GC1PPDH: The Night Mail

Found on 2009-10-24 at 19:00:00
Placed by: drsolly
Size: Regular (Difficulty: 2 / Terrain: 2.5)
Location: Southern England, United Kingdom
Geocaching.com: GC1PPDH

[font=Trebuchet Ms]Solved this one last Friday after a number of stops and starts on the mini railway. Decided to do it tonight since I was out late with the Watford Street Angels and had a big lie in this morning, Mrs Fitz went shopping and I didn't get the chance to do any caches during the day.

The first task was to convince Mrs F to actually go night-caching with me. The conversation went something like:

"Let's go night-caching"
"Aww no, can't we just wait till tomorrow after church?"
"No, I've got one I want to do and it's a night-cache, it can only be done at night, with firetacks"
"Umm"
"Look I can do this one alone"
"No, I'll come but I only want to do this one"

Task complete!

Onto the cache. Parked up in the street nearby and got my headtorch on whilst Mrs F used my bicycle LED torch. As we were approaching the entrance Mrs F spotted the sign for the Burial Ground - what the heck? Where are you taking us?! This set her on edge whilst I chuckled.

By the third firetack we were having trouble spotting them, so I suggested we go back to the car and get the big torch which would be much stronger. So we made our way back to the car. Got the torch out, turned it on... Oh batteries are almost flat. Guess we're just going to have to rely on our instinct.

Headed into the woods and it wasn't too difficult to find the waymarks. Sometimes we needed to spread out or go forward a bit till the next shiny spot was in range but generally easy. Of course Mrs F was a bag of nerves, leaving me to be the brave one. She wasn't too bad as long as we were moving, but when we got stuck and had to look around into the darkness for the next firetack she began to loose her nerve.

"Don't worry," I said "No-ones going to be out here". I continued offering support and suggested that at times when I was scared I used to recite Psalm 23 to myself, "Shut up!" she wailed, "just don't talk".

I can't remember how many firetacks we had gone past but at one point I was doing a 360 and I saw 2 bright LED lights staring back at me from about 25m. Then one blinked off and on again, it was then I realised it was a fox who was obviously as puzzled as I was to see him!

I think after we had passed the gate, Mrs F had started to calm down and was enjoying herself. She had spotted most of the firetacks with her eagle eyes. but later we found ourselves losing the trail. We got to a point where we just couldn't find the next firetack. We'd even tried walking on ahead some considerable distance but ended up coming back and then trying to explore the remaining area.

Mrs F did well to hold her nerve, I think the passion to get the cache had taken over nerves over having to stop and look around. After finding ourselves at what seemed like a dead end, I decided to switch gears and suggested we look for a cachers trail. It was then we left the obvious path and started heading towards an open area which wasn't a path but certainly traversable. Suddenly Mrs F called out "I see it!" and there it was - 2 firetacks.

Impressive large cache. Left TB and GC, sweeped up all the other Travellers, otherwise TNLNSL.

Thanks for all the hard work on this one, well planned, well thought out and very fun in the end.[font=Verdana]