Do What? Where?
I hadn’t been to Cornwall since Maximus was knee-high to a grasshopper – back in 2005, I think. Well before I was either a parkrunner or a geocacher. So I owed the place a bit of my time. In any case, my caching statistics have been slightly untruthful since the original “Ye Olde Survey Monuments” virtual cache was archived. More of that below.
Earlier in the the year, Minimus told me they’d like to go somewhere with a beach. The conclusion was that they’d like to go to Cornwall again, and specifically to Marazion again. This was in some great part due to them having been last year with Kas and Maximus.
The Booking
Originally I’d thought we could just go for a long “middle of week” or a long weekend over the Bank Holiday, but of course the Bank Holiday weekend would be school holidays. That meant way, way higher prices and also meant most places would only take bookings Saturday to Saturday. So a week it was.
I booked a reasonable-looking place just from booking.com. A two-bedroom flat in a block of a dozen or so. Close to the seafront and town centre. It turned out to be great – two reasonable-sized bedrooms, a good-sized lounge-kitchen-diner and two bathrooms. Ideal. The only thing I’d maybe pick out was that I was sure the listing said there was a washing machine, but there wasn’t one present. So we had to make stuff last out the week. I’d packed plenty anyway, so all was good.
Eating
Whilst the flat had a reasonably-stocked kitchen, it’s not always my favourite thing to spend time cooking when on holiday. So we adopted a plan of having breakfast at the flat and everything else out. In any case, part of the joy of going on holiday is finding good places to eat. And in any case in any case…. I’m way less concerned about eating out when I’m only paying for two instead of four. So we spent the week trying various restaurants in Marazion.
Stuff to Do
The plan was to keep it fairly quiet. So I didn’t plan any monster geocaching days or walking days. I took a load of books so we could have some reading time. The focus was generally on not doing too much.
A little before the holiday, Minimus told me that a bunch of their mates would be in a place near Tintagel at the same time, and would I mind awfully if they met up? No, fine by me. So it worked out well eventually. When I was wih Minimus my activity levels were quite low. When they were away, I did go caching, but mainly from the sight-seeing-with-caches perspective rather than the monster-caching-whilst-ignoring-the-scenery perspective.
The Geocaching Statistics Thing
My stats had been technically incorrect for a few years as a result of an interesting (i.e. not very popular) decision by HQ. Once upon a time there was a virtual geocache called Ye Olde Survey Monuments which moved every two weeks between different trig points. The sketch was that you could log a find its current position or at any of its previous ones. There was a whole “lore” grew up around the YOSM. It was like a National Series. This was, of course, back in the days when you could log more than one find on a cache.i found it 20 times at different places.
Back in 2017, HQ decided they didn’t like this kind of cache any more, so they archived it and also locked it so that it wasn’t possible for anyone to log retrospective finds. The problem that caused me was that when it was archived, it was over a trig point in Cornwall (they would change the given coordinates every time it moved). That meant that most stats sites recorded me as having a find in Cornwall, when I’d not been there as a cacher at all. So this trip fixed that issue. I have now done “actual” caches in Cornwall. Twenty-something of them, in fact, not including the lab caches.
Summary
It was an enjoyable trip. I had a good balance of sight-seeing, geocaching, and chilling. Everywhere we went for food was excellent. The weather was a bit iffy all week, but not enough to put us off anything. Most of the week it was cloudy and windy. I don’t mind that, to be honest, because as previously noted, me and sunshine aren’t the best of friends.
So here are the individual posts for this trip.
