October 15 : CITO : Crowthorne : CROW Litter Pick

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here. A geocaching first for us – a CITO event.

Cache In Trash Out® (CITO) is an environmental initiative supported by the geocaching community. Since 2002, CITO has helped preserve the natural beauty of cache-friendly spaces. In that time, more than 363,000 people have volunteered at 18,000 CITO events.

We went to Crowthorne to take part in their twice-yearly litter pick, which is organised by Crowthorne Reduce Our Waste (CROW).   On a beautiful, if cold morning, a varied selection of geocachers and geodogs assembled to do some litter picking, some seasoned pickers already armed with their own personal kit.   We had soon signed the log book and been equipped with hi-vis jackets, a litter picker, a selection of bags, and a hoop to hold the bags open.

We wandered the streets of Crowthorne, picking up discarded stuff – and fitted in a little bit of caching, too. No-one asks why you are furtling in the undergrowth if you have a hi-vis tabard, a litter picker, an carrying a bag of rubbish! We ended up with 2.2 kg of rubbish, including two scrunchies, a Lego man, and a small plastic elephant! It was all surprisingly fun and it was also good to meet up with other cachers, some known to us, some new faces … plus Logan the geodog.

Here’s a description of what happened, taken from the CROW Facebook page:

Amazing turn out today on this beautiful sunny morning. We had 43 adults and 15 children between them walk 92.54 miles whilst they picked adding a fantastic distance to the #millionmileclean

They collected a total of 38 bags of rubbish and a load of other dumped items including a lot of metal canisters, a milk crate, old wood, a metal pipe, a perfectly good quality fold up chair, a laundry hamper, bits of a TV and a broken drone. Then there were the weird items…..

• A wig
• Dolls legs
• A plastic elephant
• Science glasses
• Boxer shorts
• A suede boot
• A car phone holder
• A lego man
• A die
• 2 fibreoptic hosiery
• A headless plastic snake
• A cat collar
• Condoms

Winners of the 3 prizes are as follows:

• Furthest distance walked whilst picking was 4 miles!
• Heaviest amount collected was TW and family who had bags full of over 22kg and a large metal canister which we estimated weighed 30kg.
• Strangest item was voted by the committee to be the wig found by JB with the doll’s legs a close second.

CROW were incredibly impressed at the geocaching turnout and have invited us back to future litter picks (twice a year).

Litter collected (thanks to Cacheandwalk for the image)

During and after our litter picking, we fitted in two other geocaches.   One was a month-old cache placed at the far end of the Morgan Recreation ground, away from Litter Pick HQ.  The cache owner was probably surprised that seven groups of cachers (all litter picking) stopped by to find it that morning!

And no-one was watching, too, when we made a repeat attempt on another geocache,  ‘This piece of road is 20 and below’.   We’d had two previous searches for this cache, two-and-a-bit and seven-and-a-bit years ago, but both had ended in holly-scratched failure. This time we had the perfect camouflage so not a single muggle asked what we were doing, fiddling around at the side of the path.  Mr Hg137 found something that matched the hint … and tried to throw it away as rubbish. He was dissuaded, and a short search very close by yielded some litter … and the cache.    Found at last (hooray!), though we think it may have moved a little since our last two tries.   We’ve already blogged, twice, about our failure to find this one so it’s a good way to finish off this blog post and the story of the search for this particular cache.

July 13 : Simon’s Wood

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Today was a special day for both of us and we wanted to do something just a little out of the ordinary, so … we went geocaching.    Staying local, we travelled just a few miles to Simon’s Wood, owned by the National Trust, on the border of Wokingham/Crowthorne/Finchampstead.   It comprises an area of woodland, heath, and a lake, crossed by a Roman road, and edged by a striking avenue of sequoias.  Needless to say, it’s a popular place for a walk, a run, for wildlife watching, or just for watching the world go by.  Oh, and it’s doggy heaven, so many great sniffs and places to explore, even a lake for a swim.

