Sambourne and then caches along the River Arrow
On Saturday we decided to head to Sambourne, which is between Redditch and Alcester. There was an event there last weekend (which we'd totally missed spotting - probably because I've never heard of Sambourne before!) and lots of new caches had been placed in the area.
Isaac guided us off the M5 and to the first cache of the day. We failed to find it after a shortish search so decided to move on and come back for a better look later in the day.
The next few caches were all nice quick drive-by's with co-ords that were absolutely bang on. My Oregon had us within 1ft of the cache at more than one of them - something I've never seen so good before.
After clearing up the drive-by's, we parked up to plan our circular walks around the rest of the caches in the area. We could do them in 3 groups so headed off for the first group.
These were just three caches and all placed along the one PF. All nice quick finds and good sized boxes.
Next stop was just the other side of the village. We parked up and set off for a circular walk around the caches. Some sneaky hides on this section, which we really enjoyed. Also quite a few fields of rape-seed with paths just about visible through them.
After we'd finished this loop, we sat to have our sandwiches before setting off for the final loop of caches in the village. On the way, we drove past a walker who had an Oregon attached to his backpack. Could it be a cacher? On looking at the logs on the caches for the day, it could well have been Wrighty - wish we'd have gone back to say hello now.
The last circular walk started off badly as we could not find the first cache. We decided to come back later and look again and carried on. The next one was a fun one which involved some special equipment to retrieve it. The rest of the caches on this loop were nice easy finds, with some great hides.
As we arrived back near the Jeep, we had yet another DNF. Hmmm - looks like we'll be busy clearing up our DNF's later on.
Now we'd pretty much cleared the village of new caches, we headed off to delta68's Follow The Arrow series, which are set along the banks of the River Arrow, in some great countryside.
Lots of great walking in nice areas followed, with no problems on the caches apart from one called Ditch which we could not find anywhere. A quick call to the cache owner on the PAF line revealed it must be missing.
After we'd finished the Follow The Arrow series, we headed off back to try and clear up our DNF's. It's always worth going back to a cache for a second time as we found all the DNF's, which was very satisfying indeed! A summary of our mistakes the first time round:
- The co-ords were a bit off and we had not really had the patience to expand our search enough earlier.
- We'd actually checked the cache location as it was the obvious place given the hint. We totally failed to feel the rat's tail on the sneaky hide as it was one of those caches you had to do by touch alone.
- The cache had actually slipped almost out of sight so we had not spotted it earlier. Another cacher had spotted this in the meantime and moved the cache back to where it should be.
35 finds for the day and a fabulous day out in an area we'd not really explored before.
