Another day near Downham Market
Another trip up to Downham Market for some tupperware hunting. I spent the day with CDinc, waggerswinners and Candleford hitting the Bouncing Butterflies and Shouldham Shoe Shine series.
We all met up at a massive car park on Forestry Commission land next to Shouldham Shoe Shine #22. It was a nice easy place to meet up and there was plenty of (free) parking. It felt like somewhere that would be safe to leave the car all day too.
And the next job, obviously, was to mill around in a slightly suspicious way until all four of us were there.
Butterflies
The Bouncing Butterflies is a series of 37 puzzles caches, each of which involves completing a small (ish) jigidi jigsaw puzzle. These had all been solved by a community effort before actually going on the hunt, thereby meaning all we had to do today was to walk around and sign all the logs.
Because we’re not really rebels, we started at number 1 and walked the series in number order, which made for an anti-clockwise loop. Obviously we were torn, because anti-clockwise is bad karma, but then so is doing them in reverse number order. It was bad luck whichever way round we went. But we decided number-order outweighed clockwise.
The walk involved a number of offshoots to fetch “off-series” additions, and that added a bunch of extra walking to the circuit.
Despite the icons being placed over a forested area, most of the Bouncing Butterflies were actually out in agricultural land, not that it was a problem. It was good weather still, and with four sets of eyes we made excellent progress. By the time we got back to the car we were past 40 finds. And by this time we were all happy with taking a lunch break. Lunch was had sitting on a big log near the cars.
Shouldham Shoe Shine
After we’d done with lunch, we set off in a clockwise direction around the Shouldham Shoe Shine. Obviously we were starting closest to #22 but we started with #23 because it was clockwise from where we were. This series doesn’t have bad karma, because the numbers go clockwise. Which is nice.
This walk was almost entirely in the woods, following on from the morning’s open-countryside walk. We didn’t really suffer with helicopter GPS syndrome though. Probably something to do with there being four pairs of eyes. So this walk added a further 26 finds to the total without any great stress.
The Full Monty
After the walking, we drove down to Shouldham. The village contains the proverbial Full Monty of typical English village cache series. There’s one each from the Church Micro, Village Hall, Village Sign, War Memorial and Fine Pair series. You can’t pass up the opportunity to do the Full Monty when it presents itself.
A Few in Downham Market
To finish the day, Candleford, waggerswinners and me met up in Downham Market to walk around and do two sets of Ad Labs plus a few others. We parked in the car park of a certain well-known supermarket, as it was by far and away the best place to park.
We walked a vaguely clockwise circle around the town centre, grabbing as we went. It only took an hour or so to walk round. It’s kind of compact and obviously Ad Labs aren’t subject to the proximity rules.
By the time we gave up, I’d eeked out another hundred-plus day. Top notch.
