What’s Goin’ On
After a lot of walking yesterday I planned to have a day of not straying far from the hotel. There were things going on at the hotel and I also liked the look of a walk around the Asserbos. If nothing else, it was the first full morning of the GPS Maze event. It had opened up the previous night, but it was more packed than a packed thing, so I decided to wait. On Thursday morning it was nearly empty.
But first things first. I had breakfast in the hotel’s buffet place. It was average, but I was already paying for it on my room rate.
Maze O’Clock
The GPS Maze was set up in one of the hotel’s many large function rooms. It consisted of a maze (really?) of high panels printed with lots of information about geocaching and GPS technology. In the grand scheme, this was a good GPS Maze. Why? They’d set up a set of lab caches that required you to actually read the wall panels. So to do the labs you actually had to walk around the maze. Secondly, they’d done another set of labs relating to physical items they placed inside – a treasure chest, a mini-diorama thing, a mannequin dressed in diving gear. Regular, everyday kind of stuff. So that made the walk around more entertaining. In my case though, it became several walks around, because I’d missed the gig with the panel-reading labs and walked past half of them. A couple took me ages to find.
Some Climbing
I bumped into PlasmaWave while I was in the GPS Maze. He had a cunning plan. He’d bought a hooky-pole and telescopic ladder with him, and he wanted to go out and use them. I told him the previous day I’d seen a cache that was up a tree, and I couldn’t reach it. So he kindly volunteered to drive me back there, and then proceed on to a few others that needed ladders and/or poles. Cool.
The one I’d failed at the previous day turned out to need both the ladder and the pole. The cache was a box fastened to a tree, but it was padlocked and the code for the padlock was a few metres further up the tree. It wasn’t a climbable tree. So having both a pole and a ladder was handy.
After this we headed up to the north-east of town, where there are a few challenge caches that also involved either a pole of ladder. It was a bit more hazardour than it might have been, mainly because of the weather. It was raining quite a lot. Not full on “cats and dogs” but enough to make going up and down a ladder a bit suspect. One of the three challenges is one that I’m not yet eligible for (265 days of finding a traditional – I’m about 20 short) but that will be easy enough to address over the next few years.
We drove by a random puzzle on the way back into town. I’d had enough of being out in the rain, to be honest, even though we were in the car quite a lot. So PlasmaWave returned me to the hotel and I had a little lie down and a ponder.
Never look a gift horse in the mouth – unless it’s a puzzle solution, not a horse….
After my pondering, I decided to get up and do that walk around the Asserbos that I mentioned at the top of this post. It’s basically a big deciduous woodland area right in the middle of town. And it could be accessed by walking across the hotel’s car park. It contained a selection of caches, some of which were quite interesting.
I hadn’t really planned a walking route, and that proved to be advantageous. My first foray was the supposed location of a puzzle. I’d “acquired” the solution elsewhere, and that proved to be my downfall. I spent a while searching where I thought it should be when a couple of German gents arrived. They were gathering information for something else. In passing they told me my cache couldn’t possibly be here, because there was a new one (released for the event) about 80m away. OK, so it’s a duff solution I had acquired. I went to find the one they indicated, having first asked them which it was.
In the Woods
Moving slightly northwards, there was one in the trees near the small lake, and at this point I got talking to Petra, from Cologne, and her two dogs. Well, technically, I didn’t talk to the dogs very much. I don’t think they understood English. Petra understood English though, and she humoured me by spending a chunk of the afternoon conversing with me. I, to my shame, don’t speak any other language well enough to hold a decent conversation. That is a common failing of British people. I learned a bit of French when I was at school, but I got my worst O-level grade in that, and have subsequently used it very little. I can read French and Dutch at a push, but can’t really speak it.
Back at the plot, Petra and I wandered around the woods for a couple of hours generally wasting time and finding occasional caches. There was one we didn’t find. It was at a big crossroads in the paths. We spent ages, and were joined by two others, but still didn’t find it. More of that later though. On another day, in fact. Ultimately we walked together for a couple of hours and found nine caches in the process.
Evening Festivities
The event crew had organised a pub quiz evening up in the town centre. I knew I didn’t have a ticket, but I thought I might be able to get into the venue just to watch and have a couple of beers. So I checked with the hotel how to get up the town, and they told me just go go stand at the bus stop outside – there’d be a bus every 20 minutes or so. Fair enough. I waited about 10 minutes.
When I hopped off on the edge of the town centre I thought it had been a short ride, so I reckoned I could easily walk back, if required. First up though, I jumped off at one end of a series of adventure labs. They took me sort of away from the town, but they were quite close and I’d already acquired the solution to the bonus puzzle, so I figured I might as well. They were quick and easy apart from one stage. I gave up on that one. It needed the name of a tree. I don’t know if it wanted a latin name, or a Dutch common name, or a specific given name. It eventually got nothing from me. Another set added to the list of started-but-not-finished labs.
Not Eventing
It turned out that I couldn’t go into the event venue. The place wasn’t big enough to cope with people who weren’t in the pub quiz. They nicely put an event log outside though, so I was able to sign that and move on. I moved on to a couple more caches and a couple of sets of labs in the town centre, before deciding I’d had enough. I walked home (it was less than a mile) and retired to the hotel’s posh restaurant again. They had a Szechuan Chicken on the menu that I’d not noticed before, so I gave that a go. I’m not sure how authentic it was, especially given the quantity of vegetables and salads that came with it, but it was good nonetheless.
When I tried to pay for the meal, I hit a bit of a snag. The dib-dob machine wouldn’t take either my debit or credit card, so I had to add it to my room bill. That was to cause me a bit of anguish the following morning, but for now let’s just say it had been a fairly productive day because of all the labs.
