Scoffing Scones in Swaffham

We've were down at my mother's house in Norfolk this weekend - she's got quite a large amount of woodland that would be great to hide caches on!

On Saturday (unfortunately we couldn't plan it for the 10/10/10 global event) we popped into Swaffham and had tea and scones at the second-hand bookshop, which has a small cafe in the back, and then wandered off to do the Swaffham Saunter series. This is about a three mile series with six 35mm film canister caches each with a coordinate leading to the final seventh. We forgot to take the clue from the first but it was pretty obvious what the missing coordinates was. The hides were all simple and there's actually little really to write about. Total walking distance was 3.9 miles including the walk from & to the car-park.

I spent a fair amount of Sunday working on my next cache. I researched the coordinates and wrote the puzzle about 6 weeks ago and then last week I uploaded the webpage which is now sat ready to be activated but still I needed to make the actual hide. I haven't really had the time or the materials but I set to work with a vengeance on Sunday whilst the kids were all hatching 'get rich quick' schemes and making magic wands which they hoped to sell at school.

I can't write too much in my blog for fear of leaving a spoiler as I'm hoping both the puzzle and the hide are difficult and therefore will be highly rewarding to successful finders.

My plan is to have it finished and published by next weekend.

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Muggled!

I received a DNF (did-not-find) notification and a detailed email last night from a well-experienced Geocacher who could not find my "Queen 2" cache, even after she had resorted to PAF (phone-a-friend - ring somebody for help who has already found it).

I've not had chance to check yet but from her email it really does sound like it has been stolen and it's very frustrating. I know this sort of thing happens all the time with this hobby, and I quite accept that, but as it's my first one to go missing I'm a little bit more disappointed than I probably will be in the future.

I have a replacement tub and contents ready, and it's not the money that bothers me, it's just the time it will take and also the frustration at the pointlessness of the destruction or theft.

Damflask

After my sister bravely completed the Sheffield 10k run on Sunday morning we met up with my Mother and set off for a short route around Damflask near Lower Bradfield on the outskirts of Sheffield. This was a nice easy stroll around a reservoir, put together once again by Mr. Truffles.

If anyone is after an easy Sunday afternoon's walk I do recommend this one - there's a total of 14 finds, 3 of which are puzzle caches but are simple to calculate en-route, the walk is all flat and the hides are pretty easy. We logged it in at 4.4 miles total and to top it off you can have an ice cream on the way to the bonus cache!

I tried to motivate the kids into getting involved by offering £5 to whichever of them got the most finds. This caused some squabbles in the last couple of seconds at several caches, but Adam soon became despondant when he was 4-0 down to Jade with 7 found and only 7 more to go. At this point, to motivate him YET AGAIN, I changed the rules to £1 per find each. Well blow me down if he didn't win 5-4 in the end.

Hopefully he might have learnt a lesson about not giving up.

Hopefully I might have learnt a lesson about not changing rules and losing an extra £4!