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.
We had some work deliveries to do in Woodley, between Reading and Wokingham. Noticing there were a few geocaches nearby, we decided to combine business with geocaching. After the work bit … we moved the geocar a little way, close to South Lake and Highwood nature reserve.
After finding a suburban cache near a church, we went for a stroll around South Lake. Even on a grey day in early spring, the lake looked great. Wildfowl of many species thronged the lake, and red kites mewed overhead – all very pleasant. And it’s popular with the locals, too, a lot of them seem to walk around the lake as their daily exercise.
The stroll had another purpose: we were collecting coordinates to find a Counting Vowels cache (assembling words and phrases from notices / signs /labels, you add up the vowels and arrive at a set of coordinates, where you hope to find a cache). The cache, and also our remaining targets for the morning, were to be found (we hoped) in the Highwood nature reserve, adjacent to the lake.
By now we were wondering why there was a chunk of lake and woodland amid what is quite a built-up area. Back at home, a bit of research told us that South Lake was originally a fish pond, and was enlarged into the current lake in the early 1800s. There was also a smaller lake, North Lake, a little way away, but that disappeared under housing about 50-60 years ago. And Highwood nature reserve used to be part of Woodley Lodge, which had an arboretum in the grounds, which explained why we saw some unusual trees in the woods. The Lodge has also disappeared; Bulmershe School was built on the site, also around 50-60 years ago.
Sequoia
We set off into the woods and followed clear paths back and forth to find the Counting Vowels cache, plus another, squirrel-themed cache (though we didn’t spot any squirrels). We’d been doing well so far, but our final cache was a total failure. We got to within a few paces of the cache, according to our GPS, and were looking for something like “a hole in a mossy stump”. We examined every likely object in the vicinity. Maybe we weren’t being observant enough, but we couldn’t spot it. We decided to give up when we started asking each other questions like … how tall does a stump have to be before it’s a tree?’ … ‘how much moss is mossy? … ‘how big/small does a hole have to be before it qualifies?’ … and we knew then that we weren’t going to succeed! (FYI the cache has now been moved.)
And that concluded our morning of work and geocaching. We went home to the “office” for lunch.
We have geocached once before in the Wellesley Woodlands, in December 2019. Then, it was raining hard, we got comprehensively soaked, and gave up. Today, we picked a different part of the area, and hoped for better weather.
Wellesley Woodlands comprise 110 hectares of woodlands interlinked by a network of footpaths. We chose the eastern end, where a cache series, the ‘Sycamore Trail’, is laid out along a walking trail of the same name which circles Chalk Farm Lake between Aldershot and Ash Vale. On a cold winter’s morning it was quiet except for waterfowl and fishermen. (Editor’s question: Why, why do they need so much kit?)
The series starts close to the small car park between lake and canal, then wends its way along grassy tracks around the lake. The caches are hidden in, under or behind signs or various bits of natural material, and not one of them would attract even a glance from a non-cacher, they blend in very well indeed. So well that it took us a while to find them all; the hints provided with each cache were very, very useful.
Watch out for bugs!
About half the caches have an ‘animal’ theme, or, alternatively, have been invaded by a range of plastic bugs, swarming all over. And every single cache is well worth finding, there is a little added extra for every one. Only one cache log disappointed; it has been oh-so-wet recently and the cache log … oh dear, sodden and well stuck. We got it out eventually, and it was very wet and very full. We’ve put another piece of paper in as a temporary log, but it won’t last that long, it’s not very big.
Soggy log
On a warmer day, we’d probably have returned to the picnic area near the car park for a coffee break among the trees, but it was both cool and damp this day so we gave it a miss. Nevertheless, a great little series at any time of year.
Subtitled : Two wrongs don’t make aright.….butmany more wrongs sometimes do!
A few geocachers are really, really keen on being the First-to-Find (FTF) a new geocache. They will be notified of a new geocache with a ‘ping’ on their phone, and they are out of the door in a flash. We do not fall into that category.
