Piratemania 7

Thursday 24th July

So after having a couple of days turnaround from our trip down South we were to set sail again to the Piratemania Mega Event.
We had booked the camping a few months ago and will be staying at the Cartmel racecourse for 3 nights.
On our way there of course there would be a few diversions and the plan was to get as many of the nearby virtuals as possible. Due to time restrictions a walk up Scaffell Pike and Helvellyn was out of the question so we still have those virtuals left to do.

So a lovely early start in fantastic weather too, our first port of call was Civic Trust (Cumbria).
A quick virtual just off the M6. This is a drive by and the answer is quickly found. An interesting spot with some great views.




Ben near GZ

Stunning views

Next on the list was quite a big diversion in the opposite direction to Cartmel. We headed East to a virtual just off the A66.

Bridge Stone (Cumbria)
Another drive-by virtual in a nice area. Information was easily obtained and we even met other cachers there who took a pic for us.

The bridge

Onwards a bit more North now but in a westerly direction to one I have been looking forward to for ages. It did not disappoint.

Long Meg [Cumbria]
A stone circle that has been around over 4,500 years.
Well this really was a fantastic area and a big reason as to why we love Geocaching. We may have even converted some muggles from Colorado who were over for a few weeks.

Ben, DS & the circle

Long Meg

That was the last one this side of the M6 and next it is the Lake District woohoo.

Ben and I visited the Lake District 2 years ago for the NW Mega at Cartmel and this time we really wanted to show mummy what she missed out on.

First stop was Keswick and a walk along the lovely Derwent water.

George Hodgson
We had trouble parking at the car park due to it being so busy. It is always busy up here but especially when the weather is as gorgeous as it is today.

We headed down from car park and along side the water, it is a stunning walk with the most spectacular views.

The first view from car park

The information was found quickly enough but luckily we looked in the right place for the answers.

Amazing place

Not far from GZ

A quick walk back the the car and then a very short drive to another fantastic location.

Mirror Image (Cumbria)
Just Ben and I went over to this one so we didn't have to park up properly again. This virtual is supposed to get a great photo across the lake with a Mirror Image effect. Unfortunately we couldn't get that effect today but we were able to answer the simple question to claim the find.

An amazing spot

Ben in his element

That was our last virtual of the day and now for something different - a traditional cache with lots of favourite points.

Cathedral Cavern Cache
Cathedral Cavern is a disused quary which has created a beautiful cavern - the size of a Cathedral - with a spectacular pillar and a marvellous window out to the sky (Taken from the cache page)
Finding the cache was easy but that isn't what this cache is all about, the area is amazing.

Inside the cavern

Through the window.

At the back of the cavern you can clamber over some big rocks and up to reach some tunnels, but a torch is required.

The tunnel

This cache definitely deserves all the fave points it gets and is a place we would definitely return.

So apart from a couple of drive by's it was off to Cartmel to settle in with the fellow campers.

All pitched up and ready to rumble.

We had a relaxing couple of ciders before heading across camp for the BBQ event.
Lots of chat with familiar faces and some new ones before our first day was done, a great day and good to be back at this lovely village.

Friday 25th July

Our first morning and second day in the area. We were going to go up Scaffell Pike today but last night we decided against it due to temperatures getting as high as 30 degrees.
So today we spent around Coniston on an epic adventure.

Pirate's Mystery Trail II
A 6 stage 5/5 in blistering heat, are we up for it? hell yes.
This is one of the best caches we have done with every stage in a fantastic location.
We won't spoil it as it is a cache that you won't regret doing but here is a handful of pictures.

A paddle is in order

Ooh a cave?

Water?

Views

Wow

The treasure

It took us a few hours to complete this but it was worth every single minute. Coniston is a stunning location so lots of pics are necessary.

So just this main cache today but we did grab one more cache and then in the evening headed into Cartmel for an evening get together in the Royal Oak Inn.
It is a lovely pub with a very nice Beer Garden. With this event you could book a burger which was cooked on the BBQ and it went down very well. We enjoyed chatting with friends galore and Ben and Blokieblokes lad played in the little stream in the beer garden.

Back at the campsite afterwards we carried on the chatting and swilled down a couple more Cider's before retiring to bed exhausted from the heat.

Saturday 26th July

It's Mega day

Summer Hols - Minehead / Lynton

It's about time that we started to blog again after such a long break.
The Summer hols were full of meeting people and seeing many countries within Europe, we even managed to grab a cache or 2.

