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!

n.e.a.r.ly done

Having finally accepted that the dark nights are here to stay we kitted up last night, right from work, and set off to do a nearby series called "n.e.a.r." by a family who use that as their username (it's an acronym of their real names). This is a simple walk set in a 'motorway triangle' created by the roads leading to and from the M1 and M18 and the M1 itself. The entire walk only took us 35 minutes so we thought we'd also clear up another couple placed by the same family a mile or so away in Thurcroft. The first was a simple 'cache and dash' where we parked practically next to it, and the second was a short 0.5 mile round trip to the first cache of the night that wasn't an insta-find.

On the way back to the car I saw the largest toadstools I think I've ever seen. Here's a photo and given that my GPS is just over 10cm (4") long you can see how large they are.

Back at the car by 19:25 we thought it would be almost rude not to go off and get the only n.e.a.r. cache that we've never found so we drove up to Wickersley and did another 1.1 mile round-trip down a lane, around a field and into a wood. It was very dark and we resorted to using the hint to find this one - possibly because my stomach had started rumbling.

We were home for 20:10 and while making tea I loaded up the bread maker and the slow cooker so tonight I guess we'll be eating before we go out and then won't have to rush home.

(Total 7 caches, 3 miles walking.)