Bristol and The Malverns

WHERE TO START?

It's been a few weeks since I updated our blog.  I know I joked a while ago that we were going to retire from caching at 10,000 but since our 10,000th cache in the Brecon Beacons 3 weeks ago we haven't found many, in fact we've found only 8 (6 of which we found today).  Why?  Well it's been a mixture of things really, poor weather (wettest June on record), I've been working full-time, Mark's work commitments, wanting to pursue other interests and probably above all else general caching lethargy.  There are so many new caches published on a daily basis now and so many caches are now placed for no particular reason, some with poor co-ords in rubbish locations.  So it got me thinking about what I enjoy most about the hobby - I love finding caches in interesting locations, going to places you never would have gone to if it weren't for Geocaching, I love hill-bagging, I love finding trig points, I love long walks for one old cache, I love filling in the world map (would love to do more of this in the future), I love being out in the countryside,  I love finding caches in places of historical interest .....  So that's what we hope to do more of in the future.

Clifton Suspension Bridge

Last weekend we had to go to Bristol as our daughter had to collect a rather specialised violin, so we decided as we were only there for a couple of hours we'd pick out a couple of interesting caches to find.  The first one being Suspension, a cache set near to the Clifton Suspension Bridge .  A distinctive Bristol landmark.

A couple of interesting facts about the bridge:

The first modern bungee jumps were made on 1 April 1979 from the bridge, by members of the Oxford University Dangerous Sports Club.

Between 1974 and 1993 127 people fell to their deaths from the bridge.  Barriers were fitted in 1998 to prevent people jumping. In the four years after installation this reduced the suicide rate from eight deaths per year to four.

Blaise Hamlet

Then before heading home we stopped off to do the virtual cache at Blaise Hamlet.  Definitely worth a favourite point, what a fabulous little hamlet and certainly on the list of places that we would never have found if it weren't for caching, although we may have eventually found it as we are intermittent National Trust members. A delightful hamlet of nine picturesque cottages laid out around an open green. The hamlet, which is four miles north of Bristol city centre was built in 1811 to accommodate retired staff from Blaise Castle.

Genuine Banksy, Park Street, Bristol

This was nothing to do with caching but as soon as I spotted it I had to stop and photograph it as I'd seen it in Banksy's book.

Saturday 30th June 2012

Sugar Loaf Hill

We have been regular visitors to the Malvern Hills for as long as we can remember, it's one of our favourite places to go walking and are so lucky to have the hills virtually on our doorstep.  The most memorable visit was 1st January 2000, the sun shone and it was a beautiful day, so many people had turned out to celebrate the day.... we've made many visits with our dogs but sadly Poppy is now just too old at 13 to climb hills.

We were looking for somewhere local to go as we had an afternoon free, preferably involving a walk up a hill and we spotted a few caches on the Malverns.  We decided to walk up to the Worcestershire Beacon which is the highest point of the Malvern Hills, then continue along the ridge to Sugar Loaf Hill.  After finding Sugar Loaf we sat for a while and enjoy the fabulous view, then along came a family of walkers, we spotted the tell-tale yellow Etrex, they spotted us and then hung around feigning interest in the view but probably hoping we would hurry up and move on - we thought at first we'd wait a while and pretend to be muggles but we couldn't be so mean so we called down to them, we introduced ourselves, they were HowarthClan from Taunton.  We enjoyed a good chat, swapping a few trackables and stories before going our separate ways.

Filling up the water bottle.

The Malvern Springs Earthcache involved visiting two different springs, so we parked next to the one, which was a very busy location with lots of people stopping to fill up bottles and we visited the other one after walking along the ridge.  A very interesting earthcache.

A very enjoyable walk on the Malverns on a very rare sunny, dry day. We'll be back again soon as we left a few caches for next time.