May 22 : Fearless Traveler !

During our second visit to Chester we discovered this delightful trackable ‘Fearless Traveler! ‘

Fearless Traveler!

As you may guess from the title, it emanates from America. It started its journey in Illinois back in April 2015 and quickly galloped to the Western side of Canada based in and around Vancouver. It also visited caches not too far from the American border, before heading to Ottawa where it pranced for some time from cache to cache. Interestingly the trackable never made it back into America, but instead headed for the UK.

The first British cache it was placed in, was one we had found back in March 2015 when we walked the Thames Path. It had been placed in a cache called ‘Mosaic Trail – Fishes’ at Newbridge. (Interestingly the cache, if our memory is correct, is a 35mm film canister..so how the horse got into its British Stable, we are not sure).

Thereafter its British journey headed North West to the Chester area where we found it!

We will release it when we find a suitably large cache for it to enjoy the British Countryside!

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May 22 : Chester (part 2)

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Chester city centre

Tuesday already, and we returned to Chester to complete our caching mission from two days earlier. Taking the bus from outside the hotel, we arrived on the north side of the city at the smart new bus station https://www.chesterchronicle.co.uk/news/chester-cheshire-news/watch-take-ride-round-chesters-13073745

Fearless Traveler

Before going right into the city, we attempted a cache hidden close to a nearby underpass … we must have tried every exit from that *!?* underpass, and looked at a lot of brick walls and signs, but we eventually got ourselves into the right place, finding the cache and a trackable of a little horse, ‘Fearless Traveler’.

Captain Morgan’s cannon

Then it was through Northgate in the city walls, and another cache, near a sculpture of a broken Civil War cannon. We would spend much of the day diving on and off the walls, eventually completing the 2-mile circuit, my ‘must do’ item for the day. It’s a walk well worth doing (and free!), with great views of the city streets, the cathedral, the racecourse, the river … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_city_walls

It was a short walk to the city centre, with more statues (there are loads and loads of sculptures in Chester), including this one of a baby elephant http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/8569557.stm – there is a similar statue at Chester Zoo …

Janya

Apart from statues, there is unofficial ‘art’ advertising local businesses (and another elephant) …

It was a short walk to Eastgate, close to the city centre, where the clock on the bridge over the gate is, so they say, the second most photographed clock in the world. There’s a cache here, too, though muggles swarm around the bridge, and you must pick your moment to find it.

Chester, Eastgate clock

Further on round the walls we climbed down to pass the Roman amphitheatre, where a group of schoolchildren were being trained to be Roman soldiers and having lots of fun doing it, being ordered about with shields as large as they were.

Attention!

Having diverted from the park, we went further on and back into Grosvenor Park, where we’d had a cache DNF (did not find) two days before. We had a slightly amended set of cache coordinates, and we were hopeful. We approached, only to find a muggle asleep on the grass nearby. We retreated to eat our sandwiches and to watch a muggle carrying a large, opened bag of monkey nuts through the park. And we found some of those nuts wedged into the trees when we started our search (so THAT’s why the squirrels are so tame and brazen!) We looked around for a bit – we thought we’d searched here before the coordinates were changed – then a chance look down revealed the cache lying on its own in the open, in a small dent in the dirt. We signed the log and tried to replace it as the hint said it should be. Good to find one of our earlier failures.

Chester city walls

We returned to the southern section of the walls, overlooking the River Dee, then around the corner to the western walls, overlooking Chester racecourse, the Roodee. http://www.d2architects.co.uk/a-brief-history-of-chester-racecourse-730.html It’s the oldest racecourse in England, and one of the smallest, tightest circuits, with one lap being just over a mile, but this means that you get a good view of the whole of each race from either the grandstands or the walls. The course was being prepared for a race meeting the next weekend, and it was quite busy even then: it must be heaving on race day itself! There are a couple of caches along this section, too, and it was again a struggle to find the caches and sign the logs without attracting the attention of the many passers-by.

