Saturday 13 October 2012

Geolympix Marathon Series - A, C & B

Shaggy Ink Caps

Geolympix Marathon Series - Rings A, C and B

After starting this series a few weeks ago in September we were really keen to come back and finish it.  We'd pencilled today on the calendar and hoped we'd be lucky with the weather again.  We'd kept our eye on the Met office website all week (we spend a lot of time doing this ) and after a wet week the forecast was good for Saturday.  We've been really lucky with weekends for a few weeks now, just hope the good run of weekend weather lasts a bit longer.

We set our alarms for 5am and arrived in Skirmett just after 7.30am, after putting on our boots and having a quick cuppa we were ready to set off by 7.45am.
Brrrrr
A bit of a chilly start as we set off but we trusted the forecast and didn't bother with too many layers.

I know I probably say this a lot but I can't believe what a brilliant hobby caching is, I think it every time we go out, it's the perfect way to relax at the end of a hectic week, I absolutely love it and look forward to our trips all week ...... anyway I digress, back to the walk.........

Sorry no room for them

We completed ring A then repositioned the car in Turville to do Rings C and B.

The name of the village Fingest really made us laugh, not sure why but Mark decided that it was derived from the superative of  'Fing' (whatever that is) as in Fing, Finger, Fingest - on our return home I looked it up and the name actually comes from the Anglo Saxon name 'Thinghurst' which means wooded hill where assemblies are made

By about 13:30 the sky went very dark and the heavens opened, luckily only a short sharp shower and we didn't get too wet, then there was another short shower later on but we were mostly under the trees at this point.  Most of the day the sun shone and the skies were clear.

Beautiful start to the day


The series really is excellent, extremely well thought out with great scenery along the way.  Most of the containers are small turtle containers apart from a few micros .  The caches were all really straightforward to find with sensible hints but well hidden so not easy to spot by the passer-by.

Des escargots

All together we walked 16 miles, this included a break for lunch in Turville between the 2 loops and it
took us 8 hours, we went at a steady pace stopping along the way to admire the views, look at the scenery and watch wildlife.  In fact I think we saw a record number of deer today!  We saw many birds of prey, at one point a red kite flew out just above our heads, an amazing sight to see. We walked past a dead owl too which was sad to see  There was also lots of interesting fungi to spot.


There were 3 fields with cows and calves in but luckily they weren't any problem at all, as is the norm on long walks these days we didn't have our dogs with us so this would've helped of course as the dogs are cow magnets

We'd recommend this series of caches to anyone, you can either do them as one long 26 mile walk or break them off into shorter more manageable walks.


Then it was time to head home (via Maccy Ds of course) - Another top day out! 

Geolympix Marathon series - Ring A, C, B




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