January 13 : (Return to) Wokingham

Just five days previously we had visited Wokingham in perishingly cold weather and undertook an ad lab in Wokingham Town Centre.

Simultaneously, we tried to undertake two multi-caches which shared much of the ad lab’s route.

A combination of the cold, confusion over which cache we were doing, and the pressure to return to our car before our car parking charge ran out -left us annoyed and frustrated.

Mr Hg137 knew the Town Centre well – he’d lived in the town for 30+ years, Mrs Hg137 had a reasonable knowledge too. And we still messed up.

We decided once the temperature rose (admittedly it was only a degree or two), and some improved planning of a walking route we would return.

So five days later, we started again on the two multi-caches.

One of the two multis took us on a glorified pub crawl around the Town Centre. Wokingham was once famed for having the most pubs per head of population. Sadly a combination of Wokingham’s population growth and the economic downturn of pubs, has meant this title has been lost.

 Our caching walk took us to several pubs that remain and at each pub, we had to gather numbers from either a feature of the pub itself, or a nearby piece of street furniture.

Simultaneously we followed a trail of blue plaques. The ad lab we had completed visited 5 blue plaque locations, but the multi took us to many more. Indeed the cache owner didn’t let on that the waypoints were at ‘blue plaques’ as he referred to them as ‘Wotsits’ in the cache description. What made this multi harder, was that at every plaque/waypoint we had to find a number, and use that as a basis for the coordinates for the next plaque/waypoint. We had to take great care on checking every number we found, as we didn’t to miss a blue plaque.

In the end we collected a variety of numbers for both the pubs and plaques, calculated coordinates and found both ‘final’ caches. One was hidden in a set-back location, the other in a high visibility location within a car park.

As well as a pub crawl, and a blue plaque trail, Wokingham has a ‘mosaic’ trail with mosaic laid into the pavements. We are quite sure, that in that not-to-distant future, these mosaics may well form an opportunity for another caching trail in Wokingham.

Our only disappointment of the morning was spending 15 minutes looking for a standard cache in one of Wokingham’s Parks. Sadly for us, the cache has disappeared and we registered a did-not-find. It sort of summed up the last few days in Wokingham – hard work, for very little gain.

January 8 : Wokingham’s blue plaques

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Wokingham Town Hall

Wokingham has many interesting old buildings dotted about the town centre.  Many are marked by blue plaques, which have their very own Blue Plaque Trail.  For the geocacher, the information on the plaques lends itself for setting multicaches and Adlab caches – those where numbers need to be found, or things are to be counted, to use to calculate coordinates.

On a bleak day in early January, we set off around Wokingham to find some of those caches.  Our initial plan was to look for two multicaches plus an Adlab and its associated bonus (physical) cache, since all were based around similar locations and some of the same blue plaques.   It didn’t go at all well; doing three caches at once, we got mixed up, then found one of the stages in one multicache had a problem: the clue item was damaged.  In the end, we said – finish the ad lab and go home and get warm.  And that’s what we did.

It all got easier once we were doing one thing, not three, and weren’t struggling to enter coordinates into the GPS with freezing fingers.    (FYI: AdLab caches work from a mobile phone and rely on proximity to the clue locations.)

The Tudor House, Wokingham

We started at the Tudor House, once a 16^th century mansion; more recently, it was a doctor’s surgery: Mr Hg137 remembers it well from his days as a Wokingham resident.   Walking along Broad Street, we stopped at Nationwide Building Society.   This has a blue plaque, not for its current use, but for a previous incarnation as a cinema, the first in Wokingham.

A short way on is Wokingham Town Hall, a place where we’ve both attended special things: weddings, funeral wakes, Mayor Making ceremonies and much else.   Today we weren’t going inside, just inspecting the blue plaque and the water trough nearby (it’s now a planter).  

Leaving the Town Hall, we turned into Rose Street, wide and lined with historic buildings.  Another blue plaque awaited us near the far end, on a (small) residential house; this used to be a school with 12 pupils and a live-in teacher – it must have been quite crowded!

Just around the corner was the last blue plaque on our trail, placed to show off The Overhangs, some of Wokingham’s oldest buildings, which really do overhang one of the main roads through the town centre.   Once again, the location had memories for Mr Hg137, as he used to work there in the mid-1990s (he tells me it’s modernised inside, it’s just the façade that retains the Tudor layout).     

