thereby giving off false clues to subsequent visitors. Even walking on them can change the spread and spoil the photo or again give off fake clues. It's a gamble and it's not really any fun.
Thankfully I found it and was surprised, although in reflection perhaps I shouldn't be, to see that I was only the second person to find it since it was published in November, almost three months ago. It was a nice short series in an area I've never been to but it was, in my opinion, let down by this random final cache.
After this cache we headed back down to the main road and then walked west along Rivelin Valley. There are several standalone caches down here and we picked these up easily as we walked beside both a stream AND a river through a landscape I guess would be much more beautiful in summer. Aiming for another small series called Rivelin Romp we got to, and found, the first one quite quickly but I then decided to call it a day; the kids had been grumbling they were hungry for an hour (it was now almost 1pm) and we had a couple of miles to walk back to the car via two more caches in the sort-of-circular loop I'd planned.
Bouyed by the prospect of food we were quickly back at the car, the two caches found easily en-route, and then started the painful drive home - Hillsborough was gridlocked and we were stuck there for 20 minutes, in a traffic jam, infinitely frustratingly heading in the wrong direction - the road we wanted was closed and the diversion had us going 180% the wrong way.
Walking would have been quicker and a damned sight more fun!
[Total for the short day was 4.5 miles and 8 caches.]
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