An Early Start
A cunning plan was required to fit in another big day of geocaching before the end of the year. Appalling weather in the last couple of weeks meant that a walk across farmland was unpalatable, to say the least. I don’t like being knee-deep in clart at this time of year. So what would be suitable then? Well, how about a day of urban caching in Birmingham? After all, it’s only an hour away on the train, and it’s guaranteed to not be muddy. Not all of it, anyway.
I originally thought Sunday would be good, but the public transport on a Sunday is terrible. So Saturday it is. A train ticket was purchased, for a train at 7.52am.
The station in Milton Keynes turned out to be nice and quiet at this time. The train was a bit late, but only by a couple of minutes. An an hour later, just before 9am, I found myself in the buzzing (cough!) heart of England’s second city.
A Bit of Bull
From Milton Keynes you arrive at New Street with it’s spangly Grand Central Shopping Centre above it. There were a bunch of caches in the immediate area, so we got to work on them.
Around the centre of Birmingham there is a distinct theme of bulls. Thankfully there isn’t a distinct aroma of them, but there’s a theme to the place. This is very evident around the shopping centre. Outside the front of it there’s also a memorial to the victims of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings. The memorial bears one leaf for each person that was fatally injured in the bombings. Maybe a sombre way to start the day, but definitely a part of my memory. From the memorial you can clearly see the tall Rotunda building, where one of the bombs was placed.
On a better note, one of the series of caches were doing was themed on the more modern chain of pubs whose name rhymes with heather moons. You know the one. There was one of them inside the station, and it was having it’s breakfast rush while we walked past.
Route Planning
On short days in winter, and especially in winter, there’s some discusison about the best route. The plan is normally to wander around the outskirts of the area planned and gradually work into the middle. The advantage of that is that you probably do more in total. Starting in the middle would lead to a tendancy to not do the outliers. Whereas you’d never give up and not do the centre. Anyway, the centre tends to be better populated and better lit, and hence less dangerous after dark.
The boundaries of the plan were the area of New Street, north through the city centre up to Aston University and west over Queensway to include the Jewellery Quarter. We started by venturing to the south-east corner, including Chinatown (with another ‘Spoons), Saint Martins Square and Moor Street Station. We missed a couple of physical caches down here but all the labs were easy. Things were progressing quickly.
Corporation Street
From the Bullring we headed vaguely north-west to Corporation Street and up towards St Philip’s Cathedral. Another theme for the day was the very large number of earthcaches. I think I set a new personal record for earthcaches in a single day. This began in the cathedral square at the excellently named Needless Alley.
If you’re used to England’s big old gothic medieval cathedrals then Birmingham might be a bit of a disappointment. The industrial revolution in England resulted in greater concentration of people into big cities. While Liverpool and Truro decided to build new cathedrals, several others, including Leicester, Derby, Newcastle and Birmingham, decided to repurpose existing churches. St Philips was the biggest, having been built in the early 1700’s. So it’s neither massive nor medieval ornate. It was also shut because they were having a Christmas meal, so it was difficult to get inside. We snuck inside to do a couple of labs, but were unable to get the final for the Church Micro multi, because it’s actually in the church, and they didn’t want us in there.
From here we meandered our way past Great Western Arcade and onto Corporation Street, which is the subject of a complicated puzzle cache. By the time we reached the top end of Corporation Street it was definitely time for a tea break. The cache count was up to 35, in a little over two hours.
Across the North
We stopped going north here and started going west. This took us past the final of that puzzle and then on to Snow Hill Station. We had a failure here with a “Sidetracked” puzzle. That was the second of those, because we didn’t find the one at New Street either. So we were on a bit of a downer as we crossed Queensway and started heading for the Jewellery Quarter.
The misery was worsened by one cache that was on a footbridge at unknown altitude. We didn’t linger there because it was, shall we say, an open-air toilet. And next up we failed at another one that was apparently down some didgy looking steps and required walking over a lock gate to get to an island between two bits of canal. I didn’t fancy that. Not a great time of yeat for falling into a canal. The ones round here are quite unpleasant-looking anyway. So a bit of a string of failures.
