Plan, Pack, Travel, Repeat: Caching in Staffordshire

Nearly Spring!

Caches - 32 + Bonus
Length of walk: 6.2 miles

A 6 mile walk around the village of Chorley in Staffordshire. The walk takes you along quiet country lanes and public footpaths. The bonus cache can be found en route and you will find the co-ords in a few of the caches in the series.

Our trip to Chorley today was planned at the last minute, the weather forecast didn't look great and we had time constraints so we had a few ideas of places to go and this one looked the most feasible in the time we had.

We parked at the suggested parking nearest to #1 just after 10.00 and as we were putting on our boots and waterproofs another car pulled up and we recognised it as Mr Wizz another cacher we'd met previously on a night cache as part of a meet up from the West Midlands Facebook group. We explained that we were going to try and finish the walk by 13:30 so warned him that we might walk a bit fast

....at this point I feel I ought to explain.... we have never really thought of ourselves as fast walkers until we bumped into another cacher a few months ago and he was sweating profusely trying to keep up with us and commented that we walked very fast. We nearly always only cache together so don't usually have to take anyone else's pace into consideration (our teenagers walk fast too) anyway........... by the time we got to the second cache Mr Wizz said that he had a lot more time to spare today than us and we should carry on ahead, so we said our goodbyes and carried on.

As it happened the rain cleared up just after we set off and the sun shone for most of the walk, it was a cold wind but the sun helped to keep us warm.

Farewell!

At #10 we met Wandering Wells, it was really good to meet them as we'd had email contact with them recently so it was very nice to put faces to names. It made us smile as we said how nice it was that their children were so keen and they explained the payment system for every cache that was found, we have resorted to these methods in the past to keep our children keen. We left them behind at #18 as they were stopping at the pub in the village for their lunch.

Farewell Church

At #14 we spotted a couple in the bushes, we felt sure they were cachers so we stopped to say 'hello', it was John & Felicity, they explained they were only doing part of the circuit as they were on a walk from Chester to Lichfield! That's one of the best things about caching, the people you meet and you instantly have something to talk about.

We really enjoyed the walk today, the cache owner has gone to a lot of time and effort to set this series, with very well crafted caches and good hides. We completed it in just over 3 hours and were back at the car by our target of 13:30.

We didn't have our dogs with us today so we can't comment on the suitability for dogs but there were quite a number of stiles so possibly it wouldn't be the best walk with geo-mutts.

Chase Memorial

Then we just had time to head up to Cannock Chase to find Chase Memorial. This one has been on our to-do list for quite some time so as we were fairly close decided to make the 10 mile detour to find it and we're very glad we did. We parked up in the car park next to the Katyn Memorial and then made the short walk to the cache.