Day 213: Fields, Sandstone & Sun Burn

In many ways today has been quite irritating.

Geocaching are providing a souvenir every day in August – these are fairly rare and only come out on special days so this is an event people in the caching community are quite excited about.

We began with a really easy geocaching find, GC435N5, Lady Laugh-A-Lot’s Kakuro. This was another puzzle that we’d worked on in preparation for this trip. It was another puzzle that I’d only really got 90% solved and an email to the owner provided the rest of the information. In the end, grabbing that cache was an easy start to the day.

After that, we visited the locations of a couple of other puzzles we had solved. However, and keeping in mind how much we’d walked recently, we didn’t really fancy kilometre plus walks from the car to grab a cache.

At this point we began working on a series of caches based on the rainbow. All of them named after the colours, with different information that would lead to a pot of gold at the end. We only knew the location of Red (GCMVJH) at the start of this but knew parking locations of all the rest – it was spread out, but we hoped it would be manageable in a day. The walk to Red was difficult – it was up a steep hill and it was getting hotter. Still, we managed it and knew where Orange (GCMVJQ) was (and that find lead to Yellow). Which was where it all came unstuck. We couldn’t find Yellow at all so had to abandon the series. On the way back to the car, we spotted a likely looking pair of cachers – and sure enough, looking back at Yellow now, someone has logged it after we left. They do state that it wasn’t where it should be.

Still, it’s not quite as annoying as it could be because it freed us up to explore other caches.

The Little Quest series is based all around England. There is one in every county in the country and Cheshire‘s (GC1BRVA) was only 6km-ish away from where we were. The annoying thing is that is was only just up the hill from Orange… still, we knew what we were in for at least. A long trek later, we had the information we need to add to the other Little Quests we’ve found – Lancashire, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Northumberland.

After that, we had another DNF – as in, we didn’t find it. But there’s no shame in that as the last three people haven’t found it either.

We then revisited Lady Laugh-A-Lot’s Hexagon Tessellation Puzzle (GC45F43) which we didn’t find yesterday. After logging this, we sent another plea for help to the owner who gave us a clearer clue to its actual location. Lo and behold, it was exactly where she described it.

GC2GWYJ, Free Cache Offer!, was next. Here you had to fulfil the criteria to reach 500 points based on cache finds. We totalled 2800 a couple of days ago! Mrs Pitts went for this on her own as there were no real parking spaces around.

Finally, another short trip into Chester was followed by GC1A9WC, a cache near the Eastgate Clock, which is the thing to see in Chester!