Soggy Bedford
I had a bit of time available after Christmas Day and Boxing Day. I also had the urge to get out of the house for some fresh air. I’d been inside for more or less the whole time since we left Newcastle a week ago. Anyway, back at the plot, I decided the centre of Bedford looked good for a bit of caching. It turned out to be a very soggy Bedford.
On the radar I had a couple of Adventure Labs series right in the town centre. Doing these would take me past a bunch of physical caches too.
The drive over was easy and I’d planned already where I wanted to park. There’s a lot of parks where the River Great Ouse flows through the middle of town, and there’s a free car park. The car park is right next to one of the target caches, so it seemed like the best place to park.
Off we go then
As often is the cases, I was running more than one set of labs at a time. This time I hadn’t had time to create the little QR code cards I usually do. It had been a late decision the previous night to go out. Late enough that it was already bedtime. So I’d have to do it by switching in the app, but because it was only two sets then it wasn’t a massive problem. Not like the trip to the London Calling event London Calling event, ( GC8JAYF ) where I was trying to run about 15 sets of labs at once.
One set was about John Bunyan and the other was about the various bridges over the river. The first point was a bridge.
As soon as I got out of the car park it became obvious how much rain we’d had in the last two days. The river here in Bedford is about three or four times the size that it is in Milton Keynes, but nevertheless. The water was uniformly brown and fast-flowing. And it was pretty much over the concrete edges on the banks. A couple of the riverside caches proved to be inaccessible.
The second point was a John Bunyan one, and it involved crossing a bridge that had a weir just upstream. You can see that the water flow over the weir is pretty heavy. There was also a physical cache here which was a pretty easy find in a tree.
The Big Bridge
Next up was another “Bridge” lab on the largest of the bridges. It’s a big old medieval stone one, and the water was struggling to fit under its arches.
From here I went south to grab a Church Micro, which was easy, before crossing the bridge into the town centre.
Just over the bridge was a little nano stuck to some iron railings, which took me a couple of minutes to locate. There was a lot of metal around, so lots of potential sites for the hide.
The Town Centre
The rest of the John Bunyan series have to be followed in order through Bedford town centre. They were all easy enough except for having to read the question. Sometimes numeric answers had to be typed as digits and sometimes as words.
On the way round, there were a couple more traditional caches which, as is the story so far, were easy.
Back to the River
The John Bunyan series had a bonus physical cache which was down on the riverside. I still had 3 more of the bridges labs to do too. The bridges were all easy but one of them had a physical cache which held me up somewhat. The hint was clear, but I couldn’t see it. So I phoned a friend, but she was struggling to remember. So she called another friend. Her instructions were good but I couldn’t see anything, so I called her directly to discuss. From what I can make out, the cache should have been easy, but was most likely to be just out of reach, over the river.
Hmmmm! So I. Gave up. Time was marching on and I’d had enough. It did stop raining for a while but it wasn’t great weather. So I decided to finish the bridges labs and go home.
Well, 17 finds in a couple of hours isn’t too bad, and it was enough for this day.
