Our 7000th find: Where's Wallace and Fred Flintstone series
With only 9 caches to go, we could not decide if we should leave getting out 7000th find until Sunday, when we are going on holiday, or get it in the UK before we go away.
Isaac was keen to get it on holiday but I was not quite as keen as I knew it would be on a less than inspiring urban micro as we'd still be getting over our jetlag for the first few days.
In the end I managed to persuade him that a trip out to Lancashire to tackle two new series that were getting great logs was what we needed to do. We planned to start off at the new Where's Wallace series before moving over to the Fred Flintstone series, via a few caches on the way.
It was quite a long trip up the M6 to the first cache of the day. We don't normally come this far up the M6 but are happy to make an exception for Phantom Camel Train caches as they are always really good.
We parked up at the main car park on Beacon Fell after doing a quick drive-by on the way. After getting kitted out for the walk, off we set. The first two caches are older caches that have been here for a while now. A nice quick find near the car park followed by a cache right on top of the fell, with fabby views all around.
Next, it was on to the Where's Wallace series. This is a set of 17 caches, each with a clue as to the whereabouts of the bonus cache. The first cache was not far away so off we set. We spotted
the hide as we walked up so had a nice quick find.
On the 6th cache into the series we had our 7000th find. We'd have ideally liked to have the milestone on the bonus cache but we got a bit carried away while at the Mega Event last weekend and found too many caches then. The 7000th find was a fab cache anyway with a really nice hide. I won't spoil it for people by saying any more here, but if you are in the area, go and do this cache - you won't regret it.
The rest of the series was uneventful apart from some sneaky hides and some very unusual cache containers. The walking was good and the scenery perfect. Along the way, Isaac was filling me in on the many highlights of Wallace and Gromit, which was good.
After we'd finished on the series, we headed off to the Fred Flintstone series, which is on the other side of the River Ribble. The main problem is the only places to cross the river are at Ribchester to the east and Preston to the west. We opted for Preston and did a few quick caches on the way to make it more worthwhile.
All too soon we were parking up for the Flintstone series. This series is very unusual as the walk is in the shape of Fred Flintstone's head and if you watch your GPSr tracklog as you walk, you'll see Fred's features appearing before your eyes. You also have to do some co-ordinate manipulation as all the caches are Puzzle caches, but we'd done that at home the day before we came.
The walk was another great one, with some trickier hides than the earlier series today. All the caches were in camo bags, which blend in perfectly pretty much anywhere you hide them. The only one we struggled with was #7, which had already had 3 DNF's on it. We checked every possible place and could not find it either. The owner has visited today and has confirmed the cache is missing.
After we got back to the Jeep, we decided to head off towards home but could not resist two last more caches near the M61.
We'd arranged to pick up a Large sized cache container kindly given to us by a Manchester area cacher from the NW Caching forums. He'd hidden it near Prestwich and let us have the co-ords and a clue. We thus headed off down the M61 to retrieve the cache.
We parked by a pub at the bottom of the track and had a short walk up to GZ and an easy find. Now, back onto the Motorway and the journey home.
45 finds for the day, some absolutely fabulous caching in great countryside and our 7000th find. What could be better :-).
