Battys Revenge!

6th February 2010

Geocaching has the ability to take you to places that you would never have walked in your life....and so was the case of today.

The first cache took us to a place called Stretton en le Field...no no this village isn't in France, it is in fact in Leicestershire....Stretton was mentioned in the Doomsday book around 1000 years ago...things haven't changed much....

This was one of those rare moments for us where we just walked straight to the cache, there was the sight of several pheasants near the cache and the sound of several bangs in the distance....can't imagine that those pheasants having a long lifepsan! Think we will have chicken for tea!

While Mrs Shiltonpig was taking her time finding the cache, Josh was too busy looking at the trucks going by on the nearby A42. Its a good job that the cache didn't take us into the next field

as it was clearly flooded from this weeks snow and rain. Josh looks bearly eyed in the photo, think it was too much drink the night before lol

The cache in question was a "high quality" cache meaning that there was a calculator, alarm clock and several other good finds...instead we were able to find two travel coins, which we took instead.

The first originated in California Death Valley...Mr and Mrs Shiltonpig visited there before Josh came on the scene and it is the hottest place we have ever been around 50c! The second was a sheep from Germany that had been to all manner of places before ending up in this corner of the East Midlands!

We then decided to walk back up the path to the church where we took a photo of some snowdrops...after all Spring is on its way. The nights are getting lighter...yay...more time for geocaching in the evening!

Mrs Shiltonpig has a rather smug look on here face...it could be that she found a cache all by herself but more than likely its the fact she is watching poor old Mr Shiltonpig carry Josh on his back all the way around the geocaches, and watch him get smaller and smaller as he shrinks with the weight.

The church in question is now longer used for anything....although the graveyard has been used more recently.

Do other people do what we do? Every graveyard we come to, we have a competition to see who can find the oldest grave....Mrs Shiltonpig must have been on a roll today as she won this competition as well. 1750 was the oldest she could find.....perhaps the reason she was able to find it was because she was there when the grave was dug out!!! (Think its fairly obvious who is writing this particular blog).

So once this cache had been accomplished...we were then on our way to the next. This took us to an unfinished cache that we didn't get around to last week due to the "muddy buggy".

It took us to a railway...now that may not sound exciting, but actually this area of the country doesn't have any railways at all which means that we were a little surprised to say the least. What was stranger is that it is right next to a modern housing estate. We made a meal of this cache...we crossed the railway line, realised we were heading the wrong way. Then we started walking up the railway line and realised this was wrong as well, finally Mrs Shiltonpig took control and took us right to it. And another travel coin to add to the collection as well!

So two caches in the bag already, it was time to tackle one from last week, the one that got away from us. Having had a look at the website it was clear that the cache was there, it was just team Shiltonpig being useless at finding caches....

So when we arrived what does Mr Shiltonpig go and do? Put his hand in dogmuck....yuck! In fact the whole area that he looked in had dogmuck.....after looking through so much ivy, a lot of leaves, lots of trees, posts, holes and bridges.....He started to widen out the search.......and then when all else failed...Mr Shiltonpig found the 3rd and final cache of the day! And what a cool cache, no wonder he looks so pleased with himself.

Even his hat is lopsided as he holds the "bat" cache in his hand! Josh was screaming by this point so we had to call it a day but for an afternoon of tiding up a few loose ends in the area we were able to enjoy some very different caches.

February starts off well with 3 caches in the bag...and the weather has been kind to us recently.....

No geocache can beat us!!!

The 3 geocoins are proudly displayed after a hard days caching!

So as this blogger goes and washes his hands after all manner of geocaching adventures, he prepares himself for the biggest adventure of them all...Joshs bath time.....