After a walk out with the dog to claim the FTF on nearby GCBX0R7, I figured that I still had a little a few minutes
on my hands before the code I’d been writing for my day job finished deploying and testing itself, so I thought I’d try to go two-for-two with this, a second FTF!
Coordinate components A through D were easy to collect, but E posed us a problem: from the way it’s put forward in the cache description, the answer I came up with didn’t make any
sense! I double-checked A through D and, confident in them, mathematically inferred a range of possible values for E, but couldn’t find any way to conceivably get any of
them!1
She’s no good at the counting, but she’s a big fan of getting her nose in to investigate clue objects.
In any case: of the handful of possible values for E, only one made sense/pointed anywhere believable, and it fit the checksum so we set out. The cache was easy to find, and what an
excellent container! Amazing work! The container alone would have been worth a favourite point, if only I hadn’t been completely unable to parse that fifth coordinate component.
Signed log and returned the cache to its hiding place. Hoping the next cacher doesn’t get as confused as I did! TFTC!
Footnotes
1 I’ll message the CO to get to the bottom of my confusion!
After liaising with the CO to get the formula fixed following my previous effort, the geohound and I came
out for a drizzly walk in-between the downpours to have a second attempt at the FTF. We’re living in Standlake temporarily while our house is
repaired following a catastrophic flood earlier in the year, and while the dog – who doesn’t much enjoy rain – was initially hesitant about
coming out with me, she warmed to the idea just in time for us to set out.
Out in the wet.
The cache was an easy find in the second place I looked (if I’d checked the hint it’d have been the first place I looked). SL and returned, before pressing on to attempt a second FTF, this time at GCBX0JC.
TFTC, and for the quick turnaround on correcting the calculation!
Ruth, JTA, the kids and I are all back in the UK1
after a three week period during which some or all of us were consistently in Spain. The whole adventure was the kind of masterpiece of epic planning that only Ruth could have pulled
off, and it worked spectacularly2.
I wasn’t around for the first week of the trip, but continued working from home (with the dog, pictured) as per the usual.
San Sebastián
Through clever permutations of remote-working from overseas (mostly by Ruth) and overlapping/intersecting stretches of annual leave (mostly by JTA and I), we were able to avoid having
to send the dog to the dogsitter for a block of more than a single week3,
didn’t need to break the bank on our collective leave budgets, and managed to give the kids the longest possible block of continuous immersion in the language and culture of Spain.
The one time I tried surfing, I wasn’t good at it, but I was reassured that was normal for a first day. The kids disproved that theory,
becoming pretty reasonable boarders very quickly.
In the first week (when I wasn’t there), the kids got to take a mixture of surfing classes and Spanish language lessons in San Sebastián, among other activities. The Bordeaux wildfires caused some travel chaos for the others getting there, but they made it work in the end.
Tarragona
Later, I flew out to meet up with them and we switched to the opposite coast of Spain, staying in a delightful little
villa North of Tarragona. The summer heatwaves that are affecting the continent made the middle of the day especially
oppressive, so we did as the locals do and sensibly sheltered indoors during the hottest part of the day… but the kids in particular were glad to be able to take a dip in the pool to
cool off.
The villa was a lovely building in a fabulous spot, nestled among hillside olive groves and vineyards, but the lack of wired Internet
access/WiFi plus the signal-blocking stone walls made it more “disconnected” than we’d anticipated4!
As has become my tradition when travelling and on family holidays – because I’m an earlier riser than most, but also because I wanted to make the most of the coolest part of the day – I
got out early most days for a whole bunch of geocaching expeditions5.
But once others were awake we found plenty of other opportunities to explore the area.
Parc Samà‘s breezy towers and water features took some of the heat out of the day, when we visited its attractive botanic gardens.
Having come from, remarkably, a similar level of temperature and humidity in the UK, I was interested to see how much greener everything was here on the Mediterranean
coast. The plants here, better-adapted to hot and dry summers than those that we plant on our little island, were clearly more-suited to these kinds of conditions. Is it perhaps time
that Britain started ditching her lawns and other year-round thirsty vegetation… instead planting more tropical-adjacent plants to provide shade (and carbon capture!) as the climate
continues to shift?
This little fella had the right idea about keeping cool.
I enjoyed that we were able to split out time between a diversity of activities. A week-long jaunt can be dominated by a single activity – a skiing holiday, for example – but by the
time you’re spending most of a month exploring a country, you want to be able to mix things up a bit, right?
Sometimes we kept it slow-paced and relaxing, like reading by the pool while the children invent splashing-based games or playing board games in the shade. Other times we explored
history and culture, like our visit to the Ferreres Aqueduct, the Catedral de Tarragona, or the old Roman amphitheatre.
An augmented reality tour of the amphitheatre was both engaging and educational for the kids, bringing to life its long and complex history: did you know it started as an
amphitheatre, but later was the ground of a church (commemorating Saint Fructuosus, who was executed there), then
became a prison, and now… it’s an amphitheatre again: in addition to being a historical monument it’s used to stage concerts and things!
