Geocaching again after a 5 week absence...

Can you read the writing?

11th July 2010

So the world cup was all but finally over.....and now team Shiltonpig were sitting there twiddling there collective thumbs (all 6 of them) and wondering what to do next. Then we remembered that before all those football matches that we used to geocache....so we blew the dust off the gps and went on the website and looked for a suitable cache. Gopsall Hall cache came to mind...and so off we set. We had almost forgotten what to do...but fear not avid readers we were about to have our

Josh just won't let go

own adventure none the less. It was a beautiful summer afternoon, the sun was shining, the cows were mooing and Josh was shouting "stick" and "plane" several miilion times over and over again. Gopsall Hall doesn't actually exist anymore....and that remains is a little bit of a garden temple. A farm now sits on the site and the farmer clearly wants to remind you that it is in fact private property and that you must not park on the road. I am surprised he didn't run out of money for the amount of signs he has put up....put hey we found somewhere to park. Within a few minutes Mr Shiltonpig realised that he was unfit....5 weeks without geocaching has left him

Inspiration for the famous Sting song

tired and feeling very old. The field was full of cows on the way to the cache and looked very suspicious of us....and to be fair to the cows I would have been suspicious of us as well. The remains of the garden temple are not actually that much, and the local council has gone way overboard in ensuring that you don't get anywhere near it...in fact the only thing missing around the perimeter fence was a patrolling guard. The cache itself posed us a rather unique problem....the co-ordinates took us to an arch, to which you then had to walk 17 paces to where the cache should be located. Probelm for team Shiltonpig

Grafitti 19th century style

is the fact we are all different heights. For example Josh is about 2 feet tall...and his paces didnt go very far. Next up was Mrs Shiltonpig she is about 3 feet in height and when she counted 17 paces (granted she got help with her counting from Josh) she hardly moved very far. Next up came Mr Shiltonpig and he is about 10 feet tall and his paces took him back home. So we tried to guess what a normal persons pace was and had a go....low and behold after 15 minutes of trying we were able to find the rather large cache and that had neon lights on it saying "how can you possibly not see me."

Wind in the Willows

The final thing I would like to say is that the actually temple itself had been used by the military in the late 19th century and into the 20th century, even being used as a prisoner of war camp. So to see grafitti from 1874 on a wall is quite funny to say the least. They also say Handel was here when he wrote his famous "Messiah" song...but seeing as its not in the current top 40, we don't know what its on about! So after 5 weeks away we found out that we missed geocaching....we gave the geocache a big hug and a kiss and apologised for not giving it enough attention. Right...so wheres the next cache...