It’s increasingly looking like this series might be in need of some love and attention. With numbers 3 and 4 completely absent and a nearly two year gap since 5 was last logged –
coupled with my bad luck so far this morning – I wasn’t optimistic of a find here.
I enjoyed the walk, though. This long-abandoned, now feral, olive grove is tranquil and calm. And when I got to the GZ, I was delighted to see the “top” of a cache container, exactly
matching one seen elsewhere in the logs, protruding from under a rock. Hurrah!
Unfortunately, that’s almost all that’s left of the container. I collected it up onto its host rock, along with several shards of what were once its body: a sort-of memorial to itself.
Then I wrote the date and my name on the inside of the lid, declared this the closest possible thing to a “find”, under the circumstances, and left my little shrine alone. Will it ever
be found again? I don’t know.
A disappointing start to this morning’s walk. There’s an obvious host that I spent some your poking under without success, after which I turned to the trees to see if they could help.
But no luck for me. Maybe on my way back to the car, time-permitting!
A quick find after a visit to the gardens with my family. Sneaky container: I like it. We’d accidentally parked the car almost next to the cache! Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK, and
TFTC/GLA!
Finding the cache was easy. Reaching around to pull it from its hiding place was harder! But soon I had it in hand. This has been a lovely morning walk.
Now I should have some breakfast and make my lazy children get out of bed!
TFTC/GLA. FP for the series in general (as experienced so far). And once more: greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
I was glad if the shade provided by the trees along this delightful footpath. Working up a bit of a sweat out here! Had to break from the footpath and kick through some undergrowth to
reach the GZ this time, but the coordinates were spot on and I soon had the cache in hand.
Logbook has been soaked but then dried out and is… crispy! Hard to write on! Might benefit from fresh paper!
A quick and easy find once I spotted a likely hiding place. Starting to feel like I should have had breakfast before I set off! TFTC/GPA, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK.
My family and I are on holiday staying nearby. I came out this morning to explore and try to find a couple of local geocaches while the children were still asleep. This was the first.
I needed to walk around the GZ a few times before I saw the cache, with its vantage point over this beautiful valley. Then it was time for a quick scramble up the tree to retrieve it.
Signed log and returned to its hiding place. TFTC/GPA; greetings from the UK!
“Thank you for using RSS.” “I love RSS.” A badge in the footer. A little heart, a blogroll. Community. Belonging.
I love TCP/IP. I love HTTP 1.1. I love DNS resolution. Where is my badge. Where is my directory. Nobody forms a tribe around plumbing. You use it. You don’t announce it. You don’t
put a sticker in your footer that says “I love packet switching”.
RSS is plumbing. A transport format. XML with angle brackets and escaped HTML and a version attribute and the CDATA hack. You don’t love it.
…
I feel targetted (if you subscribe by RSS you’ll know that I share my enjoyment of the format in my <description>s!).
Actually, I do love RSS!
I love it despite its faults; and it’s got plenty of faults. Its brittleness, sure, as unstory observes. But also its insistence upon RFC
822 dates, which are almost the worst imaginable standardised Internet date format. Also the fact that things you wouldn’t want to use it without borrowing features from a different, one might say competing, standard. Also the excessive HTTP-centricity,
which makes it theoretically a standards violation to, e.g. make a podcast that’s distributed by Gemini, for example.
But I love what it does. I love how it ties the Web together. And I love how it does it: just a resource, at a URL, that the subscriber can hit as frequently, or not, as they like.
Oh and:
The person with the heart in their footer would not survive writing one item by hand.
I totally would. I absolutely do. I rarely do, because I’m far more-inclined to write software to do it for me, but I still write “raw” RSS a couple of times in a typical
year.
I also love HTTP. Maybe I should sing about that more often, too. And yes, I actually love HTTP in the way that unstory gatekeeps “love of a technology”, like I do RSS: I can “survive
writing it by hand”.
I’m staying in the Thistle Hotel around the corner before a flight in the morning, and stepped out to find this cache – and some supper – before bed. Sorry to hear about your muggle
troubles, but this current (new) container is a good one: needed to say the hint out loud a few times before I worked out what I was looking for! SL, TNLN, TFTC.
This afternoon I’m scheduled to drive from West Oxfordshire to Heathrow Airport. I’ll only lose 15 minutes to divert by the backroads and see if this hashpoint is achievable.
Expedition
I’ve been looking for an opportunity to get out ‘hashing but one’s never shown up somewhere and somewhen that I can make it lately…
…but today, I had to travel from West Oxfordshire to Heathrow Terminal 5. Now there’s a perfectly good highway for that – two options, infact: the A40+M40, or the A34+M4… but I figured
that if I took neither route, instead hacking my way cross-country, it probably wouldn’t cost me more than about 15 minutes extra (spoiler: it took me about 30 minutes extra,
but it was a bit of a rat run for some commuters) and allow me to see about this hashpoint!
Abandoning the car.
Initial survey showed that it’s in a field, which doesn’t bode too well. I’m certainly not interested in trampling crops or hopping fences.
It was a bit warm for walking a road like this!
But to my delight, as I drove alongside the GZ, I saw that it corn had recently been cut and the bales stacked one field over. I turned up the lane alongside and hunted for a place to
park, eventually finding one about 700m away from the hashpoint.
Oh look, a footpath I can get lost from!
A convenient footpath gave me an excuse to start tramping through the parched cut field, until eventually I was upon the hashpoint.
The hashpoint’s out there somewhere!
It was a gloriously hot summer’s day and the rolling hills are especially delightful around here. I reached the hashpoint around 18:22.
Success! I’m out standing in my field!
And then… pressed on to my hotel in Heathrow for dinner, and sleep, and an early flight!
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