More than enough motivation
Earlier in the year there were several posts on Facebook talking about a new series of Adventure Labs around Winchester. They are part of a growing trend towards clustering lots of sets in the same place. On top of this, the Chili Series that I’d done last year had been archived and replaced with a new series in more or less the same location. And in the same style. That seemed like a more than good enough excuse to go back there. Like I really need an excuse to go geocaching……
Anyway, the opportunity to spend a whole day wandering around with some hooks on the end of extending poles was sufficient to try to constitute a big team. So my regular caching buddy Candleford set to work on the jungle drums to see who was up for a day out. It turns out that quite a few people were. Must have been the promise of a day in my sparkling company. Or maybe just a day of putting up with me in favour of a load of high-terrain caches. Joining myself and Candleford for the day were Pumpkin67, Sortinghat, Plumbguy, Mol’n’me, Sal_Nich, Skinny49, IreneLockley, sadexploration and Vidin. So the “Red Hot Chili Cachers” crew was constituted for a one-off gig of idling our way around the Hampshire countryside and staring at the tops of trees. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
Early Start
The only problem with going to Winchester for a day of geocaching is that it takes a while to get there. But not to be deterred, Candleford bought herself, her car and Pumpkin67 round to my house for some God-awful time of the morning so that we get and early start. Winchester is about 2 hours driving from my house. We’d agreed to meet the others at the start of the caching series at around 9 am. So definitely an early start.
The drive down proved to be slightly eventful as we were hit by some roadworks on the A34 south of Oxford and had to make a bit of a detour around a load of small villages. That wasted a half hour. It hit the others who were coming that way too, so we weren’t the only ones who were late arriving at the start. Also because of the delay we needed to stop for a coffee and breakfast, although we’d probably have done that anyway.
We met the others (eventually at about 9:30) on a side-road in Compton, although not the one that N.W.A. came straight outta. That would have taken more than a couple of hours to reach. No, we were at the one south of Winchester. It’s an altogether different experience than the one on the south side of LA. Well, I’m guessing, because I’ve not been to the one in LA, but I think I’m on fairly stable ground.
Back at the plot – some of the others had stayed in their camper vans just around the corner. A couple of others had parked there and walked around. Vidin was dropped off. So there we were, 11 people, four long poles, and a goodly walk in front of us.
Jump to it….
The first stretch was through trees and along an identical route to the old Chili Series. I don’t think the locations were the same though. Not exactly the same, anyway.
On this first stretch our progress was really quick. I think that was due to two things. We had eleven pairs of eyes, rather than three pairs the last time I was here. This meant that as soon as one cache was spotted, half the team could move on to the next while the other half retrieved, signed and replaced. And secondly, the hides felt a little bit easier. Maybe a little bit lower, and seemingly hung out on branches that were more bare. Anyway, we rattled along at high speed. Also, we got our eye in a bit. All of the caches were a green petling tube connected to a counterweight by a foot-long bit of metal wire. Once you get into the habit, they are fairly easy to spot.
So this first 16 caches took us across Compton Down and up to the point where we had to cross the main road south of Winchester. On the previous trip, we turned around here and headed back. On this trip, some of the new caches (12 of them) were on the other side of the road, on the disused Bushfield Camp. Up there was a bit strange. Some bits were clearly landscaped parkland. Other bits were just an abandoned military camp, with all the old concrete roads still in place. There were some good new caches on this stretch. A couple of them took ages, as for the first time we encountered a few that we didn’t see straight away.
It’s all downhill from here
By this point we’d done 29 of the 34 cache series, and it was time to start heading back to the cars. The route back had the only two caches that weren’t hanging in trees. It also had a lot of walking per cache. We had to cover a longer distance than the walk up and only had 5 caches, rather than 16 on the way up. We made the situation worse by extending our walk slightly further west to the Yarner’s Green end of Compton. There was a set of adventure labs to be found here, with a puzzle bonus and a random traditional thrown in for good measure.
When we were done with all that lot, I’d found 41 caches, and it was still quite early in the afternoon. When we reached the cricket green we persuaded a random stranger to take a group shot of us, and then we parted ways. Skinny49 had set off from home earlier to go do the labs in Winchester before the walking. Some of the others were off home, or were going to chill for the evening.
Bussing it in
That left myself, Candleford, Pumkpin67 and Vidin. We all wanted to go into central Winchester to do the labs. Vidin also wanted to go there because that’s where he was being picked up. Anyway, to get there we decided to move my car into the nearby Park & Ride, and to take the bus down. Busses were quite frequent and the car park was cheap. The ride was bumpy, but it would have been bumpy in the car too. Probably.
Anyway, once in central Winchester we first of all went for a drink and some (late) lunch, verging on a mid-afternoon snack. The cafe was on either The Broadway or the High Street. I don’t remember the actual cafe except that it was a small operation, and not a chain. They did extremely good chocolate-rich cakes.
A Religious Experience
So after our snack we parted with Vidin and headed off to what was for all of us a new kind of adventure. Masses of adventure labs, set to form a geoart. All had simple multi-choice questions. Unlike some though, the geofencing was quite tight, so you actually had to walk around the Cathedral to do them. What a shame. You have to walk around the outside of one of Europe’s finest medieval cathedrals. It’s so fine, in fact, that it took 500 years to build. If we’d been earlier in the day we might have gone inside it too, but not this day, as Aragorn might have said. On this day we didn’t have to fight off an army of orcs, but we were committed to getting a shed-load of geocaches done.
So from the cathedral we walked a clockwise loop (beginning south) and managed a further 20 caches. They were a mix of adventure labs and “proper” ones. I don’t remember ever going to Winchester before. It’s really quite pretty. We were moving quite slowly though. Pumpkin67 was struggling with his back and I was struggling with my feet. But we got round and found ourselves conveniently at the place where the Park & Ride bus leaves from.
One for the Road
The bus ride back was just as bumpy, but my car was where we left it, which was nice. In our haste to get out of Dodge we completely ignored the cache in the car park. We were on a bit of a mission though. The light was going and we wanted to get to Newbury to visit an “old skool” cache that Pumpkin67 needed for the Jasmer Challenge. It was a lovely spot to do our final find of the day, with the sun disappearing rapidly.
So it was “proper” dark when we got back to my house, and Candleford still had some driving to do from there. We didn’t linger.
When I got around to counting up, later in the evening, I’d done 166 finds in the day. Not a personal best, by some distance, but good going for 4 hours driving and an 8 mile walk.
