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I only had half a day today🙁 Drop Grace down the station at 0640 and be back by 1300. So I planned the day to start in Galleywood, then Writtle, the Chignals, the Easters, get to Little Dunmow and work my way home! Plans are made to go awry!
For the fifth time, I had a look for Dubs1, a 3.5/1 near shops in Galleywood. It's a micro on a seat near a library. However there are three seats and they are next to a busy general store cum papershop. I don't usually give a monkeys, so there I am on my hands and knees looking for this little sod. Maybe it'll be sixth time lucky.
So slightly wounded after straying the day with a DNF again, I make my way up to Writtle. There's a bonus series based on village signs around Chelmsford and this is the penultimate cache before the bonus. I'd worked out the coords so hopefully I can get back on track with a find. I did, rather an easy one.
I'd noticed a nearby puzzle series last night based on Thai numerals and letters. I worked out the numbers one ok and only had time for that. However for a 1.5/1.5, it was a git and after about 20 minutes, I spotted the blighter.
Moving on, I was after a straggler that I'd failed to find before. It's the last one in a series around Chignal Smealy but I put it to bed with a quick find. A short drive away was a Challenge cache based on Essex Place names beginning with letters of the alphabet. Z had caused me problems, only having Walton-on-the-Naze and Beaumont-cum-Moze in the county.
I'd finished the task after finding the Beaumont CM last year. For this cache, you had to look at four videos of the Canadian forces storming Vimy Ridge during WW1 and answer questions to get the coords. So what's the connection? The leader of the Canadian forces was Field Marshal Byng, born in the village and buried in the churchyard! In comparison, the challenge cache a 4/1 was an easy find. After that, a quick trad in the biggest Willow tree that I've ever seen finished my targets in this neck of the woods.
I was at a multi, #21 in the Off The Essex Way series near Pleshey having done the #20 trad nearby. This seemed straightforward but one of the numbers was wrong but easily predictable. The main problem was that once you had worked out the coords for the intermediate GZ, there was another calculation for coords for the final. When I got to the intermediate, the stuff that I'd expected to see to work out the work was missing so I called it a day.
However something odd ocurred when filling in the log at home on my IPad. In the description in web mode, the second part of the description was crossed out. There was only one stage!!! I'd got to the intermediate stage, that was the final. I looked at the cache on my iPhone and that defaults to text mode so I was seeing the uncrossed out version. Luckily the CO has read my log and removed the second part to make things easier. He's also confirmed my coords are correct!
I then picked up the VS caches at Good Easter and High Easter and the trad at Gone Fishing #2. It was Warbler Central here with singing Reed & Sedge Warblers and a Chiffchaff. Coming away from here I met jv&ev, cachers from Takeley. We chatted for a while then went our separate ways.
Just north of High Easter is a new mini series, North Loop which was reasonably easy and followed this up with another of the Water Tower series at Bishops Green. Now the next one was another of my nemesis cache - the CM at Little Baddow! I'd looked for this many times, I'd spoken to the CO about it too. It was definitely there, I was told but I DNFed again as did others. Then it turned out to be missing and was subsequently replaced but it was still causing problems. So this was the first chance I'd had to return and I was so pl as d when I spotted the sod, in a different place!
About 850m was an isolated trad, Damsels & Dragons and I needed to remove it from my wants list. It was a lovely day and it was a terrific walk down towards GZ which I suspected was the river. I needed to cross over the defunct Dunmow to Stortford railway and passed a small hamlet of a few houses in an idyllic setting. The GZ was at a splendid modern equivalent of a medieval pack horse bridge. It's a pity that this blog provider doesn't allow me to insert more than one photo in my blog posts. I want to provide one of the hamlet and one of the bridge but which one will it be? The cache was a quick find and then the walk back. 😎
So onto the stats, 16 caches on the day, including 3 puzzles, 3 VS, 2 multis and a CM. The grand total now stands at 5129!