We kick-started the holidays with a cheap sun holiday to Butlins Minehead and then added a night at the wonderful campsite "Sunny Lyn" in Lynton.

The caching choice for the Saturday was handpicked as we wanted to grab a couple of Virtuals in South Devon, a Webcam and then a few challenge caches.

The Virtuals - Torquay Round Table & Face it, you're stumped! were very easy and were done in no time. It was still nice to drive around the English Riviera though.



Face it, you're stumped!

We moved on to Teignmouth next and did 4 challenges caches based on having so many favourite points and 1 challenge of completing 100+ caches in a day.

The weather was pretty good down south as it was horrendous in the Midlands so it was nice to pop off to an old favourite seaside town - Exmouth.

Last time we were here was not long after we began caching and at that time we had absolutely no idea how to do a Webcam cache. Thankfully nowadays we do haha.
For those who don't know you have to post an image of yourself that appears on a webcam by taking a screenshot from the relevant website, simple really..

"The Hotspot"

"The Hotspot" webcam is finally grabbed 4 years after wondering what to do.
A few drive-by caches now so that we can get back to Butlins for some Ben-time.

All Revved Up.

Ben loves Butlins, as do most kids as there is that much to do. Thankfully he isn't fussed about the night time entertainment so the rest of the night was spent relaxing outside the pub on site.


Sunday was an easy day with a 5/5 and 2 old caches planned, but they were so worth it.
First off was Exe View (Somerset) which was placed in May 2002. We had to take a short walk up a very overgrown path to GZ and it was a simple find.  The next one A Winters Tale was a multi placed in July 2003. It was easy enough to get the information but the walk to GZ and then GZ itself was truly fantastic, which is often the case for the older caches.

Next up was the highlight of the day Look into the Light which is a 5/5 puzzle cache.
We are not going to say much about it except for that it definitely needs bookmarking.
Here's a couple of pics:

Look into the Light

Look into the Light

By the time we had completed the challenge set and got back to the car it was very warm so we decided to head back so we could grab a couple of Ciders and allow Ben to run around the playground. A perfect way to end the afternoon all round we think.

Monday started off with a huge breakfast before setting off for the lovely Lynton/Lynmouth area. The drive along the coast is just sensational, we did a couple of drive by's on the way and a YOSM in which got Kate appearing on the cache page.

Countisbury Hill YOSM

 

View from YOSM

Next we carried on to the wonderful campsite Sunny Lyn to pitch our tent before heading off to do a simply wonderful series Hunter's Hike.
The views on this walk really are breathtaking, the walk takes you high above the valley, along the North Devon coastline, up a quiet country lane, down through woodlands and along the river Heddon.

Getting Higher up

At the coast

What a great footpath

Don't get many coastlines better than this.

Into the valley

This is definitely one of the best walks we have done and we were fortunate to have wonderful sunshine the whole way. All 25 caches were found and we all went back to the campsite happy.

Sunny Lyn is one of the best UK campsites we have stayed at. We all enjoyed a nice lazy couple of hours drinking our drinks which we chilled in the river at the end of our pitch.

Chilling the drinks

Pre-water fight

We popped into Lynmouth as we had promised Ben a fish and chip tea and afterwards took a walk in the evening to the nearest pub and had a quick drink there before heading back to the tent.

Chips on the seafront

Lynmouth

Tuesday - Our last day, so after enjoying a Full English breakfast in the site café we packed up the tent before taking in one more series and then heading home.

Yer Tis is another series next to the Hunter's Hike one and another lovely walk was enjoyed. It wasn't quite as scenic but still fantastic to walk in hot sunshine.
We had our first dnf on the trip as we did the walk but it turned out that it was missing so not all bad.



More views on Yer Tis series.

So after a tiring walk in the heat it was time to say goodbye to North Devon and head back home to prepare for our next trip to Piratemania on Thursday.

European Tour

This was thought up around 5 weeks ago and the aim of the trip was to find 2 Jasmer caches that you can't get in the UK, to find a cache in 6 different countries within 24 hours and to attend a Belgian Mega event. I put a post on the Group Caching trips group on Facebook and within a few days there were 5 of us all comitted to the trip.
We had booked return Ryanair flights from Stansted airport to Maastricht airport in NL for only £20 each.

