Found by the geohound and I after a brief battle with the first stinging nettles of the season. Owie! She and I came over from Stanton Harcourt this morning – from which we see plenty
of Brize Nortons’ Hercules! – because many of our favourite local walks are waterlogged. Things are somewhat drier underfoot here, but after our walk through the fields the pup and I
are still rather muddy! TFTC.
The pup and I unearthed a few likely hiding places without success here. Not sure what we’ve missed: feels like we lifted every hint item in the vicinity!
QEF for the geopup and I on this strangely springlike morning. Cache container is damaged almost beyond recognition, as others have
observed, and is desperately in need of replacement. TFTC.
I haven’t hashed for long enough that my home graticule got marked as inactive. I’ve got a little free time this morning, so let’s fix that!
Expedition
It took two attempts to reach this hashpoint.
The first attempt saw me set off around 09:40, with a plan to drive over the world’s
stupidest toll bridge (paying 5p for the privilege), park up in Cumnor somewhere, then work down the Cumnor-Appleton footpath before dipping into the fields (which are likely to be
fallow this time of year) to claim the hashpoint. I suggested to take the dog, and the 7-year-old child asked if he could join me too, so the three of us with our eight legs set off.
This winter’s seen heavy rain around these parts, and the stream that runs alongside the footpath had broken its banks and flooded the fields. The water had receded, but the ground
remained extremely boggy. That kind of thick, wellie-sucking mud that means that if you stop walking for more than a couple of seconds, you might as well give up and say you live there
now because your boot is never coming back.
The kid found the going especially-tough, especially after a particularly-deep puddle splashed over the edge of his wellies, and asked to turn back. The dog was finding it a bit
challenging too! So we doubled-back and found a geocache a little way off the
path. We’ve generally been disappointed by Cumnor’s geocaches and especially this series, finding them to be ill-maintained or completely absent, but it looks like the cache owner
has been working on repairing and replacing them towards the tail end of last year and this one was soon found. I drove the dog and child home (back across the toll bridge), then came
back out myself (paying the fivepence toll a third time). So began the second attempt:
Unburdened by short-legged dogs and damp-footed kids, I made better progress. At points, the path was completely flooded-out, but this gave me an excuse to walk along the “tramlines” of
the cultivator that must’ve been working in the field last year, which put me on a better course to reach the hashpoint. By 11:06 I was well within the circle of uncertainty and
declared the mission a success.
Then I plodged back through the mud, changed my footwear, and drove over the toll bridge a fourth time. The attendant, clearly sick of seeing me driving back and forth, took
pity on me and let me off without paying yet another 5p piece, so that was nice.
This “path” seems to be a stream.
Muddy boots
200 metres to go.
Zero point!
Silly grin
View North from the hashpoint.
View East from the hashpoint.
View South from the hashpoint.
View West from the hashpoint.
Found after trying a few different hosts while out on an expedition to try and reach the 2024-02-10 51 -1 geohashpoint with the 7-year-old and the dog. The path to the hashpoint is really waterlogged and the little
man said his wellies were leaking so we doubled back and retrieved this cache. Extracting the log was a bit of a challenge owing to tune container shape but we managed in the end.
TFTC.
A second find this morning for the boy, the geopup and I this morning. The hound was no use; she had her nose right up against the cache at one point and gave no indication whatsoever.
I’m beginning to think she doesn’t understand geocaching at all! Signed “DQ” to save space. TFTC.
Out for a dog walk with the younger child (and the dog, of course!). We’ve come to the nearby ruins many times before but never taken the time to do some caching here, until today.
Needed the hint to guide us to the right host, after which it was an easy find, although the 7 y/o‘s little fingers had to work hard to
extract the cache container from its (temporary?) hiding place! Log damp, but was able to sign “DQ”. TFTC.
If you could make your pet understand one thing, what would it be?
The strangers who we keep inviting into our house do not want to steal your toys and do not need to be “seen off”.
“Somebody’s at the door! I’d better bark to see them off!”
Lately, we’ve had a lot of strangers in the house: builders, plumbers, and electricians, all working on some significant building works.
And even though she’s got to be starting to recognise the same old folks coming and going, day-in and day-out, our little pup still goes completely mental every time the
builders turn up, each morning.
It’s been… a little stressful and chaotic for us all, here. Every few days a new hole appears in the house, and a new set of curious buried problems emerges (why does this pipe go
here? who thought it was good idea to wire these sockets like that?).
I get it. They come and go but don’t smell like they live here. They make a lot of noise and dust. But seriously, dog: these people aren’t going to bring us any harm2.