Diamonds in the Rough
The Jewellery Quarter is, as the name suggests, home to lots and lots of jewellery businesses. There were quite a few caches too. We started at the top end and gradually zig-zagged back towards the city centre. It was fairly quiet up here and we made good progress.
One physical cache caused some entertainment. It was supposedly a magnetic tube on the back of an electrical box. Using the torch on my phone I thought I could see it, but couldn’t get my fingers on it. I remembered I had a “magnet on a stick” in my bag, and thankfully I was able to jerry the container around until I was just able to get a fingernail onto the duct-tape that covered it. That was the trickiest retrieval of the day.
Canalside
When we got back to the city centre and canals we wandered along the canal side for a while. The best physical cache of the day was probably Deadly Business, which was a tiny coffin inside the gate of Newman Brothers coffin works.
Old Turn Junction is a wonderful mash-up of Birmingham through the ages. There’s a mass of canals, with a roundabout in the middle, and it’s surrounded by some refurbished old buildings and a smattering of big, brash, concrete and steel jobs. It’s also home to a bunch more geocaches.
Paranoid
No, not that I think everyone’s out to get me. Although, sometimes that would be a rational explanation. No. I refer to Ozzy and the boys, who are celebrated on a bridge over the canal here. Whatever it used to be called, it’s now officially Black Sabbath Bridge. There’s a bench too, with pictures of the boys attached. There’s a virtual geocache here that requires you to get a photo of yourself making a “bull horns” gesture. Fair enough.
Not far from here was a multi dedicated to the roundabout in the middle of the canals. It wasn’t in the canals. It was in an unclear location nearby and it took us two or three attempts of fingertip search on the most likely host before eventually finding it.
By this time, by the way, it was after 3pm and we could feel the light gradually slipping away.
Symphonic
Opposite the Symphony Hall was another multi dedicated to a statue of three engineers (Boulton, Watt & Murdoch) and then downhill from there was another multi, dedicated to Ozzy]]. Incidentally, there’s a Walk of Stars along Broad Street here, which obviously includes Ozzy and the boys as well as other famous West Midlands celebrities and stars.
This phase of the walk ended at the Hall of Memory, which is definitely the largest war memorial I’ve ever seen.
Christmas Market Mayhem
Across the road from here we entered (and left) Chamberlain Square and passed an earthcache at the Town Hall. And then we passed through the proverbial Gates of Hell. Victoria Square was blessed with a Chrismas Market, which seemed mainly to consist of food and beer stands. It also seemed to have about half of the city in it. Many of them were a few pints in already, despite it being 3:30. That made doing the geocaches in the square quite tricky. One required reading an inscription from the rim of the fountain, but you couldn’t see it because they’d erected some tat stands on top. Thank goodness for Google.
I have to admit that in the middle of this amount of human traffic I was starting to twitch a bit. I don’t like human Brownian Motion at the best of times. But when I’m tired I really don’t like it. And by this time I was getting tired.
So we mooched over towards Cornwall Street, where there was a trad and another bunch of labs.
Enough is Enough (I can’t go on)
OK, so Donna Summer and Barbara Streisand weren’t there, but from my perspective, if there’d been a fat lady present, she’d be well into the chorus.
So we decided to give up, via a couple more caches on the way in.
Back at New Street Station there was a decision to be made. That decision was to whether to get on a slow train in 10 minutes, or whether to wait for a fast train that was leaving in an hour. Time of arrival in Milton Keynes was only 10 minutes different, so the decision was to go to one of the many ‘Spoons nearby and grab a pint before catching the fast train.
Back Home
The car was where I left it. The local Chinese had some food. And the Co-Op had some beer. So all was well.
Adding it all up, I’d made 107 finds in the day, which is a lot for December. I call that a result.
PS
The SEO plugin I use for these posts tells me I have an issue with non-inclusive language. I was expecting that to be the proverbial “fat lady”, but actually it doesn’t like paranoid. “Be careful when using paranoid as it is potentially harmful.” – Clearly the SEO is not a Black Sabbath fan.
