GC45XAE

+++ It's amazing how your bearings can be so easily lost when there is nothing at a distance to sight towards. +++

Well anyway, antpeng, Staticman1 and I had banded together in order to grab Earnanæs, þæs wyrmes denn (GC2VH8B) and the opencache il Nono Cerchio (OK0235) last weekend, but the insistent calling and irresistible attraction of the Mega Breakfast kept interfering with our plans - and when it was disabled prior to our agreed weekend it looked as if either it was going to be bloody disabled, or, optimistically, it was usefully unavailable for anybody else who fancied their chances at the First To Find..... So we crafted two cunning plans based upon the status of the cache at the moment of our assembly.

For a couple of weeks we each went cross-eyed in our respective corners of the country trying to decode the nasty nasty encoded directions until, eventually, we became able to just read along the codes and decode live into English. This, let me tell you, is a terrifying thing to discover you can do. It's like conducting brain surgery on yourself. Thankfully, that brain-warping turns out not to be permanent and I for one can no longer do it.

However, now I can do it for the new script. You absolute sod BareClawz!

Still, directions decoded, coordinates decoded (lazy! Lazy boy!), and the next stage was to grab the relevant maps to make sense of the routes (as far as it is possible to do that), and then muster on the day.

It was bloody disabled.

So Staticman1 and I grabbed Earnanæs and another opencache, and then antpeng joined us to begin gathering the required breakfast menu items in the many subterranean greasy spoons.

EXCELLENT!

Perhaps because we knew we had a long way ahead of us we managed to work through all of this quite efficiently, but that said, it was still a long, long couple of days. We went off-piste quite a bit, but that led us to some hair-raising climbs over deads, as well as getting us, at first mildly and later hopelessly, lost and disoriented... I should stress that this was not a function of the quality of the directions, but of our happy-go-lucky willingness to go blundering off in the wrong direction just for grins, and then to compound the problem by walking in circles for ages.

But what would life be like without an elevated pulse occasionally?

Probably my most life-endangering moment was making the classic geocaching error of walking along with my eyes on the map and not the terrain and only realising seconds later that I'd walked blindly less than a foot from a deep unguarded well. Try not to do this. There's breaking your pelvis in a subterranean hell-hole, and there's breaking your pelvis in a subterranean hell-hole because you are a dick-wit.

And then we had all the codes. And then we had the final coordinates. And then we had the cache. Except... we didn't because it was, as mentioned, bloody disabled. So we went and sat at GZ, held hands in a circle and cried softly for a few silent moments.

We left a little something for CO, despite his obvious pact with the Devil, and returned to our respective corners relying on our only remaining plan: To leave a watchlist on the cache page, eyes on the Below Above Facebook page, and the engines running.

...Time... Passes... Oh... So... Slowly...

And then BANG! Drop the baby and drive! DRIVE! DRIVE! The cache is ours!

In your face.

Obviously a fave. Obviously.