One of the many lakes at Dinton Pastures
It is surprising therefore we have managed 5 FTFs in our 3600 finds. One of them, was way back in November 2017, and was the first cache in the ‘Counting Vowels’ series set by Mikes54. Today we happened to notice number 100 Counting Vowels had been placed in Dinton Pastures in Winnersh. It had not been found. Sadly for us, we were expecting a household delivery, so it was a few hours later, we noticed the cache was still ‘unfound’. We dropped everything and headed out.
It was an early November afternoon, and the 10 mile drive took ages. Every set of traffic lights were red, and progress was slow. We had no means of knowing if another cacher had found the cache while we we travelling.
We squeezed into the suggested car park space (were we too late?), and we walked to the first waypoint we eyed everyone suspiciously. Did they have the smile and happy face of achieving a FTF ? We couldn’t tell.
Lots of words to choose from
The counting vowels series take you to noticeboards, seats and signs. You write down certain words, and hence the vowels. Count the vowels, apply some arithmetic and derive some coordinates for the final hiding place. We’ve done several of these caches, we know what to expect.
Our first noticeboard had words pointing left, and words pointing right. The question on the cache description said use the LEFT arrow, which we did. The two ladies who were standing at the sign, stood and nattered, as we scribbled away.
Red Framed Notice
The second waypoint took us to a complex noticeboard. We saw the red framed words and wrote them down.
A family were sitting at waypoint 3. Normally we would have let them sit, but a FTF was at stake. We politely asked if we could see the inscription they were hiding. Just as one of the adults was saying “We are not sure, our child is autis.. “. We needn’t have worried, the autistic child, stood up, shook Mrs Hg137’s hand whilst Mr Hg137 memorised the necessary information (A man’s name AND a ladies name – including the ‘AND’).
(The bench was a memorial bench, and it was some while later, Mr Hg137 realised he had met and had chatted to the 2 people whose names were engraved in the bench…we’re talking 30+ years ago!)
Waypoint 4, another bench, and another few words to write down.
We had the right number of words, but the vowels didn’t add up. We needed 23, we had 24. Where did the extra vowel come from? We pondered, and decided we had to retrace our steps all the way back to waypoint 1. (We didn’t want to disturb the autistic family again)
We’ve been here before !
On arrival at waypoint 1, we checked the waypoint question and it mentioned the RIGHT arrow. Huh ? We were sure it said LEFT…this was where the error clearly was, so we corrected our words and vowels…and still had too many vowels. Mmm.
We checked waypoint 2. Again we read the waypoint question and we noticed another error. (Clearly we were putting speed over accuracy). We had to write down the red words on a specific part of the noticeboard, not the words in the red frame. Correction made…and the vowel total still didn’t agree.
About this time, a man walked by, eyeing us up at the noticeboard. Was he a cacher ? We thought he was. We followed him, thinking he was better at information gathering than us..After quite a long walk in the wrong direction, we decided he wasn’t and headed back to waypoint 3.
Not this way!
The family had left the seat at waypoint 3, so we sat there, and checked and re-checked our calculations.
We decided to put our A,E,I.O and U into the calculation, even though we still had one too many vowels. One of the calculations came to 10, and as a single digit number was needed, we decided to make the total 9 to make all the sums work.
We had some coordinates, which weren’t too far away. Indeed we event spied a hint object. Mikes54’s hints are very exact. For this cache he mentioned a wooden structure and a type of bush. Our coordinates led us to the structure… it took us a few minutes to find the appropriate bush…and then the cache!
Were we the first to find the cache?
Somehow we had found the cache! But were we the First-to-Find ?
We gingerly opened the container and found…a completely blank log … we were the First-to-Find !
First to Find ! Yay !
Cheers all round!
We returned home, logged our find, and told the owner the numbers need a little adjustment. And that we thought was that.
