More Geocaching with Eleanor - 3/1/2010

Eleanor wanted to find larger caches today, hopefully with more swaps in them, so I decided that a trip to Lincolnshire was in order.

First stop was the village of Welbourn where there was a new, unfound cache waiting; Welbourn Treasure Trunk, which according to the cache page contained toys.

Upon arriving at Ground Zero I quickly found a 35mm film canister with carefully hand-painted camouflage. "This doesn't look right" thinks I, and upon opening I knew that it wasn't the cache that we were looking for as it had signatures on the enclosed log dating back almost 2 years!

Nevertheless, I signed the log and returned the cache to it's hiding place, and it was only then that I spotted the actual Welbourn Treasure Trunk only 3 feet away. Our first First-to-Find of 2010! Eleanor chose a water pistol as a swap and left a racing car, and I also dropped in the Prisoner badge trackable from yesterday.

Upon checking GC.com later in the day I was able to pin down the microcache as this archived cache.

The view from up near the cache(s) was pretty good...

After that we headed across to Horncastle and visited a cache in someone's front garden. Yes, really! The cache is question was 'Tis the season at number 34, a huge and generous cache set by The Croft House Cachers. Read the cache page to see how generous this cache is as there are wrapped gifts for each caching team that visits plus a lucky dip for children, and a bag of swaps too. Eleanor chose the gift for us, which turned out to be a fun animal racing game, and her lucky dip gift was an elasticated wooden wonky dog. Thank You and Happy Christmas Croft House Cachers!

We left the Brumby GeoCoin from Silver Birch here and collected this attractive Travel Bug;

Can you guess what it's name is?

That's right, it's Nigel! Nigel's mission is to visit every mainland UK county, so having collected him in Lincolnshire, it's back to Nottinghamshire for Nigel.

On the way home from Horncastle we stopped at two quick cache-and-dashes, The Meaning Of Life which was a good cache but in a terribly stinky area. Not the usual countryside smell, but that foul landfill / dirty Biffa-bin odour. The other cache was Odder-ty (a pun on oddity I presume), another simple find on this cold day, and as previous finders had noted, home to a colony of snails (the hide, not the actual cache container!). Eleanor was happy with the swaps that she made at both of these caches, so she really enjoyed her day out, as did I.