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I need a good walk with a decent amount of caches that’s going to have me in place at dawn and home by 1000. After consulting my lists (by the way, I have 97 lists🤔) I come up with the 20 mystery circular walk in Scadbury Park near Bexley. I don’t anticipate much traffic and hopefully few walkers so it has won the prize.
The Scadbury Park series is based on trees found in the park and has been set by SkiCycle. I‘ve always been a Dendrophile so there was a lot of interesting text on the cache pages (for me) to read.
I must add that on the way around, I was treated to a cacophony of bird song. I could constantly hear and see Ring-necked Parakeets. I saw almost the whole range of Corvids as well as the usual Thrushes, Tits and Robins. I heard a Blackcap so the migration has begun.
So there I was, parking up just before dawn in the park car park and found the first cache by torch light. I made good progress until I got to #4 when I couldn’t find the cache. I knew that the cache had been found yesterday so what was I doing wrong. I noted in a previous log that the coords had been changed so I put my coords through the checker and got a red light.🤬 I did the sums again and quickly found the errant cache.
I was wondering whether I would have similar problems but there was only one change and I was now looking for them. I lost about 20 minutes at #4 which would have been handy later on, but such is life. I got to about #18 and knew that there were three Wherigo caches nearby of which I was eager to try at least one.
I settled on Scadbury Story as there was a bonus cache attached to it and it would only take about half an hour. So I got myself over to the posted coords and realised that I was in someone’s back garden.🥴 It now seems that I could have started the Wherigo anywhere but here so I carried on. I picked up #19 and #20 of the mystery series on the way whilst I was collecting gold coins to qualify for the Wherigo.
I needed 12 coins to get the cache coords and 15 coins to get the bonus. Oh, I forgot to mention that I was walking the same route as earlier and I had got mixed up on the timings as this one was actually a hour long. I had realised that I wasn’t going to make it home for ten and when I reached the 12 coin mark, I decided to go for broke...and the bonus.
However I got to the next stage at what is left of the Scadbury Manor House and was asked what other activity was banned from the Park. It wasn’t a multi answer question and in fact could be confusing. Well I got it wrong, didn’t I.🤔 I didn’t get a second chance and it gave me the obscure answer. Well I could have said, Hang Gliding or Archery or even Oology and still been wrong.
Anyway, I thought that I’d blown the bonus so head down, tramped the mile or so through the woods to the car and then off home.🙁 However, I was wondering if I’d been a trifle premature but I was running 30 minutes late anyway. I had to come back for the cache so checked the bonus data on the way home and it turned out that I could get one question wrong and still get the bonus.
This was confirmed by Mr SkiCycle when I contacted him so in the words of General MacArthur, “I will be back”, and in the words of Derek Trotter, ”luvly jubbly”.
One last fact for you all, on March 28th 1945, the last V1 Flying Bomb that fell in the U.K. during WW2 landed on ... Scadbury Manor House.🥴
20 Mystery
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