But…
… we shouldn’t really have found the cache at all.
Mikes54 had a good look at our online log on http://www.geocaching.com, and realised he had made a major setting error. When the cache was published the questions in the cache description, and the questions for each waypoint should have been the same, but they weren’t. This is why we chose LEFT not RIGHT at waypoint 1. It was why we had included the word ‘AND’ in one answer when we shouldn’t.
Somehow, the vowels we did find were good enough for us to get close enough to find the cache. If the questions had been much more different we would still be wondering around Dinton Pastures.
Sometimes Two wrongs don’t make aright.….butmany more wrongs do!
When Mr Hg137 asked if I had any suggestions for geocaching, I asked if we could go somewhere with waterside walks and maybe autumn colours, too. He suggested Shepperton Green and Littleton with its many lakes, so off we went. Little did I know there would also be a plastic plesiosaur and lot of foam fruit, too!
St Mary Magdalen, Littleton
Starting near Shepperton Film Studios, our first cache was the Church Micro at St. Mary Magdalene, Littleton. Several other people were in the churchyard, armed with gardening equipment, tidying the churchyard ready for the Remembrance Day service the day after. We slipped unobtrusively (we hoped) into the churchyard, went around the side of the church opposite the gardeners, and searched for the cache; unusually for a Church Micro, it was inside church land. Having found a small wooden container, we slid back the base to reach the log … church bells pealed out from inside the cache! Wow! (See our ‘caches of the year’ post at the end of this year to see exactly what it was.)
Smiling, we sneaked back out of the churchyard to start our next cache. We needed to visit a post box – just across the road – and to use some of the numbers on said box to generate a direction and a reverse bearing. In the past we’ve made hard work of this sort of cache, so we had done some pre-thinking, had a plan, and a compass to supplement the GPS. We assembled the coordinates and bearing, and I sorted out the compass, being mightily relieved when the direction of travel arrow pointed in a sensible direction. Off we went, arriving somewhere that matched GPS, compass and cache hint. Just a matter of looking around after that – and the cache was found at the second or third item we examined.
A bit more walking and one more cache brought us to the start of the lakes, old gravel pits, now flooded, variously known as Ellis Water (fishing), Littleton Lake (sailing) and Sheepwalk Lake (wildlife). Paths run beside the lakes, which also house a series of caches titled ‘5-A-DAY’, each with the description:
… “A healthy geocache I know many people who started geocaching to get out and about and improve their fitness and well being, and we all know that we are recommended to eat 5 (or is it 10 now) portions of fruit and vegetables a day. Well with this series of caches you can do both. “…
The caches are all named after fruits – Banana, Kiwi, Lemon, Mango, Orange, Peach, Pear, and Red Apple – and all the cache containers consist of a piece of the appropriate fruit, made from foam. Not the average cache container! A couple of the fruit have suffered with time, e.g. the red apple is most definitely not red any longer, but most are bright, colourful, realistic and just … fun.
‘Red’ AppleOrangeKiwiBananaFoam fruit!
While we found these caches, we followed tree-lined paths between and around the lakes. We saw sailing races in progress, Lots and lots of birds visible (what is the collective noun for coots – ‘Coot Club’, maybe?), fishermen camped out in little tents, quite a few dog walkers, and a family of four, out cycling. Otherwise – no-one at all. For a little while we were very close to the M3, and a little later we passed a sign advising us to proceed no further as toxic oak processionary moth caterpillars were out and about. We decided they wouldn’t be doing much in November and carried on anyway. We didn’t see any …
After a picnic lunch beside the lakes, we emerged onto Sheep Walk, found another cache and then set off northwards towards our starting point. We arrived at Shepperton Green, passed a pub, the Barley Mow, and something caught our eye in the bushes in the car park. We investigated. It was a plastic plesiosaur (well , maybe fibreglass). Obviously, the sort of creature one finds in a car park in west London!
