Early Morning Irritation
Day 2 began with a significant amount of breakfast at the hotel. We didn’t start particularly early because it had been a long day the previous day. I didn’t have the heart or the energy to force Ami to get up early. When the alarm went off I switched it off for 45 minutes to let her sleep a bit longer. We were planning to start the caching in Livilliers, more or less the closest part of the circuit to the hotel.
We got out of the hotel at around 10 and were parked up in our chosen destination, Livilliers, by about 10:15. It really wasn’t very far. I wish I could have this many caches to find this close to home. I suppose I used to have exactly that, until I found them all.
Back at the plot, we parked behind the church in Livilliers and I had a few scares while we were getting ready because somehow the car alarm kept setting itself off. I think it must have been some dodgy combination of button presses that I’ve never before done. There was a point where I was thinking we should sit still for 15 minutes to see if it happened again.
We decided not to wait, as we’d got some caching to do.
A Long Walk
On the radar today was a loop on the MTVO series that contained about 95 caches. If it went well, we could do a load more as drive-bys afterwards. Like complete numptys we’d failed to acquire any soft drinks beforehand. So we set off without carrying anything to drink apart from various half-bottles from the previous day. Given the length of the walk this sort of concerned me for the first couple of hours. As time marched on though, it concerned us a lot less. We just weren’t getting either tired or thirsty until nearly the end.
My main problem was that I was getting very dry skin on my hands from handling caches. I think one of them had some agricultural “stuff” on it which drained all the moisture out. Anyway, I was getting very cracked skin on my fingers. More of that later.
The walk was 19.25 km long and took us 6 hours, during which we found 95 caches. All bar two of them were from the series.
A Break, and Some Driving
At this time we decided we really needed a drink break and to go buy something for my hands. We spotted a shopping centre near Génicourt which appeared to fit the bill, so we spent 5 minutes driving there and parking. Once there, we got drinks, cakes and some hand cream. We spent about an hour there before deciding to go attack a few more in the car. For drive-bys we headed through Livilliers up towards Vallangoujard, where we found a few more that required a park-and-walk strategy.
Just before 7 pm it started to rain a bit, so we finished off the stretch we were on and headed back to the hotel. It was a little earlier than the previous night. We’d completed a total of 128 caches. Another personal best.