We’d decided to do one Adventure Lab (AdLab) geocache, plus one physical cache with coordinates supplied by clues found during the AdLab.   Here’s how Adlab Caches work:
… A Lab cache or Adventure Lab is an experimental cache type. The general idea is that the user visits a location and finds a code related to something that’s found there, such as a number, name, or date, entering the correct code in the Adventure Lab-app gives the user one found geocache. The new name is “Adventure Lab” and an “Adventure” can have up to 5 or 10 “Locations” …

For this AdLab, we set off round Simon’s Wood.   We walked through the woods, visited the heathland, then made our way out to Wellingtonia Avenue, a magnificent row of huge sequoia trees lining each side of the road.  The trees were planted in the early 1860s as a memorial to the Duke of Wellington, who lived nearby at Stratfield Saye estate.  The two rows of trees forming the avenue are spaced 75 feet (23 m) apart and the avenue stretches for approximately two thirds of a mile (1.1 km).

Just part of one Wellingtonia

Giant trees admired, we returned to the woods and made our way along paths and boardwalks to Heath Pool, a shallow lake with many waterlilies.    The dam across the northern edge of the pool is part of the Devil’s Highway, a Roman road connecting Londinium (London) to Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester) via Pontes (Staines).

Devil’s Highway

By now we’d worked out the coordinates for the geocache associated with the AdLab.  (FYI: Not all AdLab caches have an associated ‘bonus’ physical geocache, and are just intended to be a pleasant and informative walk – on the whole we prefer there to be a bonus cache, as we feel we’ve achieved an objective by signing a log.)     A short walk took us to the cache location; we knew we’d got the correct coordinates because we could see the cache container, out in the open, as we drew near.   We signed the log and hid it away.

Found the bonus cache!

And that was it … a gentle walk on a special day, and a chance to enjoy nature and reflect on life.

August 8 : Crowthorne

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

We had an errand to run in Crowthorne and decided to combine that with a short afternoon caching trip.  It had been a showery weekend and we hoped to fit our activities between showers.  The errand went smoothly, so we were then free to grovel around in bushes looking for caches …

Our first target was from the ‘Counting Vowels ’ series, in Napier Woods.  On checking previous logs, we saw that the cache had not been found for about six months, with a previous log saying it might be missing.  We contacted the cache owner, mikes54, who was part way through a maintenance run on his caches, but hadn’t reached this one yet.  He gave us detailed information on the cache and its location, and permission to replace it if missing.

We found the entrance to the woods very easily – we didn’t know this was here – and walked through the woods checking the waypoints. All was present and correct so far, and we paused to work out the coordinates and set a location into the GPS. Then we set off to walk to the cache location, and it began to rain hard.  We took shelter under a tree, then moved to bigger trees as the rain continued. After it stopped, we went on our merry way to the cache location.  There were two possible locations, one more likely than the other, and we checked them both thoroughly. No cache in either.  We replaced the cache with a like-for-like of what was there before, and sent photos to the cache owner showing what we did.  (The cache has been found since, so we helped things along.)

Replacement cache

We returned to the centre of Crowthorne, for another attempt on a cache we had failed to find five and a half years before, ‘This piece of road is below 30’.   We hoped our finding skills had grown in that time.  (Hmmm- maybe!)  At the location – the vegetation seems to have grown a bit in the interim – we rummaged around with no success. After a bit we gave up and walked away. And then I made a casual remark about the location, which set Mr Hg17 thinking. We returned, and rummaged around some more.  I spotted something mentioned in the cache details, but didn’t find the cache. Mr Hg137 searched around and retired, bleeding, after some of the prickly vegetation spiked him.  Again, we have been in touch with the cache owner, have done some detailed searching on Google, and now have some additional information which will enable us to have a third attempt, when we’ve assembled some PPE against that dastardly vegetation!

So far, so not-so-good; we’d tried two caches, replacing one and not finding the other.  We went for a third attempt – a puzzle cache, ‘Down Two then Left’.  We’d solved this one a few days ago: a combination of the title and some of the less obvious pictures led to an ‘aha’ moment, and the rest of the solution was quick and easy.  We walked off to the cache location, soon spotted the cache container, and signed the log.   Finally, a cache log we could sign!

More rain clouds approaching, so we scooted back to the geocar, hiding in a bus shelter when it rained, again.   An interesting but not entirely successful afternoon!

January 18 : Puzzled in mid-Berkshire

Note : many of the caches mentioned in this blog are puzzle caches. By their nature, puzzles need solving before attempting to find the cache. We have tried to minimise the amount of information about these caches in this blog, but clearly some spoiler information may be given accidentally.

Great Hollands Community Centre

The day had arrived to collect a number of local puzzle caches we had solved previously. Our journey would take us from South Bracknell, along the Bracknell/Wokingham/Crowthorne borders, to South Wokingham before finishing on the Finchampstead/Sandhurst border. We had 5 puzzles to collect, and two additional caches close by.

