3rd July 2010 – Couch Potato GC1G9M3 – Cache #627
Now this was a bit of a trail, a five part multi-cache starting in the middle of  Bradford and ending up with a cache on Ilkley Moor – hidden under a rock – well where else was it going to be hidden on Ilkley Moor ?

The primary co-ordinates are for a strange feature in the Little Germany area of Bradford, it is a carved stone armchair and grandfather clock and picture frame which form part of the wall of a building.
There are not many places to hide a cache nearby, I eventually spotted one of the magnetic nano caches stuck onto a wiring conduit. Inside were the co-ordinates for the next part

When I got back to the car I read the cache notes again and it said of the first part ‘note the time’… I wondered what for but did look at my watch, it was 13:17 !

The co-ordinates when punched into memorymap took me 6 miles to a park in Rawdon and a bench where underneath was anther of the magnetic nano’s, more co-ordinates inside leading me 4 miles down to Pool

At Pool there is nowhere to park so I had a little walk back up the road and into a little garden overlooking the mini roundabout. There is a bench, it’s about 25 feet long and has two flower tubs one at each end, from the Clue I determined that the cache was under one of the flower tubs not the bench.
Now on a Sunny Saturday afternoon the beer garden of the pub the other side of the road is quite busy and as I was crawling around on the floor looking underneath the tubs I could see that I was being watched by some of the patrons. Fortunately I found the cache (another magnetic nano) and sat back on the bench where they couldn’t see me from the pub to open it.

It was easier to put it back unobserved as I stuck it to a different part of the flower tub, but still one person was watching me… The co-ordinates in the cache this time led me to Ilkley Tarn, so I walked back to the car and drove the 9 miles to Ilkley, and walked up to the tarn, which is in fact just a duckpond. At the tarn the clue led me to a bench and a slightly larger magnetic nano, within which were the partial co-ordinates
for the final part of the cache, and to get the exact co-ordinates you needed the time on the stone clock back in Bradford… which of course I hadn’t looked at cos I didn’t read the description until too late.

Fortunately a 3G smartphone enabled me to google a picture of the clock and I got the co-ordinates… which were about a mile and a half away, but right up on top of the moor.

Decisions, decisions… a mile and a half up a steep hill in the sunshine… and then a mile and a half back down again, or a 13 mile drive followed by a walk of about a mile along the top of the moor, and a mile walk back to the car…
The drive and easy (well flat) walk won and I set off in the car arriving 20 minutes later at the place I’d parked my car twice in the last couple of weeks already when clearing caches on the top of the moor (19th and 21st June) When I got to the co-ordinates I found a couple of huge rocks, looked under one and there was a hole and in the hole I saw something move… not sure what it was, it didn’t look furry so I’m thinking snake.
Not really wanting to put my hand into this hole I looked at the other boulder and saw a rock leaned against it in a suspicious manner and underneath this… after 32 miles driving and in total about 2 miles walking… was the cache…

3rd July 2010 – Couch Potato – Bonus GC1GCYH – Cache #628
In the Couch Potato cache were details on how to get to the bonus cache… walk 44mtrs (143feet) at 120°… unfortunately with Memorymap you don’t have a compass so I had to assess the direction and walk 60 steps, judging my stride to be about 27 inches (which for those not of a mathematical bent would be 135 feet) Nothing around where I ended up so I arced north and spotted a suspicious pile of rocks by a larger boulder… the cache.

3rd July 2010 – HIGH SPY  GC10PG7 – Cache #629
This should be a fairly easy puzzle cache based on some sums using the distances to 6 towns on the signpost at a junction… trouble is I can’t add up ! I had been here before with a set of co-ordinates that were well off, so I’d come back home and recalculated and set off again with some new co-ordinates and there was again no sign of anything there, so I came back off the hillside to the signpost and recalculated again, got a different answer again and went back up the hill and this time found the cache.