11th August 2012 – North West England 2012 – The 5th Annual UK Mega GC2X1TM – cache #2000
My 2,000th cache – The Annual Mega Event, the largest gathering of cachers in the UK. I was attending really to help Adam sell his UK Cache Mag – and we did brisk business all day being given a stand by the organisers in an excellent place where everybody had to pass as they moved about the site.
The founder of Geocaching – Jeremy Irish, had come over from Seattle for the event (what a job eh ? flying around the world going to geocaching events) and the headline picture shows him addressing the crowd. At the Mega everyone gets a namebadge showing their caching name, and it was nice to put faces to the names written down in cache logs – though I saw so many people that I doubt I’d recognise any of them again !
11th August 2012 – Bridge over the river Eea. GC3RDQC – cache #2001
After the Mega we went back to the campsite to park the car, and thought we’d better go and find this cache which was on the road on the way on… though this was more of a hand over than a find… several other cachers were there already, and more were heading over from the campsite…
11th August 2012 – A Mega Ramble 2 GC3FBCR – cache #2002
Along with the actual Mega event, the organisers had put out many caches, one series of which was an 3 and a bit mile circular ‘ramble’ from the campsite on the local public footpaths.
After we had packed up and had something to eat Adam and I set out with Goldfish58 on the ramble (a Harrogate based cacher – Adam and I went caching with her at the North Yorkshire Camping Event in June)…. and were soon joined in a search for #1 by a horde of other cachers… none of us were having any luck finding the cache so we left it and went for #2… and found that our group of 3 had become a group of 4 as we had been joined by SteveBM – a cacher from Blackburn.
No problem finding #2… we just followed the cachers path, many footsteps had gone there before us
11th August 2012 – A Mega View GC3FBK5 – cache #2003
A quick detour from the mega ramble bought us to a cache where suprisingly there wasn’t a view of the mega campsite !
11th August 2012 – A Mega Ramble 3 GC3FBDX – cache #2004
The Mega Ramble caches weren’t too hard to find, this one hidden at the base of a tree under some rocks… and signed by Goldfish58
11th August 2012 – A mega Ramble 4 GC3FBE9 – cache #2005
The series had had so many visitors that the cache sites were obvious, and some of the caches had suffered from the handling… in this case a broken lid due to the stones being dropped back on top of it
11th August 2012 – A Mega Ride 10 GC3MD0H – cache #2006
A short detour from the ramble brought us out to the road and this cache on the ‘Mega Ride’ series of drive by caches
11th August 2012 – A Mega Ramble 5 GC3FBEH – cache #2007
We came across another set of cachers here who had the cache in hand… we let them get away so as not to spoil their and our pleasures of finding the rest of the caches
11th August 2012 – A Mega Ramble 6 GC3FBJ6 – cache #2008
It was a bit muddy by this cache, and none of us really had the footwear for it, so we had to tread carefully
11th August 2012 – A Mega Ramble 7 GC3FBJE – cache #2009
The locals must have got so fed up with cachers going the wrong way that they had put up a sign pointing us onto the right path… we would have probably walked right past without the sign !
11th August 2012 – A Mega Ramble 8 GC3FBJK – cache #2010
Another cache that was far too obvious because of the number of people who had been there before… so we tried to disguise the cachers trail some – the old Red Indian trick of using a tree branch to brush the trail behind you – and leaving false trails to other likely cache hiding spots… trouble is we’ll never know how succesful we were at slowing the following cachers find
11th August 2012 – A Mega Ramble 9 GC3FBJW – cache #2011
There were a few signs of cachers seaching at various points along the path… some of these spots showed people had been searching in the wall, which isn’t good
11th August 2012 – Hill Mill Beck GCJGVV – cache #2012
Another cache where we found the cache in the hands of another cacher rather than hidden
11th August 2012 – A Mega Ramble 10 GC3FBKD – cache #2013
Again we found the cache in the hands of other cachers… busy out in the woods after the Mega !
11th August 2012 – A Mega Ramble 1 GC3FB7C – cache #2014
Not the first, but the last find of the series for us… after we had failed to find it at the beginning we met some other cachers part way round the walk who told us exactly where to look
It seemed a bit strange that when we got back to #1 we found it was hidden in a place where we had definitely looked before and it hadn’t been there the previous time !