The first puzzle cache ‘Stating the Obvious’ was near to a major Bracknell roundabout. Fortunately a nearby housing estate provided a place to park, within yards of the cache. The hint mentioned ‘magnetic’ and ‘wooden posts’ which didn’t really make sense until we approached GZ. Here on a very quiet footpath, we could search without interruption. And, after looking at three or four magnetic wooden posts (!) we had the cache in hand.

Nice and quiet at GZ !

At our next location, close to Bracknell’s Crematorium we had two caches to find. The first, a puzzle cache, requires specialist knowledge to solve (or, as it is known these days, Google). Some simple maths, and the coordinates led us to only one host, and once there it took us just a couple of minutes to locate the small container.

Before we headed to the second cache we spotted a nearby building we had never seen. Great Hollands Pavilion was new, almost brand new, as it had only been opened since July 2019. There was a medium sized function room, toilets and a cafeteria. (We were too early for a coffee, by a matter of minutes). A great looking Community Centre with ample parking too.

The second cache, our only standard cache of the day, was a shortish walk away from the Centre in some nearby woodland. A pine forest – typical of the trees grown on Bracknell’s natural heath – which also acted as a noise barrier. We could barely hear traffic until we got closer to our next cache site. Here the hint instructions ‘under a fallen tree’ seemed reasonable, but of course there were a couple of candidates to check. We took far too long here, and eventually found the cache not quite where we had interpreted the hint.

After a short car ride, our next pair of caches involved walking down a muddy footpath. Our aim was to collect a multi-cache using the details we had collected (when we visited Crowthorne on a small caching trip the day before). Also on the footpath was our third puzzle cache of the day. Our plan was to find the multi first, but we were following a dog walker along the path and realised we would be overtaking him at the site of the multi-cache. We paused, and realised we were at GZ of the puzzle cache! Spooky!

Quick.. no-ones around lets go searching!

As we stood in amazement at our good fortune, a runner went by and checked whether we were lost or not. We weren’t of course, and as soon as he was out of sight, we started searching. An obvious host which we checked. Nothing. We went to a less obvious host. Again nothing. We returned to the original, and then saw a tell tale pile of sticks wedged in a roothole!

We continued on the muddy path, until we reached the multi-cache. A fine example and well worth the walk around Crowthorne’s post boxes the day previously. We twizzled the cache-lock to the appropriate numbers, and with only the smallest of jerks, the lock and cache was opened. A plastic ammo can, yielding quite a lot of goodies! One of the goodies was a disposable camera, and cachers are invited to take photos of themselves with the GZ. Quite what the owner will make of the photos after is beyond us. Blackmail maybe ?

Mrs Hg137 hiding behind the disposable camera!

Our penultimate cache of the day was another puzzle cache we had solved so long ago we’ve totally forgotten how we did it! We have a good idea, as the question was about large numbers, and the cache title hinted as how to interpret them! After the mud-fest of the previous caches we were able to park at GZ, cross a road with no interruption at all. We know the cache location can get congested, we’ve sat in a traffic queue here several times, so we were grateful for no superfluous traffic as we searched.

And so to the last location of the day. The puzzle here was part of the ‘Famous Berkshire Residents’ series. Using a series of clues one had to work out who the person was, and thus a date of birth, length of middle names etc. This person, although still alive, has dropped someway down the public radar, although a close relative has not.

We were a bit thwarted at GZ. Firstly numerous roads were marked as ‘closed’ but we were able to drive through. At the cache site itself, we had a hunch the cache was not there as there had been a string of DNFs by previous cachers. We had pre-agreed with the cache owner we would replace the cache with one of our own. Which seemed straightforward enough except..the hint was ‘under stone’. There were no stones. Barely a piece of shingle. We spent some time looking for a stone to use, and in the end hid the cache in a slightly different position and alerted the cache owner.

So 7 caches attempted, 6 found and 1 replaced. 5 puzzles removed from our list of puzzles solved and a mini-tour of mid Berkshire! A good morning’s work!

Some of the caches included :

January 17 : Crowthorne

Winters, especially wet and windy ones, provide distinctly uninspiring weather for geocaching. There is a high likelihood of getting wet and footpaths are giant morasses of mud.

