Berry's Badge & Keyring Exchange - GCK90G

Third of the day with sarahjones65 whilst out and about in the Bickershaw area. We knew basically where the cache was but it took a while to find because it was so well hidden.

Great collection of keyrings and badges so I took the photo shown above. We took a yellow TB Mr Happy keyring toy and left a bottle opener keyring in the shape of a white builder's hat.

Great cache and clue, although we didn't really get it until the moment we found it.

We Are Not Amused - GC1KNQD

Second of the day whilst out with sarahjones65 in the Bickershaw area. We got to this one after slowly making our way through a thicket of birch trees and nettles whilst thinking all the time "this can't be the best way". We certainly weren't amused either.

Sure enough another path emerged as we got to the end of the trees - we should have learnt by now not to take the GPSr too literally and always look for a more obvious way!

Anyway, we found the cache quite easily once on the right path and took a trackable supermarket coin (not seen one of those before) whilst leaving a little something of our own.

And on, on to the next one ...

"Keen As"

First of the day with sarahjones65 - we'd not been caching for over a week so we just had to get out today. Unfortunately I was suffering badly from aches and pains after playing 90 minutes of football (only in goal) for the first time in nearly 20 years, so this cache was just what I was looking for - nice and easy and close to the car!

Normally I would have had a walk down to the fishing pond and had a good look round, but my legs wouldn't let me today, so Sarah went on alone whilst I hobbled back the car to checkout the next cache.

We took our pda phone with us to have a go at this paperless caching lark when normally we take reams of printed paper. Using iSilo as the reader after the gpx file had been converted using GPX Spinner and iSiloX, it was lot easier to handle in the field than I had thought. In fact I'd recommend this combination to everyone because you can carry around hundreds of cache locations with you wherever you go, without needing printouts. It even solves the hints for you.

A good start was made to today's expedition. By the way, I only got the point of the cache's name on the way back to the car. Nice one!

Castlefield Cache 1

Sarahjones65 and I went out to Liverpool Road in Manchester for an early evening 50th birthday celebration at the Cask bar, where they have an arrangement that you can buy excellent fish and chips at the chippy next door and eat them in Cask.

Whilst out we decided to do this new cache on our way back to the car. We haven't been to Castlefield in ages and were very impressed with the restoration work that has been done on our industrial hertitage as well as some of the new innovations such as the white bridge and the bars.

We found the cache easily (great place) and then went off to take some photos - the light was failing fast so unfortunately most of them are a little dark. Nevermind, we'll return when there are some more caches in this series in what is a very interesting area.

Check out this cache here: Castlefield Cache 1 at www.geocaching.com

Easter Caches

Blogs for the following caches will be available shortly:

• Lowton Stocks - found
  
• Follow Farley - found
  
• Merlin's De-fence - found
  
• Boris at Bickershaw 1 - found
  
• Boris at Bickershaw 2 - found
  

This set took me over 50 caches - whoopee.

Easter Jabberwocky Trail

Good Luck to all those doing my Easter Jabberwocky Trail which went live around midnight last night.

Look for all the posts tagged with Jabberwocky under Post Categories in the right hand menus for extra help. Or simply click on this link.

Happy Hunting!

Byrom Hall

As I head towards 50 caches I'm just looking for the odd local cache to pick up here and there without making a whole morning or afternoon of it.

This one fitted the bill perfectly. I was out with sarahjones65 after just taking the car into Leigh for some electrical work. We drove down Plank Lane and over the canal lifting bridge we'd visited last month onto Slag Lane. What a name for a road!

We approached with Byrom Hall on the right and then turned left down a side road towards the sailing club at Pennington Flash. We parked up and found the cache quite easily. Then we dashed back home to wait for that phone call telling us the bad news about the car.

Check out this cache here: Byrom Hall at www.geocaching.com

Welsh Caches 5/4/09 to 7/4/09

Blogs for the following Welsh caches will be available soon.

• Flower Tower - found
  
• Bryn Celli Ddu - found
  
• A Family Event - found
  
• Lanfair P.G. Village Vexation - not found
  
• The Marquess of Anglesey's Column - found
  
• Daisy's Cache - not found
  
• Almost a Concentric Castle View - found
  
• Llandegfan View - found
  
• Between the Bridges - found
  
• Pwll Fanogl - not found
  

Easter Jabberwocky Trail - An Egg Hunt Around Tyldesley

I've been working quite hard over the last few days to get my new set of caches ready for release on www.geocaching.com/

I've called it the Easter Jabberwocky Trail and it follows a circular route around where I live in Tyldesley, Greater Manchester.

The idea first came from my daughter Catherine's Drama homework in which she had to learn the Jabberwocky poem by Lewis Carrol off by heart. This proves without doubt that schools do teach our children a load of old nonsense!

From this grew the idea to make a series of caches all based on a verse from the poem, with the aim of finding the Jabberwocky at the end. With Easter coming up I decided to make the series a Jabberwocky Egg hunt to give it a seasonal slant. Each cache is hidden in a brightly coloured egg-shaped container although there are one or two 'bad eggs' thrown in just to make it all a bit more interesting.

I planned the cache route and hiding places with sarahjones65 today, and spent the rest of the day filling the contents of each container with the relevant stuff and creating the web pages on www.geocaching.com. Tomorrow I'll be setting the caches in place and when I've done that I'll be sending the details to a reviewer to activate just before we go to our caravan in Anglesey at about 10am.

So, with a bit of luck the Easter Jabberwocky Trail series will go live in the next couple of days, just in time for Easter - I hope at least a couple of cachers see it and decide to try it over the Easter Weekend.

Watch this space for more details and some additional help in solving the puzzles.

Jabberwocky Additional Help

Here are a few extra hints to help solve my Easter Jabberwocky Trail on www.geocaching.com.

I've encoded them in the usual way so that you don't see all the answers at once. You can use Speedfreak's Online Geocaching Hint Decoder to decode them all in one go or just one hint at a time - simply copy them from here and paste them into the decoder window on the above website. Or you can decode them manually using this:

1. Hfr Tbbtyr Zncf gb frnepu sbe nyy gur pnpurf ol TrrxGrnpure va Glyqrfyrl
2. Trg n pbcl bs gur Wnoorejbpxl cbrz - gurer ner frira irefrf
3. Fgneg ng gur Fyvgul Gbirf Pnpur
4. Vg jnf jevggra ol Yrjvf Pneebyy jub jnf obea va rvtugrra guvegl-gjb naq jub qvrq va rvtugrra avargl-rvtug
5. Hfr guvf jrofvgr gb qrpbqr gur ahzoref - uggc://zvfghcvq.pbz/pbzchgref/ovanelpbai.ugz
6. Frnpu zl Syvpxe cvpgherf gnttrq jvgu Wnoorejbpxl sbe ybpngvba cvpgherf
   
7. Gung'f nyy gur uryc lbh'er tbvat gb trg!

If you need any further help such as suggested route, please leave your questions in the comments underneath this post. Happy Hunting!