Day 1
A very early start to the day, Griff (BaggieDave) picked me up and we drove and dropped car off at Mark & Alison's (colonel&crew) house. Alison then drove us all the way to Stansted picking Kev (Lorri-Ann & Kev) up on way. In between Kev's house and Stansted was to be our first country in the bag....the UK of course.

LQ:GTR LONDON - Oakwood Park
I like to pick up a Little Quest cache if I am ever near one and although it wasn't on the route, everyone kindly agreed we could go for it.
We parked up close to an entrance to the park and entered via torchlight, after finding the cache and heading back to the car it was starting to get light.

So with the first country bagged, we had parked up at airport and had a short wait before flying over to NL.
At airport we picked up the hire car but before setting off we all walked over to the nearest cache.

TRAVEL BUG AIRPORT (edition 4.0)
This was conveniently located close to airport entrance and our first ammo can of the trip. The cache was hidden in the ground slightly with camo over the top.



Griff soon finds the cache and NL is in the bag.

So a quick walk back to the car where I volunteered to do all the driving until we got to the Luxembourg cache. Next stop was Germany.
The first cache we went to in Germany we DNF'ed but that was mainly due to not finding it instantly and not being able to translate into English. We moved on slightly down the road to do 2 caches
Nano am Kronenberg & Kronenberg I - Backenzahn, neither of them were as good as the one in NL but we found a good photo opportunity nearby.
So that was our 3rd country in the bag.

Germany just found :)

Our schedule for the day has started well and no time lost with the DNF, it was time for the longest drive so far (which wasn't much) into Luxembourg, via Belgium.
We had to make a quick stop just after we got over the border I was in desperate need of a loo break so we parked by some lovely woods.

Donkelser Wollef
This was one of our 2 Luxembourg caches and another that we could park up alongside. We had no problem with either of the L caches although Mark had to jump up for the other.

Mark with the Wolfman

After these caches Griff took over the driving where we drove back into Belgium to go after one of the two caches that I really wanted.

Geocache
This cache is one of the oldest surviving in the world. It was placed in July 2000 and has the coordinates N 50° 00.000 E 005° 00.000. The cache was in a great location on the edge of some woods. It was another one that was in the ground and covered with a nice shaped piece of wood.

We rejoiced when we found it, it was a fantastic feeling to have yet another old cache in the bag. I had grabbed June 2000 two months ago.

Oh yes GC40 claimed.

So 5 countries ticked off and just France to go.

A short drive and we crossed another border, this time we were in France and at our next port of call in a little town called Givet.
Givet is a lovely little town with the River Meuse running through it. We decided to get out of car and walk to a couple of the caches and then have a celebratory drink.

Cologne 2011 geocaching event Givet France cache 1
This one was my favourite cache in Givet and also the one that meant we had completed our personal challenge of a cache in 6 countries in 24 hours.
This is a short walk to the Grégoire tower - it's an old watch tower which would have been erected in the eleventh century and is situated on the edge of the steep Mount of Hauri. Here you have a magnificent view over the river Meuse, the city of Givet and the fort of Charlemont.

The cache is up there, by the watchtower

Looking down from Watchtower

So a quick drink in the town at a bar called "Cafe de la Place" to celebrate our success. We actually completed the challenge in under 12 hours from first cache to last....

A quick celebratory drink

It was now time to cross over the border again in to Belgium and head towards Aalter of which was our destination for the night. We picked one more cache up on the route and Griff handed over the driving to Kev.

We arrived in Aalter early evening and checked into the Hotel Capitole our base for the night. We had a quick shower and headed into town for a nice meal and a couple of beers before retiring for the night.

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Day 2
Griff, Kev & I shared a triple room and decided that we would make an early start in our attempt to grab 100 caches on Mega day,
We woke up at 4am and headed for a series just 20 minutes away.

Langs de oevers
We had roughly 2 hours to grab as many of this 50 cache series as possible. We managed to get 28 of them and a couple of others that were on the route. The majority of them were drive by's but we did have a lot of fun getting to one of them by torchlight....It was really Jungle-like but certainly lots of fun, one of them was up in a tree at the side of a river and #1 of the series had a marvellous "Geocache Maintenance Station". I have certainly never seen anything like it but it was fabulous.

Me up a tree

Geocache Maintenance Station.

