Coniston 10,000 - The evening before the morning after

I'm breaking this weekend's events down into two blogs. This first one is going to have very little to do with actual Geocaching and an awful lot to do with Guinness...

Ernie 'Mr. Truffles' Roper has been planning for his 10,000th cache for a couple of months and wanted to do something special. He eventually settled upon the idea of walking up and around The Old Man of Coniston (aka Coniston Old Man, here's a link to some info about it on Wikipedia.) Essentially it is a mountain. A big mountain surrounded by other mountains and those mountains are surrounded by hills disguised as mountains or mountains pretending to be hills, I'm not sure, but that's how it seemed to me. However I digress, more of this in blog #2.

I had wanted to go on this walk since I'd heard about it but was worried about the logistics of work, having the kids at weekends, driving long distances and various other things I always seem to worry about.

However the Monday before the event I took the plunge and arranged with my ex-wife to have the kids over the weekend, booked two nights B&B in Coniston and set about preparing my packing list, my equipment and my mountain of technology - camera, GPS etc. I even ordered myself a quality pair of binoculars which I may or may not remember to mention later.

I was looking forward to it all week and as I'd already booked the Friday morning off for my son's guitar exam I extended this to the whole day and set off at 2pm for the ~3 hour drive to Coniston. Beautiful weather, very little traffic and the first five remastered Queen albums (for their 40th anniversary!) to entertain me on the journey. Things were looking good.

I arrived at 4:30, unpacked (well I'm a man - I opened my suitcase), and headed off into town for some food. I settled into the Crown Inn and ordered Steak and Kidney pie and a Guinness. Excellent food. From here I emailed Mr Truffles and asked him to forward my mobile number to anyone else who was already in the area. I'd not been clever enough to do this earlier in the week except for an email to two attendees that morning.

A quick reply and I see he's forwarded it to StevieP who he guesses may already be in the Sun Hotel. At the bar.

I trot up there and just as I arrive my phone rings. It's Paul 'Penfolio' (someone I'd emailed that morning) who is just arriving at the Crown so I return to meet him and also StevieP - I must have missed them by seconds just ten minutes earlier. It's good fortune Penfolio had read my email as StevieP had been given the wrong number for me. (Typing error.)

Introductions are made and a round is ordered. StevieP and his wife are regulars to Coniston and recommend elsewhere to eat so I follow them all to The Yewdale where they order food. A couple more drinks are ordered and then Dave and Sue 'The Black Pigs' arrive. More introductions and more beer.

It's only about 8pm, I'm on five pints and thinking hey, the night is young; there's loads of time to rest and sober up ready for the morning. It's the weekend, it's new friends, it's a holiday!

Penfolio expresses some concern about carrying on drinking but I can tell he likes a drink. I manage to pursuade him (after about 5 seconds) to have another - and anyway, StevieP, the local expert, has said Coniston Old Man is, and I quote, "A walk in the park", "Easier than Jagger's Clough" (on Kinder Scout) and "Nothing to worry about". Oh how we laughed through the tears at these comments the next day.

Moving up to StevieP's regular holiday drinking den, The Sun Hotel, we find it is a large hotel and bar full of Red Nose Day revellers and celebrations. There are darts and domino tournaments being arranged, quizzes and other such entertainment. The place is packed and loud but all good fun. Several of us get roped into events and somehow I end up becoming a domino referee - moving into another side of the pub full of boisterous women determined to win at dominoes for which no-one is actually sure of which rules are being played. As a referee I make some up and stick to them.

From this point on things are hazy; stories were swapped and arguments were had with the noisy gang of women. Penfolio and I had a good laugh and I did my best to circulate between both sets of new friends, buying and drinking rounds at both ends of the pub. The beer monster had well and truly kicked in.

By 10pm I do remember thinking that I would easily manage in the morning, after all it was only a walk in the park, nothing to worry about.

By 11pm my logic had turned to who cares, I'll probably be OK and so what if I'm not.

By midnight I was thinking I'm going to be ill tomorrow but as self-punishment I damned well WILL do this walk.

By 12:45 I was happily trying to find my B&B with 11 pints of Guinness sloshing around inside me and thinking about having to get up at 8am to be ready at the car park for 8:45...


Continued here.

Drinking in Dublin - Day 1

Spandannah and I took an evening flight from Leeds/Bradford to Dublin for a long weekend on Thursday night. We didn't arrive at our city centre hotel until it was too late to do anything, apart from a quick Guinness in the bar, so we simply unpacked and looked forward to our three days in Ireland - a place I'd never been to.

After a hearty (too hearty!) breakfast on Friday morning we decided to wander randomly around the sites of the city centre and drift off in the direction of any caches that popped up within a reasonable range.

Within 30 seconds of leaving the hotel we got two firsts: our first Irish cache which was also our first webcam cache. I'd seen this cache before we left England but hadn't realised how close to the hotel it would be. I texted two work friends who both watched us appear on the webcam and then saved a copy of the picture for us.

This break was our first big urban caching session (apart from York which had been carefully pre-routed) and a lesson has been learnt for the next time - I think we'll remove all the puzzles & multi-caches from our listings and leave the simple traditional caches, virtual caches and webcam caches. This is because these are generally easier to pick-up on random wanderings and don't require any pre-planned routing. Quite a high proportion of Dublin's city centre caches are puzzle caches, some admittedly very simple, but when you are on a short timescale and in unknown territory I think it is easier to sightsee and wander randomly without letting geocaching interfere too much. (Perhaps on a return trip you could pre-plan these routes more capably?)

So on Friday we wandered randomly, we met three fellow Geocachers inside the castle and ultimately headed off towards the Guinness Storehouse - which is an exhibition/museum and also the brewery where they make most of the Guinness for the whole World (there are 3 breweries in Africa for that continent, everything else is brewed in Dublin - 3 million pints per day, 5 million for St Patrick's day and Christmas!)

Having been a Guinness drinker for about 22 years I was quite looking forward to the visit and after picking up a cache at the gate we went in and spent a fabulous 3 hours wandering around seeing how the 'Black Magic' is made, marketed, served and drunk. We had a pint each at the top of Storehouse in the 360 degree viewing room looking over the whole of Dublin, and then made plans for the evening.


(I tried to take an 'Arty' photo of the two free samples we got at the Storehouse.)

Plans plus drink.

They don't work do they.

We planned to have tea about 8pm after sampling a few local beers & bars whilst wandering roughly back towards the hotel. We had two rounds at the first bar, wandered further and then found another friendly bar and got chatting to a talkative local and the landlord - the most perfect landlord I have ever met because he gave away rounds every now and then.

At 8pm they convinced us that restaurants are open all night, besides who needs to eat anyway?

At about 11pm we were in an American restaurant, goodness knows where, eating a burger meal. Well Hannah was eating, I was sleeping. The next thing either of us remember is waking up at the hotel, 8:30am, with next to no idea how we got there.

So day one in Ireland was over. 8 caches found. Two museums visited. 7 miles walked (excluding distance inside the museums). 11 pints of Guinness consumed. Ouch.