Chester racecourse – the Roodee

We arrived back at Northgate with our wall walk completed. But we still had another mission to complete … we had started on two multicaches on our previous visit, but had failed to finish either. Each had multiple stages: one involved looking up at various items above head height around the old city, and the other required us to glean information from some of the many blue plaques dotted around. So far so good: we reviewed what we had done two days before, then went off to complete the rest. We checked our answers, but we STILL hadn’t finished them. Grrr! We’d got our looking up confused with our plaques and had missed things. We sighed, and set off on another couple of laps of the city, to check all the clues again, some for the third/fourth time. I was getting a bit fed up by now. Eventually we had some answers and set off for the allotted locations. We thought we’d walked along every single street in the city centre but we found two we hadn’t tried, one in a pleasant residential street, and one in a less salubrious service area behind shops.

Phew! We were finished for the day. We returned to the swanky new bus station and went off for a rest and a meal.

Some of the caches from our previous visit remain resolutely unfound (by us, anyway). But here are some of the caches we did find, some fresh for today, and some at the second try from two days earlier:

April 21 : Black-Veined White Butterfly Geocoin

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

On our caching walk between Barrow Wake, overlooking Gloucester, and Colesbourne, in the Churn valley, we found not one, not two, but THREE trackables. This really doesn’t happen often! One of the three was this pretty butterfly.

Black-Veined White Butterfly

The butterfly has been on the wing since May 2013, flying 5,600 miles. This is what the butterfly wants to do:
“To flutter by caches and make people smile.
PLEASE NOTE – although a butterfly and not a moth, to save your fabrics and backpacks being nibbled, please move along within 2 WEEKS. After all, what’s the point of a trackable that doesn’t travel?”
Apart from a single trip to Vienna, all that mileage has been in the southern half of England and Wales, probably not so very far from the locations where the real butterfly would have lived.

Here’s some information on the butterfly (taken with thanks from the trackable description):
“This large butterfly became extinct in the British Isles around 1925 with its last remaining stronghold in the south-east of England. It was always a rarity in the British Isles, although it is often very common on the continent. The cause of the demise of this species in the British Isles is a mystery since its foodplants can be found in abundance in all of its former sites. Disease (fostered by poor autumn weather), relatively-mild winters and increased predation by birds have all been suggested as potential causes. This species was concentrated primarily in the southern half of England and south Wales. The strongholds were in Kent (which held 40 colonies), Hampshire, Gloucestershire and Sussex.”

April 21 : MAGGIE – Misty the Maine Coon Travel Tag

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

On our caching walk between Barrow Wake, overlooking Gloucester, and Colesbourne, in the Churn valley, we found not one, not two, but THREE trackables. This is almost unheard of! One of the three was this nice shiny new trackable, pictured meeting our own trail trackable, which we use to mark our progress on long walks.

MAGGIE – Misty the Maine Coon Travel Tag

Maggie the Maine Coon cat has been around since August 2017, starting off near Lothwithiel in Cornwall. She hasn’t travelled far since then – caches are visited much less in winter, so there is less chance of them being found – but she has been to some great places – to Truro, then to Oare on Exmoor, and thence to the Cotswolds.

All this sits well with Maggie’s own stated mission:
‘To explore past my little garden where I am allowed to roam. I love an adventure, take me far!’

And here is Maggies’s mission, in more detail, as given by her owner:
‘Our little Maggie trackable is in honour of our little cat who watches us leave very regularly with the geopooch to find geocaches. If we could take her geocaching with us we most certaintly would! Maggie loves climbing trees and anywhere green. Please help me to explore!!’

April 21 : U-Boat Geo-coin

As we mentioned on our previous post, on our walk between Barrow Wake and Colesbourne we discovered a Geo-coin.

One side shows an intricate top-down view of a U-boat, the reverse shows the U-Boat profile possibly lined up in a torpedo target.
U-Boats were the German submarines during the both World Wars. This geocoin started its journey, not from Germany from Majorca. Its mission, is to visit first Gibraltar, then La Rochelle and then the Polish port of Swinemünde (Świnoujście).

The geocoin has travelled 37,500 miles in since its release in September 2011. Most of its geocaching journey has been cross-crossing Europe and it very difficult to ascertain whether it has met its three objectives!

Apart from Europe, it had a brief sortie to the Far East including Shanghai, China and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Ideally of course the geocoin wants to be near the sea, unfortunately our Sandhurst (Gloucs) to Sandhurst (Berks) won’t go near the coast, so we will place it somewhere on our travels for someone else to do so.

