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.

Day two

Day two of my blog and today I'll be starting the mundane log of reporting about my previous day's caching - and trying to come up with interesting stuff when all we did was walk. Fear not, I'm pretty sure I'll not write about everything; after all this is my diary and when I look back on it in years to come I'll probably not care that I walked down xxx lane to get to yyy woods.

Having said that, it's partially interesting that last night we walked down First Lane to get to Wickersley Woods, got the cache, and then walked down Second Lane to get another. It seems the inhabitants of Vicker's Ley back in 1600 didn't have much of an imagination with regard to road names.

In total we walked 3.1 miles to find 4 scattered around caches including a mystery one by the legendary Mr. Truffles for which I'd worked out the clue several weeks ago. The clue to his next mystery (written inside the lid) was solved quickly on-site, with the help of Google, so we'll probably get onto that one at the weekend.

It was also nice to find another one by Yorkypudding and her other half Ageinghippy. It was the next one in the multi-user series after the first one we planted; Rotherham Curse of the First To Find #9. We really must meet up with them as I believe they live only 1/2 a mile from us.