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.
Geocaching with DS8300 
You must be logged in to post a comment.