Northumberland and Tyne & Wear Weekend

The weekend weather looked pretty wet again for the lakes so yet another weekend we couldn’t continue our Wainwright bagging.  So the next thing lined up on our to-do list was a trip to the North East where the weather looked fairly dry.

FRIDAY

We set off late afternoon on Friday and decided to break up the journey by stopping off to play the Historic Carlisle wherigo.  It was dark when we arrived but was easily doable.  It was a very informative town trail style wherigo, the sort we really like, it took us to some really interesting locations and was a fun way to spend the evening before continuing our  journey to Northumberland.

SATURDAY

We woke to a very light smattering of snow, but apparently not as much as we’d had back home!

First stop of the day was LQ: Northumberland, then we bagged a couple of trigpoints before finding an old cache from 2002.

 This was situated down a very narrow gated lane so I had to jump in and out to open and close the gates.

Then off to LQ: Tyne & Wear via a virtual.  We are gradually working our way through the Little Quest series, it’s taken us a long time to do and to-date we've found 28 out of the 47.  Although we’ve completed all the counties a long time ago we have still to complete the LQ series but we’re really enjoying picking them off slowly but surely.

LQ: Tyne and Wear

We rounded off the day by completing the Tynemouth Trail virtual, this was a great way to spend the evening.

We stopped off on our way round to enjoy a chippy tea at Longsands Fish Bar – we’d highly recommend it, generous sized portions of fish and chips and it was lovely to be able to sit in so we could get warmed up before continuing on the trail.

SUNDAY

Up bright and early and enjoyed a walk around Hartley Bay and Collywell Bay. We got talking to a couple that were staying near us in their camper van, we've met some lovely people since we've had ours.

When planning our trip to the area we had hoped to be able to visit St Mary’s Island, an island only accessible at low tide, but we were unsure if our visit would coincide with low tide.  After walking out to the earthcache at Hartley Bay we came back to the camper and could see that the causeway to the island was still under the sea so we figured that once we’d walked the ¾ mile down to Curry’s Point the tide should have gone out enough to walk across.

Tide still in

Shouldn't be long now

We arrived at the causeway at about 9.15, according to the sign we should be able to walk across the causeway from 9.30. By 9.30 the sea was still covering part of the causeway and as the sea was quite choppy it was difficult to see how deep the water was, so we gave it another 5 minutes and steadily made our way across in our wellies.

Mark making his way across

After a short walk we were on the island.  The lighthouse was closed but we did think that £3.15 per adult was rather extortionate so wouldn’t have paid to go up anyway.  We enjoyed a walk around the island and there were signs asking you not to get within 50m of the seals on the island so we were hopeful that we may see some but after doing a full circuit we didn’t see any.  There was a cache to find though so that was a bonus.  Another one of those ‘if it weren’t for Geocaching’ kind of places.

Chilly wind glad I've got my parka

Next stop was a couple of wherigos in Newcastle, this took quite some time and then before dark we stopped off at Marsden Bay in South Shields to do an Earthcache.  This has to be one of the most amazing places for unusual rock formations - and will definitely come back to explore more of this coast in the future.

We had hoped to look around National Trust Souter Lighthouse, it was built in 1871 and was the first lighthouse in the world purpose built to use electricity.  Unfortunately it had just closed as we arrived.  Oh well, another reason to come back in the future.

We played another wherigo on the way home and this made us much later leaving than we'd anticipated.  The weather had taken a turn for the worst, our route was diverted which added on a good hour to the journey and we hit thick fog once we reached Cumbria - we were really glad to get home.