Down the line to Southend

I wanted to go out geocaching but didn't have a car so I decided to pop down the train tracks to Southend to check out a few AdLab series that had been wondering why I hadn't visited. I caught the train at Pitsea and alighted at Southend Central. Both stations need a ST cache, by the way.🤔

I started on the Track Down The Trackable Thief AdLab series and almost immediately passed a Cafe Nero. Well, a chap has to have his elevenses, doesn't he. After my usual, I wandered down the High Street visiting bases and was eventually awarded the code to a Travel Bug for my trouble. This AdLab was well out of the ordinary and well worth a fave if I could have awarded one.😀

I was now near the preservation area near the cliffs so I started on the Southend AdLab series. I knew that this one had a tasty 4/2 bonus as well. I walked up to the War Memorial which was one of the bases as well as being a WM EC in its own right. I cleared up the bases and could see that the bonus was a mile or so up the Esplanade towards Shoebury. That wasn’t a problem as there was also a trad near a WW2 Home Guard pillbox that I wanted to revisit.

I found the trad at 1156 and the bonus at 1210 and then decided to hang about for a bus to take me up the hill into town. It eventually turned up and once in the High Street headed east towards The Smallest Museum in the World? multi. This was in a K6 telephone box with quite a clever way of getting the info. There were no problems at the final stage.

I headed towards Southend Victoria station which could also use an ST, for the Humpty Dumpty trad. Unfortunately the wall may have been occupied by a large egg but I couldn’t tell as it was the base of an ASLEF picket line.🥴 I turned and went into the station coffee bar for a rather pleasant coffee made with beans grown in Suffolk but I may have have got that wrong.🤔

I wanted to catch a bus from here up to Priory Park but in the end I walked the mile or so, passing the Theatre of Dreams, Roots Hall, the home of Southend United aka The Shrimpers. I entered the park through the R A Jones Gate and immediately started on the Priory Park AdLab series. This took me past the Bandstand and the associated multi cache. It was now 1357 and I tried to amalgamate the AdLab series with the A Walk in the Park multi. However I decided that searching for inscriptions on floor tiles was not the the best idea during the autumn.

I continued on the AdLab series and eventually visited all the bases wondering if the zones had been set a little too tightly.🤔 I headed over to the search area for the bonus and more by luck than judgement felt the well hidden cache.😀

All I had to do now was to head out of the park and try to catch a bus back to Central. Amazingly my route took me past the Having a Rest trad, my last cache of the day.

2 Multi 2 Mystery 2 Traditional 15 AdLab

#15921

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