The Sketch
Last night I went to watch Forest play Brentford. It wasn’t a great game for Forest. So what better way to spend the following day by travelling to London and spending the day wandering around Brentford. Somewhat ironic that the football was on Thursday night because of Forest’s participation in the FA Cup Semi Final the previous weekend, and that the London Calling crew had picked Brentford as a location for hosting their GPS Maze event.
An Early Start
Anyway, the GPS Maze had a pre-event event at 9:30, which meant getting to Brentford from home by then. And hence a very early start. I booked a train for 6:40. However, I thought I’d booked one for 6:20. So as is always the case for me when I have something to do, I was up really early and ready to leave home. My dad was driving me to the station so I could avoid paying for parking. And, so I could have a beer or two on my coming-home day. More of that tomorrow.
The station in question was East Midlands Parkway. It’s the first time I’ve ever used this station. I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was like a station. The selection of tickets wasn’t what I was used to from living in Milton Keynes. There weren’t any options for day returns for a start. Either advance singles or an open return. Also there weren’t any options to include a travelcard. And the open return was way more than twice the cost of the singles. I was, however, benefitting for the first time from my senior railcard. Oh yes! I’m old. Well, older than 60. Which means I can have 1/3 off rail travel, even off first class. It doesn’t make me buy better tickets though. It just might mean I use the train more often.
First of the Day
I was very early in arriving, which left me a bit of time to kill. I grabbed a coffee, but I was so early that the guy hadn’t finished baking the fresh pastries for the morning. Thankfully, though, I had loads of time so I could afford to wait. I filled that time by walking up the road to grab SideTracked – East Midlands Parkway. By the time I got back the pastries were done and my train was 10 minutes away, so I bought more coffee and two pastries, and wandered off to my platform.
The train was a couple of minutes late and there was a woman sitting in my seat, but because none of the others in the carriage were reserved and nobody else was there, I decided not to ask her to move. Anyway, she was on the side where the sun was shining straight into her eyes. I preferred the other side. So headphones on for 90 minutes of noise-reduced music on a beautiful morning. And some coffee. And those pastries.
Across London
Down at St. Pancras I was back onto my original schedule, and my companions for the first bit of the day were more or less there to meet me. They were Candleford, FLtraveler and Goldpot, who’d all arrived next door at King’s Cross about 15 minutes earlier.
And so down into the tube station (not at midnight) for a trip to Vauxhall and then a suburban train out to Kew Bridge. By the way, you’ll have to forgive me if I talk about trains a lot. Various companions over the weekend were like walking timetables. Goldpot and Andy33 (aka The Long Man) both travel to and around London very regularly, and seem to know where to go for any particular link to somewhere else. So there’ll be a lot of chat about trains. On the walk to the event site we grabbed a couple of caches as we passed.
Around Brentford
The 9:30 event was characterized by the regular reminders from the organisers that the plaza and the building housing the GPS Maze were separated by a bus route. Don’t stand there! Anyway, there was a healthy throng outside the building. This soon turned into a big queue for entering the Maze event. So after a quick discussion we decided not to bother standing in the queue. Let’s go for a walk around Brnetford instead, and come back when it’s quieter.
So we headed off westwards towards Brentford Station. Our happy band on this stretch included CanalCruiser, Candleford and FLtraveler. There’s not a lot I can say about Brentford, to be honest. It’s mainly residential, but has a riverfront that was previously quite industrial. I would say it’s one of the parts of West London that was never particularly affluent. Anywhere in London has to be quite affluent nowadays, but originally not so. Not that it’s bad. And most places look decent when the sun is out, which it very much was.
Anyway, we walked along a small high street (and took a break for second breakfast at Greggs) and also along the end of the River Brent just above where it joins the Thames. It was good in a slightly ramshackle way. Our path also lead us to Watermans Park, which apparently used to be a gasworks.
Anyway, that lead us to Kew Bridge, home of another SideTracked cache. As we’d been walking we’d talked about stopping for a beer. We toyed with a pub right by the bridge, but eventually took Goldpot’s recommendation (over the phone) and went to the Express Tavern. The beer was good, and most welcome.
The GPS Maze
These are very rare beasts. I’d only previously done one, but then this was my second in a week, after there being one in The Netherlands last week. By the time we reached this one it was mid afternoon, and the rush was gone.
It was easier to do their ad labs standing outside of the venue. They’d been set up as multi-choice, and the signal was much better outdoors.So I did them there before walking in.
The Maze itself was a decent affair, but I somehow remember the first I went to had physical activitiesd and things to play with. Even the one in Holland had a few display items with an associated set of labs. This one though didn’t have any of that, so by comparison I didn’t spend long inside. After half an hour, maybe, I’d done everything I felt like doing.
Up the City
From here we grabbed some snacks and drinks from a local Tesco and walked to Brentford Station so we could grab a train back to Waterloo. The plan was to do a bit more caching, probably. Anyway, we lost a couple of people on the way, and we circled around Waterloo for a while before deciding to retire to the pub again. I can’t remember which one this time, probably the Three Stags. We were heading sort of south of Waterloo for an evening event just over the road from the Imperial War Museum.
That event was busy, but there wasn’t anything really there apart from the people. I’m not sure what I expected to be there, but essentially it was a big room full of people mooching around and chatting about caching.
Is It Time for Dinner?
After the event we (now consisting of me, sadexploration, Candleford and CanalCruiser) warbled our way up the main road to Blackfriars Bridge, where we promptly retired to the pub again. This time we had the excuse that it was dinner time. The pub we sat in (Doggett’s Coat and Badge) was rather noisy, and I was struggling a bit to hear, but the food was good and it was possible to log half of the big geoart of adventure labs that the crew had created. Those were out in the river, but with a geofence wide enough to do them from the shore.
CanalCruiser left us at this point, leaving the rest of us to go check into our hotel (the Premier Inn Southwark (Tate Modern)). It was a quarter mile away. I was very happy to be able to drop my bag for the first time all day. Even though it was 10 pm at least, our decision was that we had time for one more drink. We walked over the road to the White Hart (on Great Suffolk Street). There was a peculiar smell in the place that I couldn’t quite determine, and nobody else was in, so it wasn’t the day’s best venue, but it saw us through.
And that was more or less it. 192 total finds, of which 145 were from the lab geoart.
