England 221024 – 221031

Geocaching is also about statistics!

This is the first of two short posts about my trip to England in October. It was pretty much exactly four years after my previous visit and with no other flights anywhere in between. It was my seventeen hundred and ninety first flight and I have been flying an average of forty one flights a year since I first flew. So what happened in 2018? I retired, but expected to spend a lot of time visiting parts of the world I hadn’t been to. Plans and reality don’t always match. I was also going to do a lot of geocaching when retired. What happened? Well apart from three finds just across the border into Norway, which doesn’t really count, all my caching has been in Sweden until this trip. Prior to that 46,3% of my finds were outside Sweden!

So, I have completed the various geocaching matrices and am finding it difficult to set interesting targets. Do I want to increase the number of times I have filled the D/T matrix? Well yes, but it’s not a priority even though I see I have found 59 of the 81 combinations. I think that my geocaching activity over the past fours years indicates that I am plodding along or even getting tired of geocaching. I’m down from 74 caching days in 2018 to half that last year and this year. Time for reflection.

The light on this darkening situation was of course my trip to England. It’s primary reason was to visit family and friends.
I was also able to reaquaint myself with the motorway traffic in England. It used to be tough, but now I find it horrendous. Three lane motorways with a safety hard shoulder have now become four lane motorways with small laybys eftery mile or so. If you break down make sure you do it at the right spot. Yeah right. I started off with a six hour drive north from Gatwick when I arrived, the last couple of hours in the dark and in pouring rain. My day started with me leaving home at 7 am and getting to the hotel at around 8 pm. A long day.

After a day in Harrogate I drove south to Barlborough to a hotel I had booked in March 2020 but couldn’t use because of the onslought of the pandemic. Initially, they refused to refund me for the unused nights but now they did which was pretty fair of them.
My non-geocaching brother and his son thought the walk I proposed would be good. They knew of the trail as it was on thier doorstep and had thought of doing it earlier but hadn’t got around to it.

S.C.B.L
One thing about trails in England is that they are usually circular, on public footpaths as there is no general public access to land and a pub is often located nearby which is useful for food drink and toilets! In this case the trail was linear as it followed a section of disused railway line. We took one car to the end of the trail and parked it outside a pub (check) then got a lift to the start of the trail some kilometers to the east. S.C:B.L stands for Seymour Clowne Branch Line. When active it supported the coal mine and gas works in Clowne which no longer exist.

S.C.B.L. trail before our visit

With me I had my youngest brother and my nephew who as a teenager had plenty of energy and was very active att hunting for the caches. A couple of caches of note were a 3D-printed container and one fixed underneath a piece of Astroturf. Sneaky!

Astroturf camo for a petling

The series of thirty caches netted us 23 finds and seven DNF’s, some of which I admit were NDA’s due to verious reasons. The seven km long trail took us most of the day but as I said there was a pub at the end!

S.c.B.L trail after our visit

The following day was a non-geocaching day but we took a trip out to Curbar Edge in the nearby Pennines, a place I know from my student days. Luckily we ended up standing on a cache. Nice

Afternon view from Curbar Edge

Our find on Curbar Edge.

The next day, Friday, took me further south to Wokingham where I met up with my geocaching brother of team ”zelger”. More on that in the next post.

England

We returned from England a couple of weeks ago after visiting relatives and friends, with a total of four caches found, three of which were earthcaches. What a disappointment! It was not through getting a huge number of DNF’s but because my non-geocaching partner was with me and focus was on other things. We stayed in Harrogate (North Yorkshire) at what could be nearly termed Fawlty Towers but the breakfast was really great. There was no coffee machine but a hoard of Manuel’s who ran (literally) around with pots of tea and coffee, often coming to us to take our order long after we had eaten our breakfast.

A real English breakfast. Just look at the cholesterol oozing out.

We didn’t hunt for any caches in Harrogate but that is where I found my second cache of all time and first cache in England back in 2003 Pump house (N Yorks).

As we flew into and out of Manchester airport we decided to spent a day there before leaving for home as it is a place I know very little about. A quick look at the geocaching map for the area showed that there were relatively few caches in the city centre but they included thirteen earthcaches.and left to my own devices I would have attempted more if not all of them.

Relatively few caches in Manchester

The earthcaches were all in Manchester’s CBD and focussed on the building materials found there.

The Stone that built Manchester – Town Hall

Manchester town hall and weathering of the ornaments

A Red pub by one of the railway stations

Another red building just up the road from the pub.

Manchester Marble…. The Touchstone.

Carrara Marble in the touchstone

Euhedral Crystals

Midland Hotel – another red building

ShapGranite

Most of the buildings are red, either brick or granite and sandstone. Without the earthcaches I would not have paid much attention to the building materials but it was fun to learn that some of the more decorative material was Shap granite. I used to visit the Lake District as a teenage geologist together with a mate and Shap was a prime target for our visits. Now it is a protected site and rocks cannot be removed any longer.

Not all buildings are red. This new glass building is the football museum

Manchester has an industrial heritage and to many it still looks like a dirty relic from the Victorian era but for anyone interested in industrial architecture it’s a gold mine.

One of the many canals in the city centre

The canals are becoming an integral part of the new Manchester centre

Brick and rivetted steel railway viaducts

We also visited the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) which housed a diverse array of technical objects. There are too many photos to add here. It was well worth the visit. Entrance is free but donations are eagerly taken.

Outdoor exhibits at MOSI: Replica of the locomotive “Planet” and “Bolton”

Indoor exhibits at MOSI: The Avro 707 prototype of the Avro Vulcan, now in it’s last year of flying.

In all we had a relaxing week but the lack of focus on geocaching did upset me a little. I can see that I will need to return on my own and spend a few days with Zelger, my geocaching brother and his wife, in a cache rich part of the UK.