The morning started bright and early. I was awake well before my alarm, so I got up. Nothing was on the agenda until 10:30 so I just sat and watched some Sky+ stuff. Then we bobbed round to our friend’s house to help her with a few internet issues and have a chat.
By the time we left there it was around 1pm and we had caching plans in place. We had intended to complete a series of 9 caches around Shelf. It was supposed to be 10, but we knew number 3 was already missing. As it turned out, we could only find 7 of them.
- GC2WFPE: a nice easy start to the day, the cache exactly where we thought it would be.
- GC2V6G9: we spent ages here. There were only a few places it could be. In the end we gave up and didn’t find it.
- GC2WFQ1: this also took a long time to find. It was worth it though as it filled a gap in our D/T grid (4/2.5) and that’s always useful!
- GC2WFQ2: one of those caches that moves around… it wasn’t where it was supposed to be at all (the clue said roots, the cache was in a wall…)
- GC2WFR0: hidden under a stone stile, this was fairly quick to find.
- GC2WFQB: this was meant to be hidden between a wall and a tree, however all the trees had been cut down recently. The cache was fine though.
- GC2WFR6: this was the other one we didn’t find. It wasn’t a pleasant place to search at all. We gave up.
- GC2WFQJ: this was out in the open, an easy find. It was supposed to be magnetic, but the magnet had corroded.
- GC2WFRD: attached to a gate post, this was another easy find.
As you might guess, this walk ended up being quite frustrating. It appears the owners of the caches haven’t kept them up to scratch as they originally intended and that’s a shame as it could have been a lovely afternoon. We had planned to do more, but our hearts weren’t really in it by this point.
On the way home, we popped in for a cheeky ice cream at Kendall’s Ice Cream Factory.
When we got in, I saw that another cache had been published. This was a bit of dilemma. We already had the souvenir for today and found 7 caches. However, we wanted to keep the numbers going in order to help getting to 1000 that bit easier by the end of the month. Plus being first to find a cache is always a good thing. It was decided that I should go for the cache on my own while Mrs Pitts stayed and prepared tea – it helped that I knew exactly where the location was… in theory.
A quick blast down the Drighlington By-pass (within the speed limit, obviously), and I was there. It’s a heart stopping moment when you first unroll a log from cache that has just been published as you hope for a blank log sheet. But there was one and, for the 23rd time, we had found a cache (GC4HQA6 to be precise) before anyone else. I say ‘we’ even though Mrs Pitts wasn’t with me, as we are a team!
I’ve added a bit of topological greenery to the quilt so that it isn’t just a blank white space. 31 squares do not make a rectangle (unless a long, thin one counts – which it does, but doesn’t look pretty…)
Our new Motorway Mayhem cache was finally published today too, gaining three finders very quickly: The Awesome’s (with a stupid apostrophe), TeamShiney (that’s not how you spell ‘shiny’) and the TwoMcGhees (who are very nice chaps!)
The evening saw Mrs Pitts experimenting with home made cocktails. Now, since I don’t drink, I have mocktails. Mrs Pitts made me two of these: an “Apple Berry Fizz” (strawberries and pomegranate seeds muddled together, some apple juice and ice, shaken, with ginger ale and crushed ice added to the glass) and a “Berry Slammer” (strawberries and raspberries muddled together, the juice of a lime, apple juice, shaken, with ginger ale and crushed ice added to the glass). Both were very nice!
The rest of the night was just spent watching TV and relaxing, like a holiday should be.
