Monkey on Trent

Monday April 5th 2010

So we had packed our West Midlands passport, as we know that the East/West Midlands border is notorious to get through. The hatred between these two people grows with each day....the west with their oatcakes and their baltis...and the east with their bakewell tarts. Of course I am talking total nonsense of course (you should have got used to it by now), but there is a friendly rivalry between these two regions of the UK. We wanted to take Josh to trentham monkey forest....now they will be some cynical people out there that might think that we only took him after knocking off the incredibly close Little Quest cache....tut tut tut for being so cynical, what kind of parents do you take us for lol? Well as always at the moment the day started in a church graveyard (do cachers have a thing for church graveyards or is it just us?). The cache took us to easily the most pleasnt area of Stoke on Trent, to the village of Tittensor....for some reason Tittensor is the 1st village I have come across that doesn't have an article in wikipedia.

Which is a shame as it is a pretty wee thing and has the lovely church to measure. Josh woke up so we thought that he would enjoy the monkey park at Trentham...if you haven't been then you are missing out...only £6.50 for adults it is one of the best places to see the monkeys up close. The photo to the right shows Josh and a monkey....answers on a postcard please on which you think the monkey is. Mr and Mrs Shiltonpig have studied the photo for hours and we can't tell which is which. Josh was running around and looking at the monkeys, it was nice to see him happy and enjoy it. Mr and Mrs Shiltonpigs 2nd visit, we remember more monkeys being there the first time....and there was loads of people here today...how dare they come on a day we were here!!!! Takes about an hour to go around so there is plenty of time to attempt what we did next...the caches on the top of the hill. Now Mrs Shiltonpig hates hills...no really she does, she comes out in an allergic rash, the rash looks like tomatoes on her. So when Mr Shiltonpig told her the caches were up the hill, you can imagine her reaction.

However to her credit she mustered up every single bit of her energy and walked a slower longer way around to the top of the hill. The hill in question provides the best views of Stoke on Trent as you can see for miles....I'm sure you can see mow cop from here. There is a giant statue of somebody or other at the top of the hill as well. A couple of strange things we found at the top of the hill, firstly the dog poo bin had gone missing, and yet people had still places dog poo in plastic bags where it was supposed to have been...the height of laziness. The second was that someone that found the cache at the top and placed a religious coin next to it, we checked later but no one had logged that on the gc.com website. The cache was a film cannister and the coin didn't fit in it.

The walk up the hill and then subsequent woodland is well worth it and was a nice break from the quiet hoardes at the nearby monkey park. Josh was making a noise over and over again so we stopped to see what he was talking about, we looked up and there was a whole herd of wild deer in the woods, it was lovely. And all thanks to Josh as we wouldn't have seen them without him. One of our favourite containers for a while took us to a cache called "Monkey Nuts" it was a tub that had been used for baby wipes. Thats just the kind of tub that we need with Josh around, we tend to go through around 30 packets a day with him!

So after knocking off 4 caches at the top of the hill we then made our way down to the bottom and onwards to the nearby Trentham Village. There is plenty to do here shopping wise, and has some great craft shops and Mr Shiltonpigs personal favourite alcohol shop....if you been there, you will know which one I am talking about. Stoke has been famous for its connection with Michelin for many years, hence the wooden statue to the left. There are a couple of caches here as well, but sadly after Mr Shiltonpigs awful directions and Mrs Shiltonpigs insistence that you couldn't get through the rails (she was right) we had to call it quits. We must be getting old or something but there were just far too many people around to handle today, we much prefer the open countryside where we preferably have it all to ourselves....selfish I know...but hey its lovely. We had noticed that nearby in Bucknall it had an earthcache. An earthcache you say whats one of those? Basically its a place where you learn about a science or geological aspect of our earth. It also means we get another pretty icon on our profile page...yay!

The rock in question is actually a glacial boulder that was around when Pixar made there trilogy of Ice Age films. It was weird as you had to measure the circumference of the boulder and boy its a big one, we ran out of tape measure its that big. Mr Shiltonpig did his usual posing thing....but we found it and logged it and now have our 1st earthcache to our name. So as we travel home and use our East Midlands passport through the checkpoint, we go home safe in the knowledge we have logged a little quest cache, an earthcache and seen some monkeys...although the biggest monkey of them all is sitting in the car seat.