So we decided to undertake many of the puzzle caches we had ‘solved but not found’. Many of these we assumed would be ‘cache and dashes’ minimising the risk of getting a soaking and squelching through mud.

There’s a cache in these woods…shame about the mud!

Then we discovered many of the puzzle caches we had solved over the years had been archived. We had the co-ordinates but the cache had been removed. Our list for ‘caching and dashing’ had been severely depleted due to our tardiness in finding them!

We formed a series of puzzles we could collect, and found a couple of caches nearby. One of which was an unusual multi. Most multis require the cacher to visit at least one or two places, sometimes many more, before acquiring the co-ordinates to finding the cache. This multi, called ‘Post Code’, was different. The cache co-ordinates were given. The cache was a padlocked box, but to unlock the cache, one had to visit four post boxes in the Crowthorne area. Find a particular number on each post box (generally the post code of the area the post box stood in) and use the numbers on the padlock. Easy !

“I can’t read the number from here”

Except…these post boxes formed a 2 mile walk! Now, dear reader, we were in a quandary .. should we drive round the roads of Crowthorne to each post box in about 20 minutes… or take a separate walking expedition … and locate a couple of caches near the four post boxes?

We, of course, opted for the latter.

There were only two caches on our ‘post box’ route…the first in a alleyway adjacent to a relatively new estate in Crowthorne. As we approached GZ, a dog walker approached the path from the estate. (We say ‘dog walker’, but the size, weight and momentum of the dog meant it was more like ‘dog taking man for walk’. We wished him well as he was dragged by, and we searched a couple of likely host items. We were looking for a ‘man-made’ structure hiding the cache..and we were very surprised when eventually we found it !

Our second cache was one we had ‘attempted’ back in May 2013. We blogged about that day here, and we remember it well as we left home with maps with geocaches marked, pens, etc… but no GPS! We tried to find caches with no GPS and hints! ‘Grimmetts Grotto’ we never found. Today, even with a hint (‘Base of tree- leave no stone or brick unturned!’) and no leaf cover interfering with GPS reception, we had trouble getting close to anything useful. So we searched every tree in the copse, turning over every stone and brick we could see. Eventually we located the correct tree and stone and signed the log.

Then we started our post box walk.

The Crowthorne estate we walked around was mixed in age.

New Houses

Some bungalows, possibly 1930s in style, and where these had been knocked down large 5 (or more) bedroomed, houses behind metal gates.

A new estate being built on the old Transport Road Research brought the houses into the 21st century. A pleasant pavement walk and at each ‘post box’ we peered at the box to acquire the numbers we needed. Fortunately there were few people around to quiz us, otherwise it may have been just a tad suspicious!

Four posts boxes found.. four numbers acquired…the multi cache awaits!

December 14 : Counting Vowels on Wildmoor Heath

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

The Counting Vowels geocache series started out in November 2017 and now comprises around 60 caches, and it’s growing all the time. To solve the caches, you need to visit a number of waypoints and note certain words on signs; after a few locations you have a selection of words e.g. ‘weighbridge’, ‘public’, ‘giraffe’ (OK, we haven’t found one of those, yet!), and then add up the vowels in the words, come up with a total for each of A/E/I/O/U and use those numbers to come up with the coordinates of the cache container.

This sign?

This one?

Or maybe this one?

Wildmoor Heath, between Sandhurst and Crowthorne, is the location for three of the Counting Vowels caches, and we thought they would be a good choice for a Saturday morning caching trip. Each had four or five stages over about a mile, plus a walk to the final location, and were described as requiring 45-60 minutes each to complete.

All three caches start from the car park at Wildmoor Heath, then go in different directions and our GPS showed a plethora of waypoints, all mixed up together as the GPS orders them by distance. We decided to solve the caches in numerical order, #34 first, then #35, and finally #57. First was the Wellington Nature Trail (#34), which skirts the edge of Wellington College and heads off westwards along the Three Castles Path https://www.ldwa.org.uk/ldp/members/show_path.php?path_name=Three+Castles+Path+%28England%29 Off we went from the car park, pausing briefly to note the information for one of the stages of a later cache (More about this later …)

It’s going to rain in a minute!

We went through woodland, then out onto open heath. Just as we had collected the last bit of information, and had reached open, treeless ground, the sky darkened, the wind rose, and a squall of rain / snow / sleet rattled through; we backtracked, and sheltered behind the largest tree we could find, and worked out the coordinates for the cache. It passed by after about 15 minutes, leaving blue skies and sunshine, and it was as if it had never happened. We came out from behind the tree and set off for the cache location, finding it very quickly.