April 21 : Sandhurst (Gloucs) to Sandhurst : Barrow Wake to Colesbourne

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

A week had passed, and we were ready for the fourth section of our epic walk from Sandhurst (Gloucestershire) home to Sandhurst (Berkshire). We *should* have driven straight along the A417 to Barrow Wake, overlooking Gloucester. But the road was closed after an accident, and a scenic tour of Gloucestershire followed, via Cirencester, Stratton, Seven Springs, Crickley and Birdlip, and arrived at our start point later than planned. Just then the traffic started flowing again…

Crossing the A417, we set off up Shab Hill past the telecoms masts and down a country lane. We were high up, following the Gloucestershire Way, with good views all round, and caches spaced at regular intervals. But, if road building programmes have their way, this will all look very different soon http://www.gloucestershirelive.co.uk/news/cheltenham-news/cotswold-motorway-plan-flatten-air-1393656

This could be a road soon!

Our success at finding those first few caches was mixed – we found some, not others, and at least one was out in the open in an adjacent field! We spotted a seat – the first one we had seen – so stopped for an early lunch overlooking the Churn valley and Coberley long barrow. Just then a curly-haired, ginger dog appeared, soon followed by a muggle lady. We were sitting on ‘her’ seat. We shuffled up, and chatted, while the curly-haired ginger dog made covert attempts to get into our rucksack and steal our lunch leftovers.

Dog and owner walked on, and we followed them after a pause, as it gave us privacy to search for caches. It was cooler now, and not so sunny, and was that a drop of rain in the air? We reached the valley bottom, crossed the river, then the A435, and set off uphill across one of the biggest and dreariest fields we’ve ever crossed. Luckily, there was a cache at the far side of it … Unluckily, it was well wedged, and a few minutes of cursing and un-wedging ensued before we got to sign the log.

Upper Coberley

Climbing still, we walked through Upper Coberley, a prosperous looking hamlet (we looked much too shabby and muddy to be walking through here!). At the top of the hill we turned right, and the Gloucestershire Way turned left; it had served us well, but it was heading north and we were now going east.

We started on an undulating walk on tracks through the Pinswell plantation, along a ridge, through woods sprinkled with bluebells, primroses, daffodils and dandelions, and gently downhill towards Colesbourne, slowly losing the views as we went. Along our way, at regular intervals, were caches (they do help to keep you on the right track!), which were part of the Pinswell Loop series.

Expansive views …

… amid lovely old trees

Two caches are worthy of longer descriptions. One was sodden: water dripped onto our feet as we opened it. Inside was a geocoin: its subject – U-boats – sort of appropriate that it was underwater!

The other had many favourites: we didn’t know why. On arrival, we walked through some impressive stone gateposts and started looking for the cache. We couldn’t find it, and after about ten minutes admitted we were stuck and looked online for a spoiler photo (cheating, maybe?) We realised we had walked over the cache container several times …

We skirted the edge of the Colesbourne estate which is known for its snowdrops https://www.colesbournegardens.org.uk/ though they had finished by time of our visit. Crossing the Churn again – it was bigger now – we walked into the village and the end of this day’s walk.

River Churn, Colesbourne

We’d found thirteen of the fifteen caches we had attempted, and the threatened rain hadn’t happened. Superb walk, and a lovely bit of the Cotwolds, off the tourist trail.

Here are some of the caches we found:

April 8 : 10 Years! Glorious Gloucestershire

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

10 Years! Glorious Gloucestershire

While out walking across Crickley Hill, we had the chance to find one of the twenty oldest caches in England, Glorious Gloucestershire. Taped inside the lid of the cache container is a geocoin, placed in 2011 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the hiding of its parent cache. One of the logs for this trackable was from someone who remembered the party to celebrate the cache reaching its 10th birthday …

Very few trackables placed in 2011 have survived – and even fewer caches are around from a decade before, 2001, when geocaching was a very new pastime.

Well done to both trackable and cache!!!

Editor’s note: The trackable number that appears in the picture is NOT, definitely NOT, the real traclable number. I’ve concealed it so that it can’t be discovered by cachers who don’t visit the cache!