The Sketch
A day of caching my way around multiple fairly small routes near to Royston. Some of them were new series (to me) and others were drive-bys or the dog-ends of series I’d started on other days but didn’t have time to finish. So bits and bobs, basically.
Getting Going
If you start me up, I’ll never stop, as Mick Jagger once sang. So I started up relatively early and got going. As it happens though, I’m not a rolling stone, so I stopped on the way. I always do. If you’ve read any of my other caching blog posts you’ll know I stopped for diesel, coffee, and lunch. It’s a habit.
Back at the caching, I was meeting up with Candleford for part of the day but I was a bit earlier than we’d agreed, so I stopped in Baldock to do a simple-looking set of Adventure Labs to get me going. It was an easy walk up and down the high street. I’d never been into the high street in Baldock before. I normally drive in from the A1 and then make a turn towards Royston. It was quite a nice little area and the labs series was done in double quick time.
Royston
By this time my phone had pinged because Candleford was more or less in the zone. So I left Baldock and popped over to Royston to our designated parking spot. It was a residential street but had plenty of space, and we were only planning to be there a couple of hours anyway, so I guessed it would be safe and not especially irritating for me to park.
Somehow Candleford parked in the wrong street, so she couldn’t find me. So that lost us a few minutes, but eventually we got ourselves sorted. Anyway, it gave me time to go find the cache at the end of the road.
Our first walking loop was the Royston Rumble, which runs in a circle across some fields south of Royston. We hacked around these in double quick time despite me having left the archived caches that used to be here on my GPS. This series only had 18 caches in it and we were finished with them after 90 minutes. OK, so a couple of them we’d done whilst failing to park near to each other, so we only did 16 on the walk, but still…
Chishill
From here we jumped into Candleford’s motor and headed up to Great Chishill. There was a little triangle of caches here that we might have done on the EHB monster day, but we skipped past them ‘cos we’d had enough that day. It was better this way anyway. On EHB day we were only doing drive-bys. A few of this series needed a walk, so we’d have left a few.
So we did all the driveable ones first and then Candleford dropped me off at one end of a linear walk. She’d done this area before so she pootled back to Great Chishill village via a single Little Bridge cache she hadn’t done. I walked a quick path along an easy route to grab the 5-6 that couldn’t be accessed by car.
Driving Around
From here we decided to do a bit of village-to-village driving to scrape a few odd ones – we drove through Fowlmere, Thriplow, Foxton, Meldreth and Whaddon collecting a further 20 caches in a couple of hours before returning to Royston.
Candleford had appointments elsewhere, so we split up here and went in different directions.
Ashwell
My different direction was to go to Ashwell. Back in May I’d done a bunch of caches here but on that day I left a short triangular bit of walking because I didn’t have the time.
This was the short series called Ashwell Acrobatics. Back in May I took one out of this series because it was on our walk. So that meant I had 15 left to do, plus a War Memorial cache which somehow I’d not done before on any previous visit to here (of which there have been several).
So by this time I was debating whether I had the time and energy to do any more. It was only about 3pm but it had been a long morning and it was warm.
Litlington
Well, you can’t be going around packing up at 3pm when you’re out for a full day. There was another series at Litlington which I was going to do before Ashwell, but as I drove past that village I couldn’t find anywhere sensible to park. Anyway, I decided to come back and on this second visit there was a space at the marked parking location. Oh, go on then. How bad can it possibly be?
It turned out not to be bad at all. In fact, I expected the 23 caches might take me over 2 hours but it actually only took me about an hour and three-quarters. That was a bonus, as it meant I had a bit more time than I thought I would.
Home Time
I decided to drive back towards Milton Keynes though once I was done in Litlington. I did this in fairly leisurely fashion via a few other villages containing individual caches.
When I got back to MK I finished off a set of Adventure Labs I’d started some time previously. It was a set based (loosely) around Wavendon but actually spreading as far as Woburn Sands and out to the famous “Greg” statue on the edge of town. Adding those into the day’s total got me to 131. I figured that was probably enough for one day.
When I got home the house was still there and all other members of the family were still in it.