Back at the car park, we grabbed a cup of coffee from the thermos we had stashed in the geocar, then set off again for the second cache, the Three Castles Path (Counting Vowels #35). This was the first ever long distance path we walked, back in 2010, and it was good to revisit familiar territory on such a sparkling bright morning. This time round, it didn’t seem to take very long to visit all the required ‘things with words’, to count the vowels, and to find the cache. So far so good …

Just one cache to go, Wildmoor Heath (South), a newish cache placed only a few weeks ago, and number 57 in the Counting Vowels series. We had already noted down the first clue for this cache earlier on, and we decided we would take a short cut to the second waypoint. All proceeded steadily, and we soon had a set of coordinates for the final cache. The coordinates looked plausible and we set off towards them. We arrived at the road, and we still hadn’t arrived at the cache. Oh dear, something wasn’t right. Never mind, maybe the cache was over the road. We crossed, and investigated the boundary of Eagle House School. But we still weren’t quite at the right place, which looked to be on private school land, in the middle of the cricket pitch. This just wasn’t right … we checked our calculations, then checked them again, but couldn’t work out where we had gone wrong. By now, lunchtime was passing by, and we were hungry and grumpy. We had failed. We stumped gloomily up the road and back to the car park, and did a re-check on that first waypoint we had noted down at the start of the day. AND WE HAD WRITTEN IT DOWN WRONGLY! Rats! We re-did our calculations, which gave us a new location … 600 metres away. By now, hunger had overcome our desire to walk an extra 1200m there and back so we returned home for a very late lunch.

But we weren’t giving up …

The return

Happily, the cache owner had been in touch the previous day to confirm that our revised coordinates were correct. Next morning, we returned to Wildmoor Heath. As there was a 5k and 10k Muddy Welly race taking place close to the Wildmoor Heath car park, we parked elsewhere and walked through woods and across boardwalks to reach the final waypoint for this cache. This time the GPS led us to a place that matched the hint, and, after a short search, the nice new cache was unearthed. The moral is to read (and more importantly, correctly transcribe) what is written on the noticeboards; it went wrong for us because we didn’t.

The postscript

How do we know that the Counting Vowels series started in November 2017? We were the First to Find (FTF) on the very first cache in the series and spent a morning wandering hither and thither around Wokingham to find it. https://sandhurstgeocachers.wordpress.com/2017/11/10/november-10-ftf-wokingham-chestnut-avenue/

And here are some not especially revealing pictures of caches:

December 22 : Buckler’s Park : Crowthorne and the TRL

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

It was the Saturday before Christmas, and we had loads of things we *should* be doing. So – obviously – we found ourselves in Crowthorne, parking the geocar for a morning’s geocaching. As the December days are short, the paths are now muddy, and we had (ahem) loads to do, we chose somewhere local, and likely to have good paths. The venue was Buckler’s Park, a new housing development in progress on the site of the old Transport Research Laboratory http://www.landghomes.com/developments/bucklers-park The houses are/will mostly be on the side of the site where the TRL buildings were, and a large part of the rest of the site, where the test track was, has been turned into a country park. (Editor’s note: The name comes from Buckler’s cars, which were made in Crowthorne in the 1950s-1960s.)

Buckler’s Park

There’s parking here, overlooking the new houses on one side and the park on the other, and we started the morning by finding a puzzle cache based on the history of the TRL, which we had looked up before setting out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Research_Laboratory After reading some well put-together noticeboards telling us about the history of the site (among many other things, part of the film ‘Quadrophenia’ was filmed here), we set off along a well surfaced and unmuddy path into woods.

There are two new cache series here, ‘New Buckler’s Forest TRL Series’ parts 1 and 2, both placed during the autumn of 2018. The caches are set at regular intervals, close to well surfaced paths, and all are made of/hidden in materials derived from the site or chosen to blend in with the places they are hidden; there are no ill-disguised film canisters or out-in-the-open plastic boxes to be found here; I’m trying not to spoil it by giving away exactly what we found, or where. The country park has retained some parts of the old test site, and there are loads and loads of newly planted trees, lots of varieties, several ponds, and streams newly unearthed from being culverted under the concrete. On this morning, at probably at many other times, this park is hugely popular with walkers, runners, cyclists of all speeds, and dogs in all sizes, shapes and muddiness; it’s hard to find a quiet moment to search for a geocache!

