Icy Dinnington

On Sunday afternoon, after a quick lunch following on from the morning's Beeley Wood clean-up, Patrick, I, Hannah and Donna met up (as Team PADS) to do a second 'Great Scots' series in Dinnington. We had done the first series a month or so ago.

This series was about 10 days old but because of the heavy snowfall had only been found once. There were also several did-not-finds (DNFs) because of the snow, a DNF because of child muggles playing nearby, and one that was believed muggled before ever being found.

Having suffered badly from the snow ourselves, which was clearing away nicely, we hadn't expected to see so much still at Dinnington. Also, strangely, the hill sides were coated in solid ice - I don't mean compacted snow that has been walked on and turned into ice, but ice like you would find on the top of a pond; the tracks up the hills were solid ice with water running under them as though the trails were originally streams. Very odd.

We first walked across what appeared to be flood plains with huge frozen puddles-come-lakes and quickly got the first easy cache. We then went up the tracks to another easy second one with Dizzy the dog eating ice where possible. On the way to the fourth one we stopped by the third which was seemingly muggled, just in case, and lo and behold it was there in the snow in plain view. We presume that it had fallen from it's hiding place in the snow and was buried for the previous two seekers - we happened to be first to arrive once the thaw had started. A completely unexpected First-To-Find (FTF) and amazingly the first one for Team PADS as a group.

The fourth was another easy find and after a wet trudge up semi-frozen tracks and a good search Hannah found the fifth. Then it was just a brisk mile back to the cars.

A great Sunday afternoon; fresh air, a good walk and good company. What more could you want?

[Total 5 finds, 2.5 miles.] [Forgot to mention in last blog the 2.4 miles done this morning.]

Thurcroft Colliery

The last week has been a quiet one Geocaching wise. We can handle the dark nights and we can handle the rain but when both are put together it starts to make us think why bother?

We didn't get out at all until Saturday afternoon where we had arranged to do a new series by n.e.a.r. over in Thurcroft with Patrick and Donna. This is reclamation ground on the site of the old colliery.

n.e.a.r. have excelled themselves with this 3 mile walk through nice open spaces and woodland and which includes 12 hides, many of which have had some good effort taken to disguise them. I was pleased with their efforts and grateful for their time.

Once back at the car we were all chatting and I realised that Hannah was very probably on 399 caches so with a nudge of an idea from Patrick we popped over to Dinnington, after saying our goodbyes, to pick up a standalone urban cache to round Hannah's day off on 400 finds. Following Patrick's description, as we didn't have this cache logged in our GPSr, we actually found it quite easily and it wasn't until later that night when logging the find online that we realised we must have found the old cache. It transpires that after several did-not-finds the cache owner had replaced it several tens of metres away with new coordinates. As Patrick had found it several months before he wasn't aware of this and had directed us to the old spot where, fortunately for us, the original container still existed despite the previous DNFs.

It's quite amusing, to me at least, to think of finding a cache several searchers had missed and that the cache owner had then looked for, abandoned and republished.

I just hope she let's us count it as a valid find!