After all the walking about and jumping on and off trains at the railway I was ready for a quiet day, so it was back to doing Lab caches.

There was an event on in Lichfield at 11:00am, which gave me time to wander round Uttoxeter to find the Lab caches put out in the town

Several weeks before the Mega Matthew had decided that we should all go off on one of the Mega days and do the Virtual cache on the Severn Valley railway, and this became a trip for 15 of us…

The Severn Valley railway is a long Heritage railway running from Bridgnorth to Kidderminster and one of it’s more interesting bits is that it passes the West Midlands Safari Park, so you see giraffes and elephants and rhinoceros from the train windows

Next day was a trip to the Apedale mining museum and country park (well the country park is actually just the slag heap, but it’s not the only one of them like this, in fact it’s about all you can do with slag heaps as they are industrial waste and perhaps inherently unstable (remember Aberfan) and so planting them with grass, trees and shrubbery keeps the surface together)

Thanks to the last couple of days I was now at a stage where I had to limit the number of caches I could find to make sure I didn’t get to #6,000 too soon – Which was good as I was needed a quiet day to rest my leg.

The First day time event was a trip on the Churnet Valley Railway – another of the Heritage Railways of the area.

On the Sunday I had done almost half of the caches I needed to find to get to my 6,000th, I was down to only needing 51, 17 a day, 3 sets of Labs and an event and I was there.

Monday, time to check out of the hotel near Bakewell, then drive over to Uttoxeter and check into the hotel there.

The Sunday of Piratemania started off with the usual Flash Mob, all gather together, many in Pirate costume and generally hand around for 30 minutes – then it seemed like half the attendees went to the local supermarket to get some breakfast !

I was definitely conscious that my leg was not doing well, I couldn’t do much more than slowly limp along, but my plan was to get to 6,000 caches by Wednesday night so I needed to do 92 or 93 caches and the rest would be events .