Billa Barra and other stories......

Smile you're on Candid Camera

 Monday April 19th 2010

Come on admit it Billa Barra is such a cool name, we think it should have been in Australia....and is easily the best name in the National Forest. More about that later. We had woke up and had a very clever game plan in mind and then someone went and posted 5 new caches in the area close to us....so we changed our plans....and because our gps is so ancient we had to write down all the clues manually. But the reward would be a FTF. So we went to Bignalls wood, which is home to plenty of wildlife....with a spring and a bounce we walked onwards to the cache.

But alas it wasn't to be this morning...as we got to the cache we found we had been beaten to it...by the Ashby Bells!!! Rats, rats and more rats....and so we sat there in sackcloth and ashes and mourned and wailed as long as we could. How dare someone else go look for a cache on a Monday morning lol So we picked ourselves up and went and gave Josh a hug to cheer ourselves up, he wasn't having any of it....he kept saying "num nums". We did a cache near the ferrers centre, sadly we didn't get chance to have a look around and so we will be back (anyway there are plenty of caches in the area we haven't done yet). In the afternoon we headed our way down to the Kelham Bridge Nature Reseve....a small woodland that boasts that it has otters, but again we didn't see any. We found the cache after a short search, but as always it was on the other side of the hedge. Josh then found some green tube type thingy ma bobs and made a kind of man out of them...well actually that was Mr Shiltonpig...but Josh would have done better.

Totem Pole Shiltonpig style

Sence Valley park was next on the agenda which is a short walk up the road (but hey why walk, when you can drive!!) It used to be an opencast mine but these days old aged pensioners seems to have overtaken the place along with their dogs. However it hardly seems the place to leave a totem pole lying around...now you may struggle to work out which is the totem pole...so its the one on the left. The cache in question was aimed for dogs or geomutts as they are called in geocaching language, but we just had a Josh....though knowing him he would have tried to eat the chewy sticks and doggy biscuits. Mr Shiltonpig was also able to trick Josh into thinking

Ugly Mug and the wooden statue

 he had seen a snake, when it was in fact a large garden hose in the nearby lake. Sence Valley also gave an Easter Island theme to the place as well which was nice.....Easter Island is full of weird looking big faces...it seemed the perfect place for Mr Shiltonpig to fit in then. This meant that Mrs Shiltonpig was confused as to where to aim the camera. So last of all we headed to Billa Barra, the name derives from "corruption of barrow" or a burial site after an ancient saxon battle. Now thats the official version...but we think some Aussies came over a while ago with a few boomerangs, koalas and kangeroos and other assorted cliches and named the place.

"Flowers"

Either way we will leave it to you to decide. The cache was on top of the hill with a great view of the area. Josh stopped every so often to admire the flowers on the bracken....reminds us of Ireland...plenty of Bracken over there! So another good caching day today....and it feels as if we have been all around the earth today....Easter Island, Australia and Calke, Derbyshire! The life we lead....