Just chill out already!
Today we’re having one of the biggest bits of work done: the removal of the ceiling in the main hallway and the installation of a new staircase. So the dog’s spending the day…
elsewhere! We’ve sent her off to play with her little doggy friends at our dogsitter’s house. It’s probably for the best.
2 Some days they don’t come through the front door at all, but up the scaffolding and in
through the roof: she knows they’re here from the banging sounds but not from which direction they’ll approach, and she’ll sometimes gather all of her toys into a pile and guard them…
y’know, in case they’ve come here to steal all her most-valuable well-chewed playthings.
I could think of countless examples of feeling loved. As a child. As a parent. As a friend. As a lover.1 But picking up your dog from the dogsitter after you’ve
been away for a few days somehow distils the feeling down to its most-basic.
Sometimes the look of affection instead reflects their love of the treat they anticipate you might have in your hand, but still.
Footnotes
1 I feel like I’m about to break into a Meredith Brooks song.
“Tank sleepy. But Tank listen your idea in case it tasty idea.”
I’ve tried to explain to our occasionally-anxious dog that, for example, the dog-and-human shaped blobs at the far end of the field includes a canine with whom she’s friendly and
playful. She can’t tell who they are because her long-distance vision’s not as good as mine1, and we’re too far away for her to be able to smell her
friend.
If this were a human meetup and I wasn’t sure who I’d be meeting, I’d look it up online, read the attendees’ names and see their photos, and be reassured. That’s exactly what I
do if I’m feeling nervous about a speaking engagement: I look up the other speakers who’ll be there, so I know I can introduce myself to people before or after me. Or if I’m attending a
work meet-up with new people: I find their intranet profiles and find out who my new-to-me colleagues are.
“Oh! Is you! Hurrah!” /buttsniffing intensifies/
Wouldn’t it be great if I could “show” my dog who she was going to meet, in smell-form.
I imagine a USB-C accessory you can attach to your computer or phone which can analyse and produce dogs’ unique scents, storing
and transmitting their unique fingerprint in a digital form. Your subscription to the service would cover the rental of the accessory plus refills of the requisite chemicals, and a
profile for your pooch on the Web-based service.
Now, you could “show” your dog who you were going to go and meet, by smell. Just look up the profile of the playmate you’re off to see, hold the device to your pupper’s nose,
and let them get a whiff of their furry buddy even before you get there. Dogs do pretty well at pattern-matching, and it won’t take them long to learn that your magical device
is a predictor of where they’re headed to, and it’ll be an effective anxiety-reducer.
Seeking investors for a genuinely terrible crazy business idea. Photo courtesy SHVETS production.
The only question is what to call my social-network-for-dogs. Facebutt? Pupper? HoundsReunited???
Footnotes
1 Plus: I get contextual clues like seeing which car the creature and its owner got out
of.
The poor little geopup’s only got tiny legs, and the 8km we’ve walked so-far has got her pretty tired-out, so this’ll be the last cache of the series before we go and find ourselves
some lunch and go home. It’s been a very enjoyable series so far, and I fully intend to return to complete it (and perhaps find some of those earlier caches that I failed to spot).
For this final cache of the morning (well, afternoon: barely!), I found the likely spot straightaway and picked up something that looked out of place. Nope, no sign of the cache though;
that’s strange. It took a few seconds to realise that yes, the cache was hidden behind the thing I’d picked up… it was just also covered with leaf little and detritus.
Soon had it retrieved in the end, though.
A huge number of butterflies flocked in the field to our right: it was quite impressive. I’ve snapped a picture showing just one, so that I can later look up what kind of butterfly it
is!
Sometimes the geo-sense “just works”. This was one of those moments. I was approaching the area and checking the distance. Then I walked straight to a likely location. Then I picked up
the cache. Done and done.
Turning South and crossing our own path, the sun came out at last and we were bathed in glorious warm light. Between that, and the familiarity of the trail we passed, the geopup and I
completely forgot for a moment that we were out to look for this next cache and overshot it: we had to turn back to get to the coordinates and find the cache. TFTC!
Worra lorra porkers! The geopup is a huge fan of sausages but I don’t think she understood that the cornucopia she was looking at across the field was the same thing, just a few years
off being ripe. Great cache container too. TFTC, and let’s chuck an FP in because this series as a whole
has definitely earned another one in my mind by now…
The geopup and I tried a couple of likely hiding places before we found this one. A nice-sized container and well-suited to its hiding place, here, TFTC!
