There is a cache near me that has it’s co-ordinates on 6 Travel Bugs which circulate in Yorkshire, I had never found any of these TB’s and it didn’t seem worth the bother to go out specifically to find them, but at the st December event someone brought along TB#3 which I photographed it so I had record of the numbers.
One morning a a couple of weeks later I was downloading photographs from my camera to my PC and came across the one of the TB, so I opened up the cache page to note the numbers in the Personal Cache Note section, and for the first time read the full cache page… and I read that the TB’s lead you to various mileposts which you use the numbers from to work out the co-ordinates of the final waypoint which is a milepost with Kirskill Hall on it…. Hang on I thought, I know where there is a milestone with Kirskill Hall on it !
11th December 2012 – Miles Apart GCKMH6 – cache #2253
So that afternoon I drove out and had a look… hmmm, the description for the cache says you need the distances of the churches on the post, but the one I was at had only one church on it and from the posts co-ordinates the final cache would be in the middle of a field… something wasn’t right !
Then, as I was waiting to cross the road back to where I had parked I realised that there was another milestone on the other side of the road that I’d not seen before… so I went over to that, the information was the same, but the difference in co-ordinates put the final in a wooded area that I had occasionally been to with my schoolfriends many years ago, and thinking about it seemed a likely place for a cache to be – the only doubt was that there was only one church mentioned on the post, but hey, the ‘churches’ could be a red herring.
So I went off to find the co-ordinates I had worked out… and all seemed to be going well, walked along the track then came to the little side path as I remembered from my youth and it led to the sort of place you would hide a cache… but then problem… the final co-ordinates were showing as up a steep bank from where I was… fair enough, there’s probably another path that would lead me to the top of the bank, but I thought I would just head straight up from where I was… have you ever tried climbing a 1 in 1 slope where the footing is wet leaves over a wet clay mud ? I had to take a much less than direct path up the slope, all the while singing Simon and Garfunkels ‘Slip Sliding Away’ to myself, as that’s what my feet were doing !
Eventually I got to the top and then walked back around to above where I had started my ascent from… the co-ordinates were now showing as back down the banking, but I was under trees on a steep bank, so the GPS signal at the bottom wouldn’t have been too good… anyway there was no sign of anything matching hint at the top of the banking.
There was an easier path back down the banking but it was still Slip Sliding Away on the way down. I made my way back to where I had been and the GPS still was pointing up the slope, but I could see that there wasn’t anything that matched the hint around… so I must be looking in the wrong place, either my calculations were wrong or I was starting from the wrong signpost !
But the thought kept going round my head that I was in a good place for a cache to be and that over the years someone would have tried to put a cache there, and so if there wasn’t one there then it must be because the spot was in the exclusion zone of another cache – and the only one it was likely to be would be ‘Miles Apart’. So I started looking for places that matched the hint, and though there were many of one of the things mentioned in the hint and several of the other thing I couldn’t see anywhere where they both were… and then I did ! – and there was the cache.
Backtracking from the actual cache co-ordinates I did work out where I had gone wrong in my calculations, the cache does work out to be exactly where the description says it should be – which I expected it would all along !
I guess my ‘find’ is both the shortest in time (about 3 hours from reading the cache page for the first time to signing the log) and the shortest distance travelled (about 12 miles round trip from home !) of any of the Found logs for this cache… Local knowledge is a big help sometimes !
