1-3 April 2011

We've had a spate of DNFs this weekend - 4 out of the 16 we tried.

On Friday evening, we visited It's Treason in Kirkby Lonsdale after work. It has a difficulty of 2, so shouldn't have presented much of a problem - it's down a lane, which is overlooked by several houses, so we felt quite exposed searching for it. There are several nearby trees which hamper GPS reception and the clue is very vague. We decided to abandon the search after about 10 minutes when someone came into the lane. We'll go back and give it another go as it's near to work, but it's a very uninspiring cache for a caches sake, and I can't help but feel putting such a small container in ivy without much of hint warrants a higher difficulty rating.

On Saturday, we planned to take Sal's mum out for Mother's Day dinner near Kirkby Lonsdale, so we took a trip to Ingleton to grab some of the caches there. I've only been to Ingleton three times previously (I think), and never really properly round the village. It's a very nice village, lots of stunning views and there are around 10 caches within walkable distance. We had around 90 minutes before we needed to collect Sal's mum, so could only fit in five of these, and unfortunately two of them seem to have been muggled. Plaice to rest is a great place to set a cache (though it was not there when we visited, presumably muggled) as it's a bench right near the end of the Waterfalls walk, and several people puffed their way past as we tried to work out if the cache was still there or not. We even got to take in a little bit of caving (for feeble people) with Storey Grotto.

On Sunday, we headed down near Scorton to give some more of the LEGEND series a go, with a little leg of 9 between Scorton and Barnacre. Unfortunately the first one on the leg seems to have gone missing, but the rest were simple finds, across several muddy fields. On our way to the eighth, we were too literal in our following of the GPS, and crossed a stile into a field and ended up in a corner with nowhere to go, other than to retrace our steps. Still, by A Good Year we found a lamb escaped from a field, and in trying to get near to it to pick it up and put it back in it's field, managed to usher it to a corner with a gap in the wire for it to go back through. Our most community minded cache find so far!

Gressingham/Hornby - 25 March 2011

Attempting to find at least one cache per week, we stopped in Gressingham and Hornby on the way home from work to get a couple of simple find.

The first was Deborah's cache, a find on a little island by the beck, reached by a little bridge. A lovely, peaceful little site, and a perfect place to leave the memorial Lest We Forget geocoin we picked up in Todmorden last weekend.

Then a short drive to Castle Stede, just outside Horby. Parked before the bridge on the Gressingham side, and then a short walk to the cache site, which is an old World War Pill box. The cache isn't inside this, but nearby, but it took us some while to find the cache, which was well hidden - recommend poking with a stick. Again, we thought this would be an ideal place to drop off The Thing on a Sting travelbug, which wants to visit castles and spooky places - Castle Stede ticks at least one of those boxes.

With a fairly busy weekend planned, this at least satisfies our attempts to log one cache a week, and it was great to be out and about in the sun after work for a change - been a long while coming!

Todmorden - 19 March 2011

We had planned a weekend away geocaching, staying in the Rambles B&B near Hebden Bridge.

On the way, we stopped to complete a loop round Todmorden, a mixture of caches along the canal, on public footpaths and some along the road. I've never been to Todmorden, and it's a lovely old mill town, full of nice stone buildings. It was one of the first sustainable towns in the UK, and instead of flowerbeds, seems to have mini allotments dotted over the place. I approve!

Anyway, none of the caches were particularly remarkable, we completed several on the Todmorden section of the LEGEND series, to make a small dent in the 600 or so in the series. Our favourite of the day was the Stoodley Pikes Mini Me cache, which although a magnetic nano was a brilliant little piece of public art that many people will walk past without even noticing, but geocaching made us have a proper look at.

Trackables found...

Found three trackables on our trip to Todmorden and Hebden Bridge:



The thing on a string, which wants to travel "from castle to castle".

Lest we forget, a cache in memory of a soldier, which wants to stay in peaceful places.

Happy Caching - Great Britain, which wants to go to the Scottish Highlands and Ireland - we're hoping to take this to Northern Ireland later this year, and will email the cache owner for permission to hold onto it for a few weeks until we do. This one has travelled nearly 6000 miles so far!