2012 - A Summary

Games

A combination of missing the normal cons, plus extended periods of working away, meant that I only played approximately half the number of games I played in 2011.  However my choices for this year are:

Game of the Year

Kolejka – aka the Polish queuing game.

Great theme, simple to play, slightly ‘thinky’ but not too much, a bit of ‘take that’ and good fun.  Not strictly released in 2012, I first played it at Midcon in 2011 but the international edition came out this year.

Runners-Up

King of Tokyo – glorious dice-throwing monster-fighting game

Tumblin’ Dice – yet more dice!  (Tumblin’ to be exact)

Bullfrog Goldfield – brain-bustin’.

Con of the Year

This year I managed to miss Manorcon, Midcon and Essen.  But of the ones I did attend, it had to be:

The Cast are Dice – great venue, good food, great people, crap hotel (well 3 out of 4 can’t be bad)

Geocaching

Again about 50% down on 2011, mainly due to the crap weather that dominated the year.  However we did add Gibraltar, Morocco, Jersey and Norway to the countries we have cached in.  So to the awards:

Cache of the Year

 Well it had to be  GC3Q9RE – Caching Heroes Number 1: Slogger007

Placed by Team PDB&G in my honour.  Many thanks to Matthew and family.  Of course I claimed the FTF on it!

Caching Event of the Year

Easy: the Geolympix in Oxford in July.  11 icons in 11 hours including our first Wherigo and first CITO.

Caching Day of the Year

15^th July – 136 caches found in the Nevada desert.  Epic!

Books

I’ve read 17 books this year which must be my adult record.  The best ones being:

Best non-fiction reads

Cider With Roadies – Stuart Maconie

CAMRA's Good Beer Guide 2013 – Roger Protz

Best fiction (in reading order)

Roman: The Fall of Britannia – KM Ashman

Hereward: The Devil’s Army – James Wilde

The Leopard Sword – Anthony Riches

Spartacus: Rebellion – Ben Kane

1356 – Bernard Cornwell

The Wolf’s Gold – Anthony Riches

The Bourne Identity – Robert Ludlum

Roman II: The Rise of Caratacus - KM Ashman

Comedy

 Rich Hall in Cirencester & Simon Evans at the Arts Centre

Music

Best Live gig

1. John Otway at the Vic
2. Jack White at the Ally Pally
3. From the Jam & the Blockheads at the O2 Academy Bristol

Best Album

1. England keep my bones – Frank Turner [OK I know it was 2011]
2. Boys & Girls – Alabama Shakes
3. Blunderbuss – Jack White

Tech of the Year

Kindle Paperwhite – goodbye paper!

Year as a whole

 Overall 2012 will be remembered as the year of sport:

• London 2012
• Chelsea winning the Champions League
• Swindon winning League 2
• Glaws continuing to dominate Barf
• The Ryder Cup triumph
• England beating India in the test series in India
• Bradley Wiggins winning the Tour de France.

 Not that I voted for the SPOTY, but if I had done it would have been:

1. Bradley Wiggins
2. Mo Farah
3. Sarah Storey
4. Alistair Brownlee

International caching - 5 countries in a day

We haven’t had a lot of time for caching recently, but an occasion presented itself recently when we could not just grab a few caches, but could cache in no fewer than 5 countries in a single day! [I did look at adding in Luxembourg, but never realised before how inconveniently situated it is]. The occasion was a road trip to stay with friends who live between Dusseldorf and Essen – the draw being Spiel at Essen the following day.

Well it is said that planning and preparation are key to performance and, true to form, I commenced my planning at around 7.30pm the night before. That was exactly 7 hours before we were due to leave with just a little question of some sleep to squeeze in as well. The plan was to find two ‘cache and dash’ locations in each country close to the chosen route. How difficult could that be? Well quite difficult really – the cache density is considerably lower in Europe and the language issues meant that the cache descriptions were double dutch to us – quite literally in Holland. Anyway sufficient possibilities were found and uploaded to the GPSr and I sloped off to bed for a couple of hours kip.

Leaving home at 2.30am. our first port of call was ‘Ghosts & Goblins - 7 – Ghoul’ in Chiseldon, part of a series that had only just been placed and less than 5 minutes from the M4. Even in the dark the cache container was clearly visible from the car and it proved our easiest find of the day. One down at only 2.40am.

The next port of call was Membury Service Station 10 miles eastwards down the M4 to pick up ‘The Teddies Motorway Mayhem Membury M4 East bound’. This is on my regular commute to work and, for once, my usual policy of “I just can’t be arsed” had paid dividends and an easy find was available, exactly as promised by the hint.