So we had 30 caches under our belt and got back to hotel for a quick freshen up and breakfast before heading off for Bruges.

We had decided that we would go and find the hotel for tonights stay and park up closeby and then walk to the Mega event.

Our hotel for the night.

Brugse Beer III

We arrived at the Mega Event and soon spotted cachers from the UK and had a bit of a chat and a small beer. The event was typical of the Mega's back at home and within 30 mins or so it was time to head off and grab some caches so we decided to do some alongside the river on the way back to hotel.

Fellow caching addicts from West Mids.

Kev, Griff and I then decided to grab the car and go and grab as many caches as possible in our quest to grab 100 on Mega day.

Down the riverside

The river

Snif
A series of 9 caches and a bonus over 1.8 miles.
There was some lovely woodland to the side of us and all caches were nice quick finds. We got around the walk in 40 minutes as we were on a mission.

Bones
A series of 14 caches and a bonus over 2.3 miles.
Another easy walk along tracks down the edges of fields. The caches were easy to find and to get the bonus coords you had to match up bones of the body to get final coords for the bonus.
The bonus was yet another Ammo can hidden below ground level.
55 minutes later and this series was in the bag too.

De legende
A series of 12 caches and a bonus over 3 miles.
An easy walk along tracks at the side of fields, with some nice woodland threw in as well. All caches were found no problem and the bonus was yet another ammo can hidden under ground level.


These 3 walks have been fantastic and great to do them in another country on the hottest day of the year so far. We rewarded ourselves with a thickshake from McDonalds and then headed on over to some of the newly published caches and did them as drive by's until we hit 100 for the day.

We then headed back to hotel for a quick wash and then set off to meet Mark & Alison at an Indian Restaurant in the city centre.

Beautiful Bruges

The Main Square

We had a very enjoyable meal and then Kev, Griff & I said we would do a few more caches and have a few beers.

3 - 0.5 L of Stella for 21 euros......ouch.

We had one beer in main square but due to the cost we decided to move on and hit another couple of bars. We managed a few more caches before deciding we had a little too much to drink to do anymore.

Oh dear, look who is trolleyed :)

At the end of the night (around 3am) we had to get a taxi back to hotel as none of us had waypointed where it was.

Day 3
We had an early start today as we had a big day of driving to do, so after eating a big breakfast it was time to check out of the hotel. As we were putting our stuff into the car we bumped into our geobuddies from the West Mids again....small world!
We had a quick chat in the rain and then Mark drove us to our first cache of the day.

Tjilp, tjilp

Another old cache this one which ticked a square on the Jasmer grid, this one being placed in May 2001.
This one was one we had looked at before the trip as all around the cache were ditches with water in, fortunately with the aid of Google Earth we took the correct approach and one small leap from Mark and cache was in hand.

We did another old cache which I already had the M/Y for and then headed for the highlight of the day and 1 of the 2 most sought after caches of the trip.

The ditch Mark jumped to get cache.

G'ebbes
A March 2001 cache in a National Park of Netherlands. It really is a beautiful woodland and such a fantastic location to be brought to. We parked up in main car park and took a half a mile walk through the woods. The cache was easy to find and it really put us all on a high, this for me is what caching is all about.

March 2001 ticked on Jasmer grid.

Some of the woodland.

We all returned to the car in high spirits and quite excited about the next cache too.
The drive wasn't far compared with what we had drove already and I took over the driving again for a while.

Pegasus Bridge

Pegasus bridge was used in the epic war film "The Bridge too far", it is a virtual cache with an easy question to answer to claim it. The bridge was fantastic and situated in the city of Arnhem in the Netherlands.

Pegasus bridge.

All of our itinery was now done so we were off to our final hotel of the break in the town of Valkenburg.
Valkenburg was a lovely town and I think took us all by surprise. It was a shame that we didn't get to spend more time here but obviously with our strict schedule this was not possible.

Our hotel in Valkenburg

Valkenburg as night falls



In the town

Griff getting planking all wrong

We had a drink at bar with the lovely owner before heading into the town to seek out a Dutch restaurant. We had a lovely meal swilled down with a couple of beers before heading off to do our last caching of the trip.

Day 4
We got up early for the 30 minute drive back to Maastricht airport for our flight back to Stansted and the end of our epic trip.

The End.

 

Totals for weekend:
6 countries
3 Jasmers
1 Mega Event
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