snerdbe's new canal / old railway series, Essington Moat series and numerous Walsall caches
On Saturday we decided to go for snerdbe's new caches along the canal and old railway line to the west of Wolverhampton. We then planned to go onwards to the new Essington Moat series near the M6 and then if we still had time left, head over to the Brownhills area to clear up newer caches in that area.
I'd got everything loaded up by teatime on Friday but then 7 new snerdbe caches were released, neatly completing the circular walk around their caches. I re-loaded everything so we had the new cache details with us for the trip out.
Saturday turned out to be a fabulously hot day so we set off with the bikes in the back of the Jeep as we'd read that the snerdbe caches were perfect for bikes. They were indeed!
We parked up by the old station at Tettenhall and set off on our bikes. On the way out we went down the old railway line and then returned up the nearby canal, picking up caches along the way. None were too taxing apart from one called No Fishing Allowed which was missing.
After we'd finished the series, Isaac directed us over to Essington to start on the 6 new Essington Moat caches there. At the first one we bumped into another cacher - great to meet you Loony Phoenix. The rest were nice and easy with well chosen hides and good views all around. At the last one, we stopped for our sandwiches (no soup today - it's way too hot to be having soup!).
Next, we headed off into Bloxwich for what turned out to be a total disaster caching-wise. Litter, bad hides, thorns, nettles etc etc made for a couple of DNF's on the run. This is not what caching is about, so we gave up looking for any more caches in the area and moved on to a more rural location towards Brownhills (*much* better).
On the way we picked up our first Walsall Church Gem (we did a few more later in the day). We parked up for a nice circular walk over open fields, which turned out to be the perfect tonic for the frustrating last few DNF's.
One of the caches on the walk turned out to be very eventful as Isaac ended up shin deep in a brook and not too happy about it. He could see the funny side of it later and is still telling everyone about it now :-).
The next cache had been found by muggle children, who had signed the log and mentioned they were going to look up geocaching on the internet. Makes a refreshing change from taking the cache home or just trashing it in-situ.
On the way back to the Jeep we had yet another DNF. The hide was clear and we checked with a previous finder, before getting the Jeep alongside the sign the cache should have been hidden in so I could climb up a bit higher and fully check the bars on the back of the sign for the cache. It was not there.
We still had an hour or so spare, so Isaac suggested we head off to the center of Walsall for some fun urban caching now all the shoppers would be going home for their tea and the evenings drinkers would not yet have arrived.
We had great fun (not!) near the town center as Isaac was directing us using Memory Map, which does not show one-way roads. Needless to say the place was full of one-way roads and after going past the same spot 4 times, we gave up and parked in the nearest legal place and set off on foot.
We had a lovely hour or so wandering round the town picking up caches. Lots of them were pretty big containers for a town center hide, which we loved as it shows the cache hider has put a bit of thought into the cache instead of chucking the ubiquitous 35mm container out (yawn!).
By the time we'd done all the town center caches, we were getting hungry and it was heading towards tea time, so we headed for the M6 and the journey home. 35 finds for the day.
