A clear-out of South Shropshire and then onwards to Wolverhampton
We could not decide where to go caching this week as it was a tie between South Shropshire and Bolton / Rawtenstall. In the end we opted for South Shropshire.
We started off on a nice little series based along the River Rea between Cleobury Mortimer and Neene Savage. Some absolutely fabulous locations and stunning views. The only thing missing on this series was all the caches were micros, hidden in zip-lock bags and most we could see as we walked up. Most of the locations could have taken a big ammo box so we were bemused why they were all micros.
After that, we did the remaining three Cleobury Country Wanderings caches. The first one was a nightmare to get to as what we thought was a badly marked PF was in fact private land and we'd totally missed the correct path. The second one was our favourite cache of the day - the only Regular sized cache, a nice walk and some great views over the whole area from GZ.
After some soup and sandwiches, we set off to get the final two station pictures to bag the Severn Virtual Reward virtual cache. To log this, you have to post photos of you with your GPS at 7 of the stations along the Severn Valley Railway. We'd already got 5 of the photos from previous trips so it was a simple matter of finding two more stations for pictures. After we'd done the last one, we were treated to a train chuffing it's way past the level crossing we were waiting at :-).
We'd wasted a whole lot of time coming through Bewdley and Kidderminster so time was now getting on and we had quite a lot of caches left on the hit-list for the day.
Next stop was the new HawkWalks caches near Stourbridge. On the way down the canal towpath to the second one, we bumped into another cacher - Dice Man. Great to meet you!
The rest of the series was un-eventful apart from catching sight of the farmhouse that the unfortunate paper-boy, Carl Bridgewater was murdered at 20 or more years ago, when he disturbed burgulars. I remember having nightmares about this at the time as I was about the same age as Carl then.
We then headed off into the centre of Stourbridge to look at the Stourbridge Trek series. The first one was nowhere to be seen and the cache page implied the cache was "within 150ft of the stated co-ordinates", despite a Traditional cache being meant to be hidden *at* the stated co-ords. We gave up and left the rest of the series for another day, just in case they were all as confusing as the first one.
We started to head towards home as it was dark by now, but not before stopping off in Wolverhampton to bag 4 newer caches.
22 finds in total, which was a bit deflating, given the amount of effort we've put in today. The time spend crossing Kidderminster and getting the two station pictures really took it's toll on the find count.
