Caching in Worcestershire

Young Acorns

This weekend Mark had work commitments so we couldn't go too far from home.  As luck would have it a new series popped up not too far away in Grafton Flyford last night so after dropping our son off at work we decided to make an early start and see if we could get some caching done before Mark's phone rang.

GF Series 

A series of 15 caches set on a 4 mile walk around the footpaths/bridleways and quiet lanes of Grafton Flyford.

The walk was about 4 miles along a mostly familiar route, as this was the starting point for the now archived ABFTN Christmas series.  The caches were a variety of hides and sizes, some quite tricky to find.  We even managed 2 FTFs and it was nice to see a few different people getting FTFs on this series - it's good to share .

On our way back to the car we took a detour back to GF3, we'd searched for it at the beginning of the walk but decided to leave it until the end so we could get on with the walk.  On arrival at GZ Dadu13 and Team Airtomoreira were searching so we joined forces but after another 10 minutes or so we couldn't find it so we went our separate ways.

An enjoyable walk in the countryside, then we continued on to the second series of the morning.

 

ECC Series

A series of 21 caches with Doctor Who themed titles set on a circular walk of just over 6 miles on the footpaths around the village of Earls Common.

We parked near to ECC 14 to start the series.  Our original plan was to just do part of the series as we thought we'd be pushing our luck doing the whole lot but when we reached the half way point we decided that as it was such a nice day to risk it and just hoped that Mark's phone wouldn't ring when we were quite a way from the car.

Favourite cache container

Quite a lot of the walk was set along little used paths and were quite overgrown in places and some of the paths were poorly marked which would've been hard going without GPS mapping.  A few of the fields had cows or horses in them but they were no trouble at all.

Much to my delight there was a trigpoint on the series, in fact Mark says my actual words when I spotted it were 'YAY!!  There's a trigpoint!!'  I'm very easily pleased.

Mere Court Trigpoint

On the whole we really enjoyed the walk, it was lovely to be out enjoying the countryside on a warm sunny day after months of rain.  Not being Doctor Who fans some of the titles were lost on us but our teenagers would've known straight away.  Luckily no knowledge of Doctor Who is required to complete the series

Whisper dog tired

On Sunday morning we were free until midday so decided to head over to Abbots Morton and try and complete the Letterbox series that we started a few weeks ago.  We parked at the village hall again and walked down to AM 13 to continue the series.  We took Whisper our yellow lab with us as she'd enjoyed the first part of the series with us, Poppy unfortunately wouldn't be up to such a long walk now.  Quite a long stretch between AM 14 and AM 15 was very boggy as it was along a narrow bridleway and with all the rain we've had it was completely churned up.  The rest of the walk was fine apart from a bull in the field on the way to AM 16 - when we entered the field the bull stood up so as we'd already starting walk around the edge we decided to just continue sticking to the edge and walking as quickly as we could without breaking into a run as tempting as it was.  The bull watched us but luckily it must've been too hot and lay back down again - PHEW!

Really enjoyed the walk but we rang out of time to find the bonus caches so we'll hopefully be back for an evening dog walk to find those.