That dinosaur must have distracted us, as we didn’t find either of our remining two caches. Our first failure was at Wood Road Scout Hut. Worse, we were spotted! A muggle hailed us from a nearby rooftop with a call of ‘are you geocachers?’ and then came to join in the search, but our combined efforts still failed to find it.
Wood Road Scout Hut – a little dilapidated
And finally, we crossed the small River Ash on a footbridge at a ford. Somewhere here, we should have found a cache aptly named ‘Watersplash’. We had a really good look and feel around all the places we thought a cache could be hidden, and also fashioned a stick-y tool to have a deeper feel into crevices. But we couldn’t find it, even after we had interrogated the local duck population on likely places to look; they wouldn’t tell us, as we didn’t have food for them. So, a slightly downbeat end to a really good autumnal walk.
Watersplash – over the River Ash – but no cache!
Here are some of the other (non-fruity) caches we found:
After a very rainy Saturday, Sunday was bright and sunny and we had time for a very short caching trip. We went to Horseshoe Lake, a flooded gravel pit a handful of miles from home. From the small car park, we set off past the activity centre. People were paddleboarding, some with dogs as passengers, and all were having a jolly good, wet time.
We were only looking for three caches, one of them a multicache from the Counting Vowels series. We started with the Counting Vowels, collecting some numbers from seats, noticeboards and signs (you do calculations with these found numbers to derive the coordinates of the cache). Part way through this we decided to break off and find one of the other caches, which was quite close. We should know better, it always, always, always goes wrong for us if we try to do more than one cache at a time. And so it did today …
We approached along a footpath, to within a few tens of yards, but decided to ignore a ‘Likely Path’ which led into the trees in the correct direction. We then decided the cache must be on the nearby road, so walked to the end of the footpath and a little way along a very quiet country lane, Ambarrow Lane. Part way along, we could see a bridle path, so climbed a bank to walk along that instead. After a bit we were standing next to a ‘Likely Tree’, but it was on the wrong side of a fence. We retraced our route to the footpath and went back along that till we reached the ‘Likely Path’ (why didn’t we read past logs?). Following the path, which arrived back at the ‘Likely Tree’, but on the other side of the fence. No, that wasn’t the location, but it was very close by. . (Does it sound like we knew what we were doing? Umm, no, we didn’t have a clue…)
Likely Tree?
Having made hard work of finding that first cache, we returned to our original objective, the Counting Vowels cache. This went much more smoothly; we proceeded round the lake, finding waypoints and numbers and dodging muggle walkers, runners, cyclists, and many, many dogs, quite a few rather damp from a swim (that’s the dogs, not the walkers, runners, or cyclists!). We worked out some coordinates, and we found the cache, our second, exactly where our calculated coordinates said it should be.
By now, we’d circled the lake and had arrived at the River Blackwater and turned upstream, towards our start point, following two long distance paths, the Three Castles Path and the Blackwater Valley Path. We’ve walked both paths at various times, but we hadn’t walked along this section since early November 2018. It’s a wooded section, with a gently meandering, tree-fringed river, sunlight filtering through the trees, swans paddling on the river … lovely …
Our final cache lay among the trees on the side of the path away from the river – we were glad of that, it can be precarious if you have to climb out over the river. We had to search several trees before we found the new cache, only two months old, which was still new and shiny. It wasn’t far from here back to the car park, which was now full with cars. A successful morning walk! And here’s what we found:
Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.
On a cold day at the end of January, while on a daily lockdown exercise walk, we tried – and failed – to find the one cache we had set out to discover. Most dispiriting!
Four weeks on from that attempt, we were back in Snaprails Park, ostensibly out for our daily exercise, but really to have another attempt at this cache. At least it was warmer today!
Pokemon people
There were many people in the park, more than we were expecting, but most of them weren’t together, or looking at the scenery, or each other, simply gazing intently at their phones. We thought for a bit … aha! … Pokemon … we confirmed our suspicions by asking one of them.