We sheltered from the wind and worked out the coordinates of the bonus geocache.   Our GPS gave us a direction to travel in, and we knew how far away it was in a straight line from us, but we didn’t know exactly where it was.   So we followed a not-so-straight line along paths, probably not the quickest way, through car parks, and along roads, to arrive at … a place near where a postman had chained his trolley!   Oops, we didn’t want to attract attention by rummaging there!    But all was well: a glance behind a nearby object showed us the cache, tucked away out of direct sight.   Time was pressing now, our parking time was running out, and it was a speedy walk back to the geocar, and home for a warming cup of tea.

Found it!

August 8 Thames Path : Marlow to Maidenhead

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Marlow

For today, we had a plan to park the geocar at the end of the day’s walk, use public transport aka train to get back to the start, and walk back; much searching went on to find somewhere (anywhere) in Maidenhead that had free parking and was close to the river; Google’s Streetview was most useful here and we found a spot in Ray Park Road.

A fifteen minute walk brought us to Maidenhead station and the first cache of the day, one of the Sidetracked series which are hidden near stations.  On the train, we had a few minutes to sort out our walking boots and to chat to the many other walkers who were also on the train; one group of six were off on a two day outing, walking to Goring on the first day, then back along the river; we passed Goring some few weeks ago and it’s a long, long walk along the river, but not nearly so far if you cut off the big loops in the river.

Sidetracked geocache

Sidetracked geocache

Sidetracked geocache

After a twenty minute train ride we disembarked at Marlow, dawdling behind the other passengers so that we could retrieve our next cache, another Sidetracked, without being watched.   The Thames Path was a short walk away, and we walked down to the river, then stepped away almost immediately for a look at Marlow Lock.  This was a busy lock (they all are!) with neat gardens (they mostly are!), a fine view back to Marlow Bridge … and the answers to clues to a multi cache, another with a Dr Who theme, which we found just a little further on our way.   Once under the speeding cars on the A404M we were out in the country and it was a quiet, warm sunny morning.  A couple of miles walk, with not a single cache, and we arrived in Bourne End.  We stepped aside to find the third Sidetracked cache of the day, near Bourne End station; we’d passed close by while we were on the train but we didn’t have quite enough time to find the cache while the train paused at the station.

Bourne End railway bridge

Just here, the Thames Path crosses to the other side of the Thames, and it does so on the railway bridge.  Here, too, somewhere, is another cache.  It’s a multi cache, and the description gives five possible locations, with a clue to work out which is the right one.  We solved the clue, and we tried all five locations.  Could we find the cache?  No, reader, we could not!  We paused for lunch, looking at the river.  Then we had another look.  Could we find the cache?  No!   We reluctantly gave up and moved away downstream across the meadows.  It was rather hot now and we wished there was more shade.
At Cookham, the path diverted from the river, to walk past some expensive houses who had kept their river frontage private.  We passed the Stanley Spencer gallery, then followed the path through the churchyard, where a wedding was in progress; we’d read that Stanley Spencer’s memorial is here but we didn’t spot it.

We went down a leafy track away from the village; part way along a cheer rang out from the village.  We wondered if that was the moment England won the Ashes?  (Checking later, it wasn’t.)

Boulter’s Lock

Busy river!

We arrived back at the river, and the remaining caches for the day were all along the path back to Maidenhead.  It was so pleasant that I walked past one by 400 feet, when I should have been watching the GPS, and we had to backtrack; grumbles, and rightly so, from Mr Hg137!  Another  most notable one was entitled ‘You want me to look there?’ and was close to both a litter bin and a dog poo bin.  We spent some while feeling round in places where we really did not want to feel – and it was a very hot afternoon so things were … aromatic – but we found the cache close by.   The final stages of the walk took us back into Maidenhead and past Boulter’s Lock, which was packed, and past a blue plaque showing that Richard Dimbleby had lived close by (he was a famous war correspondent and factual journalist).

Richard Dimbleby lived here

Then we were back at the geocar after pausing at this poem etched into a stone by the river:

Old Father Thames goes gliding by
As ripples run he winks his eye
At Cotswold cows and Oxford dons
Nodding to Windsor’s royal swans
He bears our nation’s liquid crown
By lock and weir to London town
May all that know and love his banks
Pause here awhile to offer thanks.

Ian Miles (2002)

Here are some of the caches we found:

Thames Path statistics :
Route length : 7.6
Total distance walked : 121.25 miles

Caches found : 12 Total caches found : 221