And other times still we even did the typical “British tourist in Spain” things, like a trip to the beach or an expedition out on a catamaran to swim in the sea while the sun set.
I expected the catamaran trip to be a bit tacky, but it was actually lush. (I may have availed myself of the open bar, a bit!)
Obviously the biggest reason for our trip was to catch sight of the total solar eclipse as it passed over the region, and our villa’s garden/vineyard was without a doubt a superlative
spot for this. We’d initially been concerned that visibility of the low-in-the-sky/close to sunset eclipse might be obstructed by the hills and that, therefore, we’d need to find
another spot from which to spectate, but an early-in-the-week experiment of watching the sunset (with an eye on the clock) reassured us that this wasn’t the case. So – as long as we
were lucky with the cloud cover – we should be set.
A particular highlight of the entire trip was hanging out as a family in our private vineyard, watching the solar eclipse.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have had great visibility of a total solar eclipse once before, in 1999, but honestly: this one beat
it. The perfect location, the reds of the setting sun, the “moon illusion” exaggerating the perceived size of the moon as it
approached the sun, the joy of vicariously sharing in the childrens’ wonder… all of these made the whole experience pretty mind-blowing.
You’ve seen pictures of eclipses before, but this one is mine. I maintain that even the good/professional photographs are poor substitutes for the real experience, though!
We watched, we awed, and then we saw the still half-obscured sun gradually disappear over the horizon. And then, a round of hugs and cheers and conversation later, we sat up late to
enjoy the Perseids begin their nocturnal display.
Mostly I was looking at the sky (through the safety of my eclipse glasses, of course). But I managed to snap a handful of photographs that, despite the limitations of my phone’s
camera, came out pretty well.
PortAventura
After our week in the villa we delivered JTA to the airport to return home. Then Ruth, the kids and I drove on to PortAventura, perhaps
our favourite theme park anywhere in the world. Since our last visit, the younger kid has reached a milestone of height that permits him to ride all of the largest rides, and he was
excited to take advantage of this newfound privilege.
A particularly useful thing about PortAventura compared to some other theme parks is that it’s designed with heatwaves in mind: it’s got lots of natural shade, cooling-off
areas, and the right ratio of water rides for when you positively, absolutely need a good soaking.
Both the elder child and I were particularly excited to share with him my favourite non-looping
rollercoaster, Shambhala. Shambhala is simply excellent: it’s a highly-vertical smooth ride with a free and open-feeling restraint that, collectively, give amazing “air”
and a sensation of “flying” that’s hard to compare to almost any other coaster ride I’ve been on. I could sing its praises aplenty.
The second we reached the front of the line for our first ride on Dragon Khan…
it broke down. But we got to watch it being repaired right in front of us, so that’s cute!
Going to Disneyland Paris and PortAventura in the same summer gives me the confidence to say: PortAventura is the better theme park. The rides, the
theming, the food, the queue management, the accommodation, the value-for-money… it’s all better. So if you’re considering a European theme park trip and you don’t
care about getting your photo taken with Goofy or whatever… PortAventura would be my suggestion.
PortAventura’s water park is good too, although it was pretty busy on the day we went. Their 30-metre tall near-vertical waterslide King Khajuna is a little
intimidating7,
but nothing our thrillseeking little man wasn’t up for.
Barcelona
Finally, we made our way to Barcelona for a “wind-down” couple of days at a hotel we’ve always enjoyed there. Aside for being mistaken for staff
while I was using my laptop by the rooftop pool, there’s little of note to say about it: we took it easy, did as little as we could get away with, and generally “unplugged” before
our journey back to the UK and a return to normal life (boo!).
Altogether a fabulous trip… and a really interesting experiment in a model that we could replicate if we ever opted for a three week (but drop-in/drop-out/telework) holiday in future.
Though… I’d again want (our scheduling queen) Ruth to wrangle the logistics, because it gets complicated when there are so many moving parts!
2 For a while, she was talking about trying to engineer it into a five-week
expedition spanning both this and our trip to France earlier in the summer (to which JTA, the kids and I drove/LeShuttle’d, and to which Ruth flew following a work-related
event in Austria: my, what a cosmopolitan life we’re leading this year!). But that’d have been an enormously more-complicated affair and I’m glad we settled on this “simpler” trip in
the end!
3 Not that she cares: the dog loves hanging out with her little doggy friends, and is
always excited to be taken to our dogsitter‘s, where she also “commutes” for a workday or two most weeks.
4 During out post-holiday ‘retro’ (because of course that’s what we do), the lack of connectivity appeared as both a negative
and a positive on some of our lists! Obviously we’re all aware that a little digital disconnection is healthy and valuable, but sometimes it takes being in the middle of
nowhere to impose the requisite self-discipline to keep off your devices!
6 Obviously, the Devil’s Bridge nearest where I used to live and at which Ruth and I spent our first anniversary – back when we had no idea that we’d be able to make our relationship last… what…? 19 years this month!) –
will always have a special place in my heart.
