Geo Adventuring In Kirkby

My partner and I live together on the outskirts of a small town called Kirkby-in-Ashfield, the area we actually live in is the old part of town and is surprisingly rural. Basically all you have to do is walk for 5 minutes in most directions from our house and you will literally be surrounded by fields and small areas of woodland. That said we have actually explored very little of the surrounding countryside, despite the fact that both myself and my partner enjoy walking.

Last weekend we decided it was time for that to change. Several months ago my partner had stumbled across a passtime known as geocaching and although we both thought the concept was interesting, neither of us had really done much in the way of research into it. That was up until a couple of weeks ago when one us downloaded the android app and discovered that there are in fact several caches within a couple of miles of our house. Knowing that these caches are so close made us curious and last weekend we set out to find our first cache, after a little deliberation we chose which cache we wanted to head for and consulted the map to work out the best route. The cache we chose is situated by a small stream in an area of woodland a little over a mile from our house.

Having located the rough area we were heading for, we packed a small bag of essentials and set off. Less that 10 minutes into the walk and we were absolutely surrounded by corn fields, we followed a public footpath right through the middle of some truly picturesque country and down into the woods. We were both surprised by just how dense the patch of woodland is and how pretty it is considering we were literally a 20 minute walk from the centre of Kirkby. After double checking our map to ensure we were in the right area we headed into the woods and selected the path that looked most likely to take us in the right direction. As we headed further into the woods we noticed that the ground was starting to get muddy and my partner Kelly started to get a little anxious about falling in. We spent the next 45 minutes or so slowly trecking through the woods, investigating every nook and cranny, poking in to holes in trees and taking photos all in the hope of locating some hidden cache of mini treasures so we could sign the log and swap one of their nicknacks for one of our own. Eventually we ran out of woodland and, feeling slightly disappointed in ourselves, we decided to head back, taking a slightly different route just to give ourselves one last chance at success. This it turned out was a mistake as the path we chose led into some heavily muddy areas and both my partner an myself ended up slipping over on more than one occasion.

Unfortunately we made it all the way back home without finding a single cache, this hasn't dampened our spirits too much though as we are already plotting our route for this weekend with high hopes of our first cache find.