Christmas Corroboree VIII

I'm not sure why the organisers have used an aboriginal word (for ceremonial meeting) but on Saturday afternoon we attended, for the first time as we've only cached for 6 months, the annual Christmas Corroboree VIII in Elsecar. This year it was run by MikeG and involved a HUGE puzzle cache hidden up in the woods full of presents and sweets for the children, a raffle for charity, pie and peas and of course lots of chatting to friends old and new.

Having some time constraints I decided we wouldn't do any caching on the day except for the related puzzle cache "A Gift from St. Nicholas" which now takes the credit as being our largest find to date, it being about 36" long, 18" wide and 24" deep. A hearty and merry thanks must go to MikeG for the effort (and cost!) in arranging and positioning such a festive treat for everyone.

I had a lovely chat with Mr Truffles about my planned walk along the Yorkshire Dalesway next year, met up with The Black Sheep (Rob and Jen and their super-energetic 20 month old son), chatted to MikeG and Penfolio, and teased Bleaklow about him not being able to find Not a Bit Sticky - with an invite around for a cup of tea next time he looks for it.

Patrick and family were all there and also YorkyPudding and AgingHippy, many more I don't know and no doubt a few I do know but I've forgotten to mention... sorry!

We bought a fiver's worth of tickets and ended up winning the donation YorkyPudding brought (a string/wood puzzle) and in return she won the ready-to-place cache container I'd donated. Such a small world, she only lives a few doors away so we could have just popped around, done a swap and saved ourselves a few quid :) [I know that's not in the spirit of a raffle, I was joking!]

Big thanks again to MikeG - well done Sir.

Smoke and Mirrors... and idiocy

To ease ourselves in again last night, after our Sunday over-exertions, I decided to try and finish Mr. Truffles mystery series and also mop up a couple of problem caches.

We drove to Kimberworth and whilst firing up the GPS I noticed that I had Mystery #6 listed in there twice so without further thought I deleted one of them. What a wally. There were two in there for a reason: a marker reference which is simply in the right region and is listed on the website, and then the actual co-ordinates which I'd added myself once calculated from the clues in Mystery #5.

I'd deleted the original photo of the clue in Mystery #5 from my iPhone, so all we had was my memory. Somehow I could remember the first half of the co-ords and bizarrely I could remember the calculation to the second half so we looked up the root figure on Wikipedia (the height of Ben Nevis in metres) and then applied the calculation to get the second half of the co-ords. We then set off, without any great faith, walked the wrong way around a huge wheat field, but blow me if we didn't find it - now that WAS an achievement!

We got the rather vague clue for Mystery #7 which we already knew was somewhere up near Elsecar - an area with which we had a score to settle - and for which I had already pre-loaded two other caches into the GPS.

10 minutes on a very slow loading Geocaching.com and we had the co-ordinates for Mystery #7 which turned out to be very close to one of our problem caches.

Our Elsecar History

We went to Elsecar and had a great day the very first time I had my *real* GPS device. We did about 14 caches with my Mum and Sister but we had three problems: 1) "Tucked Away" we gave up on after 20 minutes searching presuming it was muggled 2) "Black Beauty" we gave up on and we were pretty sure it had been muggled and 3) Some other cache we thought was in a bad spot (glass/nettles/holly) and as it was was late, and now raining, we abandoned it quickly.

It transpired over time that "Tucked Away" was indeed still safely tucked away and that "Black Beauty" had indeed been muggled - but it had finally been replaced this last weekend.

So... off we went to Mystery #7, parked up and had a nice easy find of a large cache box. It was very pleasing to have finished a long puzzle series after a couple of months on and off of it. Tucked Away was only about 500 metres away so we set off for that and somehow, strangely, we found it within 10 seconds of arriving. I left it alone, told Hannah I'd found it and she looked near me and also found it immediately, so whether it was covered in more undergrowth previously or whether we all had a mental block I have no idea. It was very strange.

We returned to the car and moved it the Heritage Centre and trotted off to find Black Beauty (see what I did there?) - it was exactly where we'd previously thought so another easy find.

Overall a nice rewarding evening; we finished a long puzzle series and tidied up two previous fails.

2.8 miles walking total and home for a nice, but late, tea.