This tree …?
This path? …
Here? …
So confident was Mr Hg137 of finding the cache that he hadn’t even brought the GPS. That meant it took a few moments hesitation before finding the correct spot. This log? … that tree? … this path? … that bush? And then began our slow, steady circling of the place. The first circuit yielded nothing, save a puzzled glance from a muggle. I returned to the path, paced up and down a bit, collected my thoughts, and started a second circuit. There was one place I’d not tried before, and … there it was!!! I extracted the container, alerted Mr Hg137, and we stepped away a short distance to sign the log. I’ve learnt not to shout, “I’VE FOUND IT!!!” on these occasions, as it attracts attention, a quiet whistle is a better way of getting Mr Hg137’s notice; he calls it ‘the Mrs Hg137 bird whistle’.
After returning the cache to its previous position, and hiding it as before, invisible to a passing glance, we walked back through the park, heading triumphantly home. The park was emptying now, as the Pokemon people melted away, their work also done for the day.
Hello, Mrs Hg137 here. Happy New Year!
How / if / where to go geocaching, and remain within lockdown guidelines? We thought hard about what to do, and came up with one cache we hadn’t found, well within walking distance, in Snaprails Park in Sandhurst.
Snaprails Park
Our chosen cache was from the Counting Vowels series, where you visit a number of signs (and other things with words on) total up the number of occurrences of each vowel and use that to generate the cache coordinates. It’s one of our favourite series, and we’ve found twelve so far out of the eighty or so in the series; most of them are set by mikes54, but this one has been set in collaboration with VR7. Moreover, it was last found at the end of October 2020, so it shouldn’t be harbouring any nasty coronaviruses if it hadn’t been touched since then. All this sounded promising, and it also gave us chance to go to somewhere slightly different on our daily walk.
We walked to the park, passing under the gaily painted underpass to reach the western edge of the park, and the start of the cache. Runners, walkers, and cyclists passed us, children played in the playground, while squirrels chased up and down the trees and ducks paddled in the stream.
We worked our way round the little lake in the winter sunshine, collecting coordinates as we went. A checksum was provided with the cache descriptions; it came out correctly and the coordinates took us to somewhere that matched the hint. So far so good.
But we simply could not find the cache. We went round and round the object where we thought the cache *should* be and searched in as many likely looking spots as we could find. But no cache.
So many leaves to search through!
We think the cache may have got buried in leaf litter in the three months since it was last found – and we also know that we find VR7’s caches very hard to spot, we’ve come to grief over their caches before. But it gives us an excuse to walk this way again soon!
Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.
Coronavirus restrictions change so fast! On Friday afternoon, we had planned out a nice little caching route, just over the county border in Hampshire. Then came the daily coronavirus briefing. Oops, Hampshire would be off limits from midnight that night because our location (Berkshire) was moving to tier 3 restrictions, while Hampshire was remaining in tier 2. So no boundary crossing for us … On Saturday morning, we thought again. The sun was shining and it seemed a shame not to go out. Aha! We found some caches in Martin’s Heron, to the north-west of Bracknell.
Savernake Park
Off we went; we just squeezed into the car park at Savernake Park and set off round the lake towards the first cache. A muggle and dog approached. Mr Hg137 paused … it was someone he knew … all of a sudden it turned from us searching for a geocache to us demonstrating how to geocache to a possible new cacher. Sadly, we couldn’t get near the cache, let alone find it, so it wasn’t a great demonstration, and Holly the dog was not very impressed either. Anyway, the most likely route to the cache is now blocked off with a woven wooden fence, we couldn’t find another way in, and eventually gave up.
Mural under the railway
We walked on northwards, under the railway, along a path following a small stream which marks the edge of Martin’s Heron. Crikey, there were lots of muggles about, and they were all heading to/from the nearby Tesco! In a short gap between passing muggles we approached the next cache, took note of the hint, headed for a likely location, and found the cache after a fingertip search.