The Pan

Hill Start Hill

We walked past the site of ‘The Pan’, which makes for both interesting signposts and some old and obvious jokes, past ‘Hill Start Hill’, and on to a section of old tarmac which must have been an experimental cycle lane junction, complete with road signs (they were tested on this site), and on towards the northern edge of the park.

Out of position road sign?

The trees thinned, and we emerged onto a wide section of tarmac which turned away from us, the ‘Banked Curve’. This is part of the test circuit from the TRL, where cars used to hurtle around at very high speeds. It’s 10m from bottom to top of the banking, and we both tried, and failed to climb it, though, annoyingly, dogs have no problems. Around the edges of the banking are small green boxes (a bit like telecoms boxes), monitoring boxes left over from testing days, and these have all been kept, some re-used as minibeast hotels, some to become mini-museums or libraries.

Banked Curve

Minibeast hotel

Bird box? Bat box?

Turning back towards the car park, we passed the old fire ponds and fire tower, plus a relic of something automotive … a winner’s podium … strange.

No races near here recently!

After a few more minutes we were back at the car park, and two hours had vanished in a flash. Ten caches attempted, ten found, and an interesting country park. It’s good now, though very, very new. Come the spring, with new growth, it’ll be lovely, and even better with a few year’s maturity, a good place to return to as it develops.

And here is just one of the caches we found (but every single one was special):

July 29 Simons Wood, Wokingham

This was week 3 of the Mary Hyde challenge. This week to gain the Mary Hyde souvenir one had to find or deposit a trackable. Finding trackables can often be tricky, as frequently caches are listed as ‘containing a trackable’ but due to various reasons, the trackable is missing. We were therefore grateful we had a trackable in our possession, Annerschter (aka Henry’s Cat). But where to place it ? The weather was forecast to very wet so a short caching trip was planned in Simons Wood on the border of Wokingham/Crowthorne/Finchampstead. Fingers crossed we would finish before it rains!

Simons Wood is owned the National Trust, and is a heavily wooded, and in places heavily rhododendron-ed. The National Trust are slowly removing many of these large invasive plants, but it will still take some time until Simons Wood loses its ‘jungle’ feel.

Is it a jungle or is it Simon’s Wood?

We’ve cached here before – way back in July 2014 when we found one the UK’s oldest geocaches, first hidden in 2003.
Today would be on the other side of the Wood and we would circumnavigate a property known as ‘The Heritage Club’.

Our first find, was well hidden under a fallen tree. We quickly discovered though, it was not a simple find. The cache had been procured from cache maker JJEF, and we had to work out how to open the cache! Like many of JJEF’s caches, it only takes a minute or two..but it gave our ‘little grey cells’ a light work out. As the cache was quite big, it was here placed Annerschter in.

No prizes for guessing where the cache is …

…here!

The second and third caches were harder to find. The hints were ‘near a circular clearing’ and ‘in the roots of a silver birch’. Well, woodland is always changing. Clearings are not clearings for long, silver birches tend to form a mini forest of their own.

For both caches we spent 10-15 minutes looking at a myriad of hiding places, and came close to DNFing both.

Amost a DNF !

Fortunately persistence paid off, and we were successful at each.

Our route back to the car passed the gates of ‘The Heritage Club’, a grandiose title which can easily be mistaken. It is not some 17th century building, or 19th century steam railway.. it is in fact a nudist holiday camp.

The Heritage Club

This accounts for the very high, prison-like fences surrounding the property. Given our struggles to find the last two caches we probably wouldn’t have seen anything if the fences weren’t so high!

Last cache of the day

The skies were darkening and cars had headlights on (at 11 am on a July morning!) we had a quarter of a mile yomp along a pavement back to the car. One cache to find – magnetic behind a road sign – and we would have finished. Yards from the car park, the first raindrops fell and we reached the car without getting too wet but having gained another Mary Hyde souvenir.

February 28 : Leap Year weekend part II

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Leap Year Weekend Caching Souvenir

Our original plan for caching on the Leap Year weekend was to find a cache – any cache – on February 29th, to fill that one day in the caching calendar that is only up for grabs once every four years. But somewhere in our planning, there had been a bit of ‘scope creep’ and out we went again, on the second day in the weekend, to look for geocaches.