7 Reaching the top of King Khajuna’s tower, you can feel it swap in the breeze, and when
you get to the slide itself its ‘horizon’ disappears precipitously until you shuffle completely up to it, at which point there’s little choice about your destination! While we queued
for our first goes, we witnessed several people reach the top, change their minds, and turn back!
My living room TV is attached to an ageing Windows box that we use as a media centre and middleweight gaming1
PC. To better fill the room with sound (I hate those tinny flat speakers they like to put into TVs these days!), the TV is also attached to a soundbar.
The problem is that the soundbar keeps shutting itself down. If it doesn’t receive any signals for ~20 minutes, it enters sleep mode2. It automatically turns
itself on when the TV turns on, but it turns itself off all by itself.
This is annoying, because if we pause what we’re watching for a conversation or something, the soundbar switches itself off, even though the computer and television are still
switched-on. It’s doubly-annoying because we then have to get up and walk over to it to switch it back on again, because the
dog ate the remote3.
LED’s gone red again?5
Sigh. Whose turn is it to get up and press the button?
My solution is BeepAlive, a little Go program that runs in a Windows system tray and makes a very quiet noise once every 9 minutes.
I’ve tuned the noise so that it’s quiet enough that I can’t hear it unless I’m specifically listening for it… but loud enough that it the soundbar sees that there are still audio
signals coming in, so it doesn’t go to sleep.
Now, so long as the media centre computer and TV remain powered-on, the soundbar stays awake. And that’s how a hacky engineer like me can solve a hardware problem with a software tool.
Footnotes
1 Mostly the gaming’s done by the kids, and they’re likely-as-not to use the Switch or
Steam Deck instead… or, when we’re not at the Chicory House, Bee, the Bazzite-powered gaming rig I set up in the playroom… but in principle it’s equipped for gaming. I guess we sometimes fire a Jackbox Party Pack on it when we have guests?
2 It doesn’t even seem to save any power to be in sleep mode: my power checker tool says
it draws basically the same amount whichever mode it’s in!
3 It’s triply-annoying because our soundbar is the only infrared-controlled device in our
house that doesn’t follow the IrDA standard, which makes it incredibly difficult for me to automate switching it on from the TV remote, our Flic hub, any “universal remote” etc. I managed to pull off a replay using my Flipper
Zero, but that’s not a solution I want to put into the hands of the kids (or anywhere that the dog might eat it). I suppose I could buy a replacement remote, but I don’t feel like
giving any more money to a company that turned their nose up at IrDA.
4 Okay, so technically I solved this with software a few years ago, but I
misplaced the software and it, frankly, wasn’t very good. My thinking is that by doing it better, and open-sourcing it, I’ll be able to find it when I need it next. And as a bonus, it
might just maybe help somebody else, someday.
5 At our regular house, rather than the Chicory House, the soundbar lives
above the TV, close to the ceiling, and it’s hard to even see the annoying LED. So I mounted a tiny mirror, about a quarter of the size of a fingernail, to the ceiling above
it to improve its visibility from the sofa. Now that’s a hardware solution!
Sat in the shade with my panting pupper and almost immediately spotted this clever cache container. A great location and an imaginative container! Definitely worth an FP from me.
New friends – obscure sights – the group divides – clear and present danger – an accident of geography – interest in bridges
2026 has not been an easy one so far. Work challenges, family challenges and my frickin’ house flooding have combined to make everything a bit overwhelming
and hard to cope with.
So when we got a sunny Sunday, on a weekend in late April when (thanks to having found a long-term rental) we didn’t have to move between short-term lets, I cajoled Dan
into once again acting as my support driver so I could walk some more of the Thames Path.
Dan and the smaller child joined me for the first couple of miles from Abingdon, which was nice.
…
My partner Ruth’s mission to walk the entire length of the Thames Path1
continued recently, and I still love “going on on” her journey – even the parts I wasn’t present for – through her blog posts.
If you too might enjoy blog-spectating this slowest-possible-walk along the length of the River Thames, you can catch-up on the
backlog and subscribe for the next one, whenever that happens!
Footnotes
1 She’s doing the walk in many, tiny, and disparate instalments. By her own estimates
she’s achieving about 50 metres per day, when averaged over her entire effort. This makes her only marginally faster than the 40 metres per day of the faster parts of the Greenland
Ice Sheet, which I guess means that her progress is literally glacial in its speed.
For a while I was looking way too high, but in the end I caught a glimpse of this surprisingly well-concealed container.
And that’s the loop complete! Big thanks to the CO for setting this excellent trail spanning so many gorgeous footpaths, many of them new to me despite being relatively local!
Thanks for all the caches, and for a delightful Spring morning’s walk!
My GPSr – and my eyes – locked on to a nearby gate post which I searched thoroughly before realising it wasn’t the host: d’oh! Eventually found success while the doggo tried to make
more sheepy friends.
