There's a cache in this somewhere...

22nd & 23rd October

Elanor duly took us out for a meal the night before last. We went to the Swan at Fradley Junction, another pub that's had its ups and downs over the years. This time it was everything that the ones in Alrewas have failed to be recently. The food was standard pub grub, probably courtesy of 3663 or Brakes, but none the worse for that.

The service was cheerful and the prices reasonable, and I had a couple of very decent pints of Abbots. It made an excellent end to the period of my birthday celebrations; it's definitely back to the two to three units of alcohol per day now, and I'll start working on the drink free days one of these weeks...

The main feature of yesterday was our attempts to find our first geocache, namely Weir-d Wychnor, as visited by Mr Moorse of Guelrose recently. In theory, it's dead straight forward; programme the coordinates into the gps, walk to them, look around to find the cache tucked away in a tree or whatever and there you are.

In practice, this first attempt was complicated by our inexperience, and me being an idiot. (Saves Sheila having to make a comment on this post in due course.) This cache had originally been what's known as a multicache, that is, you find the first location, and there is a little container like a 35mm film pot which contains a bit of paper with the coords of the real cache.

I had noticed that, on the web page describing the cache, the owner had said that the first bit was no longer there, so here were the numbers that had been in it. This didn't stop dopey me from programming the original numbers into the Garmin, and we spent a merry hour plodding round a location in the middle of a flood meadow looking for something we should have known wasn't there.

So it was back to the boat, check the web page, confess, have cup of coffee and try again. This time, we were almost sure we were in the right place, except that the gps insisted it was just the other side of the river from where we were. Since the description said "accessible by footpaths from Alrewas village" this didn't seem likely.

Whilst we were hunting about, I got a voicemail to say that Brian Dominic was at the boat looking for us; he'd said he might drop in during the day. I rang him back, and then we trekked back through the village to the boat and had another coffee and a good natter with him.

After lunch, and becoming grimly determined to find this beast, we looked through all the logs and pictures of folk finding the cache. This at least showed that we were on the right side of the river, but hunting in the wrong thorn bushes.

We were both feeling quite weary by now, and I had a hearing test to go to at three. Sheila suggested that if she came with me to that, we could go on and make a final attempt to track down the cache. This we did, and this time, not only did we find the cache, but there was nothing seriously wrong with my hearing either, except for the impact of anno domini.

It was a great sense of achievement. I signed the log in the box, and Sheila took a photo of me holding it. Checking the gps showed a discrepancy of .002 in the W coord. I don't know if that's common; there's stuff to do with which datum you've got the thing set to use which I'm not fully up to speed with.

Today I went off to the GP first thing for the final round of medical stuff this time; again all well, basically, but a slight change of meds means that I'm going back in six weeks.

Back at the boat well before nine, we decided to attempt another cache, this time one in Fradley Nature Reserve. This went much more straightforwardly. When found, the cache was very close to where we expected it to be. This time we did the swapping bit that's part of the fun. Most caches contain a selection of small, low value items, and you can take one out and leave something of your own instead.

We've had a US one cent piece lurking about the boat for ages, looking like the original red cent, so I put that in, and took out a white six sided dice (or die for the purists). We took another pic, and off we went back to the boat for a quiet remainder of the day, especially as the forecast storm had arrived.

The boat's been rocking and rolling in the wind a bit all day since, but it's due to blow out overnight. Tomorrow we plan to water and wind, coming back to Alrewas and then Fradley for the weekend so as to give Elanor a hand with fixing her back garden fence. Then next week we'll take a break and head off to Stone for a while.