Shiltonpig in Wonderland!

Friday 19th March 2010

As we are personal friends with Johnny Depp (yeah right...in Mrs Shiltonpigs dreams) it was decided that in order to plug his new film Alice in Wonderland linky thingy ma bob we would do a series of caches based on that much loved book. This series of caches can be found in Battrams wood, near the sleepy and rather bizarrely situated village of Battram another linky thingy ma bob . The idea is that you find 5 caches and collect 10 letters each with a number assigned to them, rearrange the 10 letters to find a word and the word then gives you the correct numbers to find the cache. As you can see each cache has a card with a character from Alice in Wonderland, Mrs Shiltonpig is the one on the left...oh hang on...the one on the right....

Mrs Shiltonpig was on fire today as normally she can't find a cache even when its on the end of her nose....but today she well and truly put Mr Shiltonpig to shame, in fact the only one he found of the 7 today was because she let him find it by himself, as he was upset he wasn't finding any!! It must be a celebrity blog today as the Munster family also showed up...you can see them in the photo on the right...ok, ok its actually us....Josh has started to understand geocaching, he now wants to lead the family with the gps....he could probably do a better job than us, as we got lost several times today, in our defence, the woods are like a maze and seemingly go round and round and round....we didn't need our nature book today as there were signs telling us the trees, we felt a lot happier at this.

In another of the celebrity showings today Carol Vorderman came and gave us a hand with the anagram that we had to solve, she is there on the left holding the letters that we rearranged. The answer was blindingly obvious....however as usual it took us a while to work it out, Mrs Shiltonpig supplying the theme, and Mr Shiltonpig realising the correct word. All the caches in this series are a good size and Josh now likes to empty the contents all over the floor and examine them one by one....he seems to like the balls for some reason. There was another cache in this vacinity that isn't part of the series, so we started walking to that one as well.

As regular readers will know that Mr Shiltonpig seems to have a thing for old oak trees and was completely beside himself when he found another one today...forget tree hugging, this tree you could actually climb inside it...how cool is that...and so the paparazzi were out in force as they snapped away aplenty with that big old show off Mr Shiltonpig. As we carried on walking we got told off by a woman galloping by on a horse saying something along the way of this isn't a footpath.....oh well, she needs to get off her high horse and let this little small family get its caches!! We made a bit of a meal of the last cache as well...this other one is based on an ancient pathway series...perhaps the ancestors of team Shiltonpig have walked here before....but not to worry folks we found this one as well. So onwards to the final cache of the Alice series now...and trying to avoid any horses or as Josh calls them....clip clops. This last cache was found after a brief search, our first puzzle cache was found and a new icon appears on our profile now...yay to us! After a whole mile and a half of walking and another change of Joshs nappy...there was only one thing to do..break open the Dairy Milk and Juice to celebrate.

On the way back there was time to show Josh a small "clip clop" (we really must teach him how to say horse) otherwise known as a Shetland pony. Its a good job we didn't take a photo of him earlier it would not have been appropriate for the kids...lets just say we know that it is a male horse. It was Mrs Shiltonpig who showed Mr Shiltonpig how to feed the pony..and what did the pony get? Joshs rice cakes....oh well, by the time Josh is old enough to understand what we did he won't like them! A thoroughly pleasant afternoon...our record for the week and the month has been smashed. Thank you geocaching!