Thereafter followed a nice straight-forward run down to Dover. We had a stop for a coffee and bacon roll on the way and were still parked up waiting for the ferry at 5.30am.

We were first car onto the ferry as well (for the first time) and, unsurprisingly, the first off. Our luxurious Sea France vessel awaited. Well it wasn’t that luxurious really, but I don’t think you can quibble for £48 return. The continental breakfast was a snip at only £6 and before we knew it we were launching off the ship ramp into Calais and hitting France just like in Saving Private Ryan. Except there were no bullets, or dying or Germans (except the one in my car), but you know what I mean!

The plan unfolded – the next cache was in a quiet part of Calais. This was ‘La Plage (Géocalais 4)’ and was quickly found . It was in a cassette case (ever heard of them children? They were a bit like iPods …) which makes for a nice slice of nostalgia, but a pretty poor cache container. Anyway who am I to criticise our snail-eating neighbours, after all it was my first cache in La France.

We then set off for a nearby park to locate French cache #2. Ten minutes later and despite a text exchange with the UK for translations, we still couldn’t locate the damned thing. To cap it all I managed to step in a helping of Chien poop and was far from pleased. The words “Bloody French” and worse were heard ringing around the locality. It took me 15 minutes to remove this particular piece of France from my shoe. If only I had a longbow to hand, I could have re-enacted my own version of Agincourt with the local canine population of Calais.

However not to be outdone, we relocated to a park near Calais town hall to bag no. 2 in France. 15 minutes later we still hadn’t found it and our quest for 2 caches in each country suddenly became a quest for 1 cache in each country. Persistent light rain later reinforced this decision. Anyway a note to all readers – don’t organise a caching trip to Calais, you’ll be very disappointed and you’ll end up hating the BLOODY FRENCH. Having said that, there is nothing amiss about Catherine Deneuve ….

Anyway it was off to the Autoroute and the quick road to Belgium, home of Poirot, Tin Tin and, um, that’s just about it actually. Next stop was a Service Station on the motorway between Gent and Antwerp. Needless to say, our run of continental DNF’s continued. This was turning into a disaster – all that planning time had been a waste!

Luckily our trusty car-bound GPS has a ‘co-ordinates’ setting and so we put our back-up grid reference into it and zoomed to our next Autoroute exit point. Unfortunately our trusty

Garmin led us into a farmyard (quite literally) on the wrong side of the motorway. We beat a hasty retreat – you don’t want to provoke a Belgian famer – and re-located to the correct site. Unfortunately it meant parking on a busy(!) single-track road and a muddy scramble in the rain up the motorway embankment. The ammo can turned out to be ‘TB Hotel – HAASDONK’ and we logged our one and only cache in Belgium.

We then had a choice of either turning round and driving the 2 miles back to the motorway junction or not turning round and driving miles and miles through dull Belgian countryside. We chose the latter.

Time was pressing and we crossed the border into Holland, a place you pass through but where you very rarely stop – an international version of Milton Keynes really. Anyway we headed off to ‘Stop 'N Go - Carpool Geldrop’ and a very quick find under the pine trees. It was supposed to be a Car Pool, but I didn’t spot a single ‘No Petting’ or ‘No Bombing’ sign, so it was all a bit disappointing. Our Audi left in disgust, after the promise of a Dutch aquatic adventure for like-minded Automobiles vanished in the drizzle.

So four countries down and just one to go. We crossed the border at Venlo and just a couple of miles later we were at ‘TB-Hotel D-NL/NL-D an der A40’. Another quick find just off the Autobahn (bahn bahn bahn bb-er Autobahn I hear you all sing in a Kraftwerk accent). By now it was knocking on towards 5pm, or 17.00 as they say on the continent, and we had cached in 5 countries.

Not long after we passed the motorway exit for my favourite German town. A bit juvenile, but it cracks me up every time.

Did we feel elated? No not really … a drive-by cache is a drive-by whether it is in the UK or Germany. However there is now a bit more shading on my profile map and we’ve ticked another virtual task off the list. However next year we’ll do the journey via Luxembourg – why stop at five countries?

February Caching Outings (Part 1)

A local caching friend of mine, Sarah of the Chaos Crew, includes a monthly summary of her family’s caching adventures in her Are you flowin’? blog (referenced below). These are both interesting, including a good selection of photos, and brilliantly capture the essence of why this is such a good hobby (read it – you’ll see what I mean).

