September trip
We leave Thursday for another hiking trip. We are hoping that the flight and train trip involved at the start will not interfere with our streak which is now at 157 days. We are bringing our SPOT messenger with us and hope to send a message every day. If you want to see where we are hiking, you can check the location from which our messages are being sent, starting on Friday at the following link.
http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0NqQJKELEBtGMuGZez6Zhsq6asA46EKMM.
We were in Pennsylvania for 2 weeks in July hiking on the appalachian trail with our grandsons and some friends. We managed to find a cache everyday during that trip and we hope we will be able to do the same this trip.
Here is one of the caches that we will be attempting on this trip
This years hike is 200 miles and is mostly a continuation of the coastal hike we did 2 years ago. There will be 11 of us this year. Here are some pictures that our frineds posted after the 2009 hike.
https://picasaweb.google.com/wdwildgrube/CornwallWalk#
We arrived in UK on Friday, took Saturday off and started our 2 week hike on the South west Coastal path here in Cornwall. The trail hugs the coast as we walk along the top of the cliffs with tons of ups and downs and some walking on the sandy beaches. The rest of the group do not cache but we have found chances to pick up a fes and keep our streak going.ited a few bugs that we brought and hqave picked up a couple to bring home.
It seems I will not have to give much details as one of the group (Dianne) is writing a blog of our trip. It should be noted that her son is posting the blog and has added a few comments in the middle of her story.
http://blog.w2dw.com/2011/09/05/dianne-lets-start-walkin/
Many of the towns here have very very b=narrow streets
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&ll=50.270044,-4.78752&spn=0.000002,0.002631&z=19&vpsrc=6&layer=c&cbll=50.270123,-4.787513&panoid=dKYCoV8pr4Q85g8OJYz9rw&cbp=12,199.24,,0,4.95
Tough 10 to 12 miles of hiking everyday, pub food and beer at night and a long sleep. A few caches everyday to keep our streak going. Caches in town are similar to back ome, except they do not have to worry about snow. Caches in countryside are usually on ground in crevices, or under hedges, with small rock pile on top.
Here is link to our friends blog
http://blog.w2dw.com/our-adventures/uk-vs-italy-2011/journal-entries/
Last night we stayed at the famous Jamaica Inn from Daphne DuMaurier’s story. There was a large cache there which I brought in to show some of our hiking friends. We grabbed a bunch of trackables and dropped 2 that we had with us. Here is a picture of us with the cache at the bottom of the blog.
http://blog.w2dw.com/2011/09/12/dianne-walking-um-driving-to-the-jamaica-inn/
It sure is great to hike 8 hours a day, enjoy the incredible views, find a few caches and enjoy some great british draft beer at the pubs.
Our friend Wayne is not with us this year because of knee problems so he has gone biking in Italy instead.
Wayne is in his late sixties and has a glass eye because of a workshop accident. His glass eye caused him a few problems at the airport on the way to Italy. Here is the incredible but true, hilarious story (with title and comments supplied by his son).
http://blog.w2dw.com/2011/09/11/wayne-why-i-will-never-travel-with-my-father-webmaster/
Sounds like you guys are having fun. I noticed you are getting really close to 10k finds :-). Will you try to get that feat near there or wait until you are back in NB ? Good luck 🙂
We had no plans and now it seems unlikely to occur here as there are not that many caches on the rugged trail along the coast.
Yesterday was an exception and we had a chance to get 12 caches along the short 7 mile hike but we only got 5 because of the very strong winds that kept us from venturing far from the trail. In fact the trail was dangerously close to the edge of the cliffs. Here is Dianne’s version of the day with some nice pictures of the terrain and the path.
http://blog.w2dw.com/2011/09/13/dianne-stairway-to-the-stars-coastal-scenes-and-little-crackhaven/
I guess I never finished this off, so here is a short summary of the last 10 days of the trip.
We found at least one cache a day during our stay in England. One day we found no caches during our hike, but there was one in town when we finished our day. But it was a nano on a guy wire at a tower over a mile from our B & B so we had to do more walking to keep our streak going.
On the day we flew out of England, we went for a walk near Gatwick before heading for the airport, and found our cache, so we did not have to get one when we arrived in Canada.
When we finished the hiking part of our trip, we had a few days off before flying home. We decided to spend those days in the last place that we had hiked to, which was a town called Barnstapple. So what did we do in Barnstapple?
Well we did a little walking around town, visiting shops, and having beer at the pubs. At one restaurant, someone behind the counter noticed we were from Canada, and mentioned that one of the guys cooking was from Canada, a place called Moncton NB. It seems he was born here, and moved to UK with his parents, and he stayed in UK when they came back to Canada.
While in Barnstapple we noticed that there was a series of caches in the country side not far from Town. So we called a cab and took a ride to Landkey where we spent the day walking through farmer’s fields and along rural lanes, picking up about 25 caches. We finished off in Landkey and we headed to the pub where we chatted quite a while with a few locals over a beer, and then the bar lady called a cab for us. Was a great day. And it was a great trip.
On the flight back, we sat next to a young girl from Northern Ireland who worked in UK and was on her way to visit friends in Halifax. Her return flight was from Montreal, so she was taking the train to Montreal and stopping in Moncton for two days. We arranged to meet her in Moncton and spent 2 days as tour guides for her.