January 30th 2010 - Part One "More hands up holes than a vet"

Plenty of talk abounds about how good geocaching is and how addictive it is....one cache is never enough...you always find the desire to do one more.

We have been caching now since 2007 and athough our meager amount of finds doesn't show it we are always trying to break new records....If team Shiltonpig could find just 3 (yes just 3) caches today we would break our record of total amount of caches found in a month!

Occasionally however things don't always go to plan and this is the first part of today. For a start the wheelchair had a puncture so Mr Shiltonpig decided to carry the "big old lump" aka Josh on his shoulders as they headed back to last weekends success of 8 caches in one day. There were two caches to finish off the series....

So back we were at Conkers with people asking us if we were going to plant a tree....nope we had other things on our mind. It was a quick 5 minute walk up to the first of the two caches..."Batty strikes back". Based on all the others last week they all have a bridge in common....so we started looking. Then the gps started playing up and a couple of times we had to switch it on/off again to try and make some headway on it. Eventually we got it down to where we thought it was going to be, the clue was not that great and then we spotted 3 holes in the wall. It was about time we asked for expert help...Josh to the rescue.

Josh and his nimble hands tried to find the cache....but to no avail the caches weren't there. We don't have the most fancy gps in the world (it does the job) so we couldn't access the cache online to find out about more clues.

Mr Shiltonpig then spotted another drain half way up the bank and started to crawl his way up to see what he could find inside. Much to his disgust when he put his hand inside all he could find was a series of snails glued to one another, he quickly dropped this back where he found it and dragged his way back down the path.

It was then after quite a while looking for the cache we decided that this one was going to beat us for now and that we would have to move onto the next one. It was then in a rather grumpy mood Mr Shiltonpig exclaimed that "he had his hands up more holes than a vet for this cache".

Its hard to describe the disappointment of not finding a cache...you are unsure whether the cache has been stole or "muggled" or its just your skills of hunting for a cache are rubbish. In addition the owner of these caches are known for his clever hiding abilities.

We started walking to the next one and passed something that can only have been an extra in a sci fi movie at some point...haven't a clue on what it is for though.

Ok, ok so we hadn't a good start to the first cache...but we could still make amends with the second cache. We quickly arrived at the co-ordinates and again the clue was a little vague....trees are always plentiful in this area....plus there was a steep bank....

Again we searched and we searched and we searched....Josh started getting grumpy too as it was his sleepy time...but it was a competition between him and Mr Shiltonpig as to who was the most grumpy!!!

Mrs Shiltonpig in her calm and patient way recommended that we call it a morning, go home and have a bite to eat and see what we could do in the afternoon. After seeing sense Mr Shiltonpig decided this was the best idea yet....bacon and egg sarnies were calling...

So after a whole hours geocaching...we had nothing to show for it except being grumpy....would we ever find 3 more caches? would we break our monthly record? and more importantly does Josh have to put his hands in any more holes to get us the caches....?

To Be Continued......(to the sound of big epic music...dun, dun, dunnnnn)