Q

What Q do I mean? Is it Q, the race of people in Startrek or is it Q, James Bond’s supplier of gadgets in the dark arts of espionage? Do you give up? It’s a series of Mystery caches down in Crockenhill, Kent set by the supplier of dark arts geocaches, jazzyjessups.😀

All the caches start with words beginning with Q, well Qu, but the trouble is that you have to find the actual word Mr JJ is referring to from the hint.🥴 I have never spent so much time poring over my copy of the Oxford Shorter Dictionary.🤔 Some of the words were so obscure, I’d never heard of them and it took me many attempts to get them all through the checker. The fact that some of the words had been spelt incorrectly didn’t help either.🤯

There are 21 caches in the series and I was so convinced that I’d never crack them all, that I did four of the caches, the ones that I had cracked, last year. Any way, I did persevere through the pandemic and managed by hook and by crook, to solve them all. However reading through some of the logs, I got the impression that the series was about to be archived.🤬🤬 I had to move fast so I drove down there, taking great care and set about the 17 caches.

I‘m looking for a range of D/Ts this morning, mainly 2 to 2/5 T but there are a lot of 4, 4.5 and even a 5 D so I’m hoping that my D/T ratio will rise.🤔

I couldn‘t find the first one so left it and then paddled through about 50 yards of flooded road to get to dry road. I quickly located the next two caches and then realised that I’d left my “dirty” gloves back at the last cache. I was wearing my “clean” gloves whilst going back but my dirties were not at the last cache. They were back on the road just as I’d come through the flood.🤬

It was a very cold morning and the ground, in the main, was icy but at least that had hardened the mud.😀 I made good progress around the route until I got to one cache. The hint said “tied to bottom of fence post” but unfortunately the track had been built up with stones and bonding material.

I peered over the fence and just made out the top of the pot about ten inches down from the road. There was a linked fence that I could get my hands through and for ten minutes struggled with opening the cache. I could imagine that I was working on a radioactive isotope in a nuclear laboratory.😀 Eventually everything was sorted out and I was on my way.

As I was walking across a field I encountered my first human on the walk, and I gave him a wide berth as did he. I had been sanitising after every cache and gate just to be on the safe side. Finally, I was back where I had started so had another look for the first cache. I looked on one side of the road and moved a bit of a railway sleeper. I saw a glimpse of porcelain in the earth and thought ”no it can’t be”. I scraped the earth away and it was a complete pot lid that is shown in the photo.💥💥💥 The “Is” is one old shilling and the lid dates from 1860 to 1910.🤔.

The cache was tucked away on the other side of the road.

So it was a great morning, all caches found and my D/T rose to 1.86D but the T stayed at 1.5. Happy Day!

17 Mystery

#11830

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