A Cunning Plan
Well, not very cunning, to be honest, but a plan nevertheless. The gist of the plan is that there’s a massive collection of Ad Labs up near Winsford that make a shape that looks like a Cheshire Cat, with some words underneath. These big geoarts of ad labs are becoming popular and more prevalent. I have mixed feelings, but given that I don’t do them very often, I was OK with this one.
So the plan involved driving up to Cheshire on Friday night and stopping in a cheap hotel. I chose the Travelodge at Middlewich, because it was cheap. And a hotel. And it had some available rooms.
So the drive up was painless, which I wasn’t expecting. I was at the hotel around 7 and then shot over to the steakhouse next door to grab dinner with a couple of others. They were quite expensive, but also very good. The food that is, not the couple of others.
Brace Yourself
The following morning was, of course, a Saturday. Saturday is parkrun day. This area offered a selection. The closest two are Crewe and Congleton. I chose Crewe because it looked like an interesting course, and also because there happens to be a set of ad lab caches in the park. To be honest, I didn’t check Congleton anyway. Crewe looked like a good location. It also adds another “C” to my parkrun Pirate Challenge – “Seven Cs and an R” – This is my third C. There are two more in Nottingham and (appropriately) one close to this year’s Piratemania.
Crewe’s parkrun is in Queen’s Park – a Victorian masterpiece on the west side of town. It has a massive but mucky car park. I arrived quite early and I filled my time by chatting to a couple from Penrith, and then a quick walk around the park to find those ad labs. They were sequential but they had a nice flow, so I’ll let them off. These took me past most of the sights, including the war memorial and the clock tower.
The parkrun also took me past all the sights, except I was running. The course is three laps and a bit, with the profile kind of looking like a duck. Somehow they managed to get a load of hills into it, so it was quite tiring. I managed to get round in under 35 minutes again though, despite a busy first lap where overtaking was difficult. So I was happy with that.
The parkrun was finished off by me flashing my kecks in the car park while I changed the running trousers for something a little warmer. I’m not sure anyone noticed (or cared).
The Main Event
From parkrun in Crewe it took me 25 minutes to drive up to Winsford and find the geoart series. Winsford is famous for salt mines, apparently. Never heard of it!
Back at the plot, there was a caching event in the morning, and it turns out that most people were still in the venue (a pub) madly logging ad labs. Well, why go out in the cold….
So my companions from the previous night were in the pub, and I went to join them. I was armed with lots of electronic devices and a spare external battery to recharge them with. I didn’t know how long it was going to take, after all.
As soon as I got into the logging, it got sort of addictive. I was a bit behind the others because they’d been there since 7:30. They hadn’t been logging all the time though. But they were about 80 sets (400 finds) in when I arived. So I had some catching up to do. Better get on with it then.
Once I got into the swing of it, each set of five labs was taking me about a minute. They are all multi-choice, so basically you can brute-force them if you don’t know the answers. I didn’t know the answers in many cases. There were several running themes though, where the contributors of ad lab sets clearly didn’t read the others before setting their own.
Around midday I was doing well enough to take a break and get myself a coffee from the bar. It had thinned out a bit by this time, so it was quieter. The early morning throng of cachers was getting replaced by a gentler noise of lunchers.
Will they ever finish?
Just doing sets of labs gets a bit dull after a while. Thankfully I had a couple of companions to share a table with. I was very much “in the zone” though too, so wasn’t getting distracted by very much. I had something like 230 sets of labs to do, which even at one a minute was going to take four hours.
So first of all I cleared the “cat’s face” and then I began work on the wording underneath. Judging by what I saw yesterday, there are at least another twenty sets to come at some point. I may go back on another weekend to finish them off and do a few “proper” caches in the area. But then again, I might not go back. I can be fickle.
Continuing along though, I finished all the logging of labs at just after 3pm. A second coffee was involved at some point too, just to keep me going. The labs had 4 bonus physical caches, so we decided to get coated up and take a walk. We initially had a few more labs as well as the bonus caches on the radar, but once we got into the walking and figured out the terrain we pretty much decided just to do the bonus caches and give up. They were all easy finds. We had to take the car to get the last one as it was a bit out of the way.
And that was more or less that for the Cheshire Cat.
A Few More
I’d promised one of my companions that I’d provide a lift down to Crewe Station. It was kind of on my way home anyway, so no bother. We managed to get lost in the centre of Crewe as my car SatNav didn’t actually take me to the station, but we found it eventually. There was a single stage of an ad lab at the front door, and then I made a short drive to Crewe’s Mornflake Stadium (aka Gresty Road) for another set of labs before making the 90 minute drive home.
Home was where I left it, and I stopped on the way in to buy stuff to make some dinner.
The day yielded a frankly ridiculous 1,381 finds. I didn’t do that many in the first two years, never mind in one day. You could say that it’s got my calendar up and running for 2025 though, after a moderately successful January. In fact I’m already past my average number of finds in a year for the whole of the 15 years I’ve been doing it.