Maybe there’s one up here?
Found one!
Geocaching-wise, it now went rather wrong. We failed to find the next three caches, either on our outward walk or on a repeat search on our way back. We rummaged in ivy, Mr Hg137 did some speculative tree climbing, we peered under stones, behind fence posts, and into the depths of bushes, all without success. A few days later, we looked at those caches again; other cachers had been out after us and they, too, hadn’t succeeded; maybe it wasn’t us being bad at searching but that the caches were missing?
All that not finding things had taken some time. The afternoon had moved on, the sun was setting, it was getting steadily darker, and Christmas lights twinkled in the twilight. We walked back towards the lake through the gathering gloom, approaching our final cache (please, please could we find this one, so far we’d only found one out of five!). We honed in on the correct spot (phew, found one at last!). The cache didn’t look too bad at first sight but we opened it and – oh dear, it was sopping wet, and there was a hole in the side of the cache container. We removed the slug and tipped out the water, but there was no chance the log was signable, it was just too wet.
A rather wet cache
Oh well, it had been good to get out and to go somewhere new. As for caching, sometimes there are successes … and sometimes there are quite a lot of failures!
And coronavirus restrictions change so fast! After arriving home, we watched the daily coronavirus briefing. Our location (Berkshire) was moving from tier 3 to tier 4, after just a single day in tier 3. So not much going anywhere for us for a little while …
One of our favourite cache owners or setters is JJEF and we hadn’t undertaken any of their caches in a while. The caches are typically engineered/constructed by the JJ half of the caching team. They are generally easy to spot, but hard to open to release the log for signing.
Felix Farm Fishing Lake
We noticed on http://www.geocaching.com two mini-series in the countryisde about half-way between Bracknell and Maidenhead that we hadn’t undertaken. (‘Countryside’ is used in its broadest context as one of the caches was next to the M4 barriers!).
The two mini-series would take us on two there-and-back footpaths on two sides of a fishing lake. As we walked by the lake for the first time, the anglers car park was bustling with ‘overnight’ fishermen packing up, and the day fishermen arriving. Boats were being launched for open water angling.
The first series was ‘Twin Lanes North’ and unsurprisingly we were heading North, towards the motorway. We then returned and undertook ‘Twin Lanes West’.
Twin Lanes North
We had three caches to find before arriving at the motorway and the first was accessible from a ditch. We were grateful that the late summer/early Autumn had been dry and we wondered how the cache could be accessed during the wet winter months.
JJEF caches require work at GZ. It is not just a matter of finding a small pile of sticks, unstacking them, opening the revealed plastic box, signing the log and then reversing the process. Having found an object at GZ, JJEF caches require you to ‘open’ a box. The question is ‘How?’
JJEF even creates dummies for you to find!
We won’t spoil your fun by describing each cache in detail but suffice to say we normally go armed with magnets, string, penknives as additional aids.
Twin Lanes West
For one of the caches we required a narrow cylindrical object to open the cache. We dismantled a spare biro to ‘release’ the ink tube, but a nearby stick was far more useful! Another cache needed an air pump (yes, really!) – thankfully provided…but how it was used was ingenious! Sometimes the cache needed rotating or moving, and this technique worked for a couple of caches. Another cache could only be opened by aligning two dials.
But there was one cache we didn’t find, the one by the motorway. Normally JJEF containers are easy to spot, but we found nothing. Whether the weather had damaged it, or the construction of an additional lane of the M4 had dislodged it, we will never know. But we spent 15 minutes looking fruitlessly for a box yards from roaring traffic – not the most enjoyable way to spend a Saturday morning!
So 7 caches attempted, 6 found and, more importantly opened – and we saw no-one excepting the fishermen and two horsewomen, so our searching and puzzle-solving skills were uninterrupted.
sandhurstgeocachers 