One day sleet, next day caching

28th & 29th October

Yesterday was one of those "challenging" days, boating wise, in fact it was pretty dire. The weather started cold and swiftly deteriorated to wet sleet and wind. I know I've often said that there's no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing for the conditions, but this was a bit ridiculous.

Nonetheless, we wanted to shop in Rugeley and move on to Wolseley, so I got all togged up in a fleece, woolly hat and waterproof outers and started out. It was certainly one of those days when the Squirrel earned its keep, burning steadily away so that whenever one of us retreated below, there was that wonderful warm glow as soon as you got inside.

On arrival at Rugeley we had a coffee before setting out to shop. There's a branch of Seconds Ahead here which supplied us with replacement night attire at a very reasonable price, and we got everything else we wanted in Morrisons.

By now it was half eleven, so rather than boat off straight away, we took some time to put the shopping away and then had an early lunch. Then it was on through the sleet to find a mooring at Wolseley, which we made by two o'clock.

A quiet afternoon followed: the internet connection isn't too good here, but it's reasonably stable, just GPRS slow. It means that email could be checked, and a bit of web browsing done as long as you weren't in a hurry. Time was also taken to enjoy reading in front of the fire.

After the mad social whirl of Alrewas it was great to be quiet for a while.

Today dawned in very different mode. The sky had cleared overnight, and a strong frost had penetrated the Houdini surround, so that it was white on the brass frame. The Eberspacher did its stuff, and the Squirrel was soon burning well, so it wasn't too painful getting up, especially as we weren't in a hurry, and could afford to loaf in bed with cups of tea until the room temperatures had risen a bit.

It has to be admitted that the Houdini dripped rather a lot as the frost melted, but nothing that we couldn't cope with.

By nine we were setting off in search of our first geocache, enticingly named Retirement Plan – Tuesdays (Gardening). We found it quite quickly, in the grounds of the Wyevale Garden Centre, which was nice; we're seemingly getting the hang of the basics of this game.

Thus encouraged, we attempted Tarka Chance, not far away in the Wolseley Centre Staffordshire Nature Reserve. This is a multicache, that is you have to find some intermediate places before going on to the main location. In this case, the intermediates were virtual caches; nothing placed there, you just had to follow treasure hunt type clues, like counting the steps or noting the number on a plate on a tree, so as to use the resulting figures to complete the coordinates of the final location.

Having done this, we were able to walk straight to that position and find the cache, thereby generating an enormous sense of achievement. It continued to be a glorious day into the bargain, so we took a bit more time to wander round the reserve before falling back on Sanity for a mug of coffee.

For the rest of the day we've been doing stuff on board. My tipcat is growing steadily, and hopefully it won't be too long before it's ready to put in place. This will liberate the existing sad and squashed beast, which will be cannibalised for its attachment chains to use in the next new fender.

Tomorrow we'll go on a bit further to Great Haywood, where more geocaches await our attention.