Of course this also provides a good historical summary of each month’s caching. Well, I’ve never been shy of stealing someone else’s good idea, so I’m going to do just that. However I’ve never been one for taking many photos so they will be sparse at times to put it mildly. Also I’ll label them outings rather than adventures: my caching outings tend to be enjoyable rather than exciting.

The month began with a visit out to Sevenhampton to check on one of my puzzle caches there (The Man with the Golden Pen). A Wantage based cacher had visited it the day before and whilst walking back to the village had been surrounded by a gang of armed locals

(hunt supporters, or more likely shoot helpers) demanding to know what he was up to. He had calmly explained geocaching to them and they left him alone. It was thought that they may have removed the cache. Anyway I went and checked and the cache was still safely in-situ.

The weather was pretty appalling on the first Saturday of the month so I just had a couple of hours to do the 5 caches in the triangle between Hodson, Chisledon and the M4. The wind was in the ‘right’ direction and the noise from the motorway was taken away from me making this an exceedingly pleasant little outing. A cock-up on the final cache of the afternoon meant I ended up in someone’s back garden and had to climb over their back fence – oops!

Sean (Smenus) joined us the following day and we were determined to go caching. However again, the weather in the morning was foul and we only got out mid-afternoon. We then proceeded to do 15 caches in the Coleshill and Coxwell Circuit (CCC), this being a circuit that starts at Badbury Clump, proceeds cross-country to the attractive NT village of Coleshill, then goes cross-country to the attractive village of Great Coxwell, before circling back to the Clump. Badbury Clump and the villages are very nice, but the bits in-between are dull and boring.

Unfortunately we left it too late and this ended up being a bit of a forced march to finish in daylight. We were pretty pooped by the end, to put it mildly. We did however record our 1000^th cache on the circuit. This happened at a particularly dull cache. We recorded the momentous 1001^st cache, which was marginally less dull, with a picture where we unsuccessfully attempted to spell ‘1001’ with our fingers!

On arrival at home, we noticed that a new puzzle cache had just been published – Whomping Willow to give it a name. The Cache Owners were the Hegwig Hawks who appear to hide mostly Harry Potter themed caches. Now young HP leaves me cold, but Sean and his sister read all the books and so I thought we might be in with a chance. We both started independently on the puzzle; I was about half-way through it, and feeling quite pleased with myself, as I’m not good at puzzle caches, when Sean announced he had solved it. 5 minutes later we were in the car, armed with a couple of torches. It was all quiet at GZ – I love a bit of night caching – and within a few minutes I had located the cache. Our first FTF in February. It later turned out that another caching team were also planning to go out that night and only changed their minds when Sean logged the find. In the FTF race, he who hesitates is Second-To-Find!

As an aside I heard recently that a local caching team grabs FTF’s but deliberately doesn’t log them for a few hours just to encourage others to join the FTF race, obviously without a hope of success. Charming!

On the following day we went back and polished off the last 2 caches in the CCC series and also completed RoobyDoo’s The Best Ale? puzzle cache. This contains some internet research, which I completed in June 2009, some locally gained information, for which I used Google Earth (naughty I know!), and then the walk to the cache. This cache now holds the record for our longest to solve cache at 20 months!

The logo has nothing to do with caching, but 6X is the best ale! ... to answer RD's question!

After the puzzle cache we legged it over to the nearby Watchfield Windmills cache where we grabbed this picture. Economically bankrupt (they cost more in subsidy than the electricity value they produce), and an environmental eyesore, they are strangely compelling up close.

The following Saturday we drove on over to Grove, near Wantage to attend the Logging Yer Lurve! event. Beforehand we did a really super circular walk in the winter sunshine around Grove starting from the aircraft on the edge of what was the Grove airbase (Grove’s Venom), taking in a stretch of the abandoned Wilts & Berks canal.

The following day we attended February’s Swindon Soirees meeting. Very good, as always, but I had to leave early to see John Cooper Clarke in Reading. Next day I had some business to attend to in Halesowen and couldn’t help taking in a local urban micro called ding dong!!! F-narr, f-narr to quote Viz!

A couple of days later we had a visit to Nottingham Uni with Smenus, grabbing a cache on-site and one just outside. On the way we visited Aladdins Cave which is a puzzle cache just outside Nottingham Centre – basically an ammo can in an Army Surplus Emporium, not many ammo cans there then!! The very friendly store owners are cachers themselves and we had a mega chin-wag; their prices are also great, so a visit is highly recommended if you’re ever in Nottingham.

To be continued ...