Puzzle cache solved

Once more, we had decided on just two local caches. The first was another puzzle cache from the ‘Berkshire Residents’ series, with the final cache somewhere off a path leading from Nine Mile Ride. (Editor’s note: that’s not a very big clue as Nine Mile Ride is about seven and a half miles long!) Some of the cryptic clues which had enabled us to solve this puzzle involved ‘sports champion’ and ‘multiple jobs’. We left the geocar and headed off down a track, then grovelled around in the trees on either side, eventually finding the cache some little way from where the GPS said it should be. Ho hum. As we headed back to the geocar, we had to step aside smartly as a 4×4 came trundling up the track, before stopping to move a fallen branch. This didn’t seem quite right – surely this wasn’t a road? But the 4×4 driver assured us that he was in the right and we didn’t feel inclined to argue. Ho hum again.

Somewhere along Nine Mile Ride …

Back to the geocar, and time for the next cache, which was also along Nine Mile Ride. This cache is one that Mr Hg137 has covertly attempted, without a GPS (and without success) on previous occasions when passing by while working. Time for a concerted attempt by team Hg137. The cache title is ‘It’s with 20m of the coordinates specified’, so we stood at the spot of said coordinates and then fanned out to search for the cache. Mr Hg137 struck lucky and had the cache, seemingly within seconds, while I was still staring vaguely at the nearest tree to the coordinates. Ho hum for a third time. So, two caches, two successes, and another day bagged in the Leap Year weekend.

January 23 : Mixed weather and mixed fortunes in Crowthorne

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Crowthorne is replete with our caching failures – we have nicknamed them ‘Nemesis caches’. And on a mixed-weather morning, a local caching trip seemed just right. It was almost exactly two years, and 800 caches, since our last attempts at these caches, so maybe our searching skills have improved in the interval?

Crowthorne Church

Our first Nemesis cache was ‘Sidetracked – Crowthorne’, part of a country-wide series placed close to railway stations. So far we have found 25 of them, from Edinburgh to Lake on the Isle of Wight, and from busy London termini to tiny local stations. Maybe our searching skills really had improved, as we found the cache after only a few minutes. The cache itself was of a design we hadn’t encountered before, and which blended seamlessly into its surroundings; perhaps that was why we didn’t find it last time?

Feeling triumphant, we tackled our next ‘Nemesis cache’, opposite the gates to Wellington College. The college entrance was busy with cars and coaches coming and going to sports events, so we felt a bit … on show. This time we weren’t nearly as efficient at finding the cache, but some minutes of wandering up and down, peering in bushes, reading cache logs and generally bumbling about eventually led us to the target. Two down!

Busy Saturday at Wellington College

And here our luck ran out. On down the busy road we went to ‘Nemesis cache’ number 3. The same strategies that had worked twice already that morning were not working now. We gave up after some minutes of furtling around behind a BT box, as we were getting nowhere, and we were a bit conspicuous to folk coming and going from a side road. (Why does the entire population of Crowthorne drive about on Saturday mornings, we wondered?)

We moved on to attempt some new (to us) caches, placed since we last cached here. It didn’t get better. We didn’t find the next two caches either; three failures in a row is not good at all! (Editor’s note: one of those DNFs has now been confirmed as missing by the cache owner.) Fourth time lucky – we found another cache tucked beneath a hedge, though once again we felt slightly uncomfortable as we rootled away so close to people’s houses, which is always a problem with urban/suburban caching.

Eventually we arrived in bustling central Crowthorne, to attempt another newish cache. Once again we were unsuccessful. Actually, we didn’t feel too bad about this failure, as the cache hadn’t been found for five months up to then, and still remains unfound. Maybe it, too, is no longer there?

Where’s that cache? Not here!

We wanted to finish with a find – it’s always dispiriting when then last (or first) cache of the day is a DNF (did not find), so we re-tried another of our Nemesis caches, ‘Disappearing Berkshire #1 – Buckler Cars’ ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckler_Cars ) . The cache is a short multi, themed around the area where the cars were built; the cache hint had been subtly altered since our last attempt, so we were hopeful. As before, we followed the route to GZ and found ourselves in a familiar alley. Some equally familiar searching followed, followed by another DNF (they were becoming familiar, too). Oh well – Crowthorne remains replete with unfound caches … maybe we’ll return in another two years to try again?

PS Here, as ever, are some of the caches we found.