Caching in between Coventry and Birmingham

On Saturday we decided on a return visit to the area of countryside between Birmingham and Coventry. We've always enjoyed previous visits to the area so were looking forward to it.

The weather forecast was not too promising, with a band of rainy cloud coming over the UK from west to east. The nearest forecast to where we were headed was for Solihull, which showed early rain and then dry until about 4pm. This looked ok for us, so off we set.

Isaac guided us off the M42 and those ridiculous "active traffic management" gantries which keep slowing and then speeding the traffic up for no reason at all. We were soon parking up for the Webbie Wander series, which was a set of 12 caches on a circular walk in nice countryside.

We decided to do the series clockwise and were soon at the first cache, which was a nice quick find. The next cache was a dog tag, which is not exactly our favourite type of hide (why hide one of these in the countryside when a much bigger box will fit easily). Luckily we had an easy find as we picked the correct hint location to start with. Phew!

The rest of the series was easy enough, with the exception of a DNF at the Castle Hills cache. It turned out later that the cache was still there, but hidden very deep in long grass. Not to worry as we can go back and find it the next time we are in the area.

We soon arrived back at the Jeep and decided to head off for the Dexter series in countryside by Balsall Common. The first one here was the easiest find ever as the cache was sat on the verge at the side of the road - a muggle had obviously spotted it and assumed someone had lost it, so left it out so the owner could easily find it - doh!

The rest of the series was easy with one field early on in the walk looking strangely familiar. I'm sure we've done a cache here before, but it looks to be archived now as I cannot find it on GC.com.

We had a DNF about half way round the walk as we could not spot the cache in any of the obvious places, so gave up and moved on. The day after we visited, it was found out in the open a short distance from where it should be, so it looks like someone / something had found it and moved it a bit.

After we arrived back at the Jeep, we decided to pick off a few nearby drive-by and cache and dashes before heading off to a third series. Nothing much to report on these apart from:

• I managed to lose my really nice caching pen off my lanyard somewhere between the first two of these caches.
• We did a cache at the side of an old airfield, which is now a racetrack where you can spend the day zooming round in some seriously powerful cars. Isaac is really into cars and loved this one.

Next, it was on to the Max's Favourite Walk series, set around Packwood House, which is a beautiful National Trust property with a fabulous garden with a very nice Yew Garden.

On the first one, we'd just done the biz with the cache and were about to put it back when some walkers came past. We made our GPSr's obvious just in case they were cachers, but only spotted their Yellow eTrex as they were quite a way past us. They turned out to be cachers: maxskitz, fishdreams and mrgammonandmrspea.

We made quick work of the rest of the series and were soon heading back to where we parked by Packwood House.

Just time for a few quick caches before heading home, so we decided to head in the Solihull direction and see how many we could find. We had intended to park up and do the caches in Tudor Grange Park, but every road seemed to be a Red Route, so parking was impossible.

We headed off to do a couple of quick urban caches, which turned out to be easy, although we did have to re-visit the first one twice as there were some teenage muggles sat on a bench right by it the first time we stopped.

More quick finds followed and some nice planning by Isaac meant we ended up not too far from the M42 junction and the journey home.

38 finds for the day.