Wintry sun and some more caches

30th & 31st October

It was a dry but raw old morning yesterday for our chug through the two locks to Great Haywood. There is visitor mooring below Haywood Lock, of course, and a lot of usable towpath before that, very popular with the towpath lurkers, but experience shows that it's difficult if not impossible to get a mobile phone signal there, so we prefer to go up above if we can get a space.

On this occasion, there were a fair number of boats already tied, but then it was only half nine or so. We tacked on the end just before the lock – the towpath was a bit curvy, and Sanity ended with her bum sticking out a bit, but it would do. We moved her further along today, onto a straighter stretch out of view from the lock and bridge.

We spent the rest of the morning catching up with stuff. I checked what geocaches there were around here, and transferred the coordinates of the likely ones to the GPS. Elanor had told us the night before that a form from HMRC had arrived for Sheila, so we needed to see if the Post Office here was still taking Poste Restante (they are).

Then we had lunch and a pretty lazy afternoon, really. I got on with the tipcat, and Sheila did some crochet, but otherwise it was a case of reading the paper, browsing the internet in a necessarily leisurely fashion (only GPRS here) and otherwise just letting time trickle by.

Today it was bright and frosty first thing. We're sleeping with the cover over the Houdini hatch these nights, and when I took it off this morning there was frost all round the brass on the inside.

In these circumstances, it's important to put a waterproof cover over the bed before tackling the frost, which otherwise tends to come off in lumps and fall onto the duvet.

After breakfast we set off in search of some caches. We found two on the first go, both on the other side of the canal in some National Trust land. It was a glorious day to be doing it, sharply cold but very sunny, much more like winter than late autumn.

Geocaching is a bit like canal cruising; the gain is the impetus to visit places you'd might never have gone to without the excuse of the activity. All the times we've tied here or hereabouts, we've done a good bit of walking through the Shugborough estate and out the other side, but never on the offside of the canal for some reason.

Cross the remains of the carriage bridge, go under the railway, and you are in a very pleasant area of woodland and grazing: nothing dramatic, just relaxing and undemanding.

On the way back from the first cache (Elizabeth's Cousin Used to Live Opposite), we took a slightly different route, and found ourselves walking past the remains of an old quarry. I don't know if this is where they got the stone for Shugborough Hall from, but it made a fascinating little extra to the walk.

After the second, quite easy find, one (Not So Buried Treasure), the GPS announced that the next nearest I'd programmed in was Essex On the Chase?, which I'd forgotten about, so we didn't have the details about it with us.

We had a go at finding it anyway, and almost certainly were in the right place, but couldn't easily spot it, and anyway there was a bloke in a moored boat on the towpath opposite looking at us. In the sport, you shouldn't let non-geocachers ("Muggles", ho, ho) see what you are up to, a) so as not to alarm them, and b) so as to protect the cache from casual vandalism.

In the circs, we decided to abandon the attempt, and retreated to the boat for coffee and to check up on this cache.

Looking at its web page confirmed that we were in the right spot, just not quite high enough up a slope, so we left it for now, and will have another go on the way back.

After coffee, we set off in the other direction, onto the Staffs and Worcs, and found two more, Anglo Welsh and Swivel Bridge, quite easily. Sheila points out that this means we found one cache the first time out, two the second and four on the third day.

This is an exponential sequence, but I refuse to try for eight next time.

We've spent the rest of the day quietly again. I got some coal down off the roof, and then finished the tipcat. Sheila's been hunting the web for alternate supplies of ebooks. Prices of some new ones are quite crazy; Penguin, for example, gives only a couple of quid off the price of a hardback for the ebook equivalent.

It looks like the book publishers are making exactly the same mistake that the music publishers did in not adapting quickly enough to the impact of electronic, downloadable versions of their wares.

Already there are sites offering free books, and bootleg software available for stripping the DRM (Digital Rights Management) off legit copies, so that they can be made available via BitTorrent and the like.

If the publishers priced the new stuff at a discount from the paperback price, the black market would have much less reason to exist. As it is, I give it just a couple of years before we start to hear the wails from the publishers about the evil practices of bookleggers (now where was that term first used?)

Tomorrow we'll get a much needed fill of the water tank, then potter through to Tixall Wide for a few days.