New year – new lockdown… stay at home, don’t mix with other people… so I went to work, went home, and apart from going to the supermarket and the fish and chip shop that was my entire life… work / home… I could have gone caching as it’s mainly outdoor exercise and I often do it alone anyhow, but I had no enthusiasm for going out at all…

I had this plan… there were plenty of Lab Caches in the area, so I could do the stages one at a time, each stage counts as a separate find, and each should then show on my calendar to fill the 366 day calendar grid up… As I still had 30 days to to fill, 2 in November and the rest split over Dec and Jan, it seemed like a good way of filling the dates up, and possibly fairly easy with the likelihood of more local labs coming out as Groundspeak seemed to be handing them out like confetti.

By Summer the Covid situation had eased, so when the schools went back in September Angel78 and I took a break in Devon, in a thatched cottage (called approriately Fox Cottage). Social Distancing was still in place and so we kept to ourselves pretty much and avoided busy places.

I got a message from a relatively new cacher Doodlemaster, whom I had known in my schooldays many years ago, not seen him for over 40 odd years, but he started appearing on the Facebook Caching forums and I recognised the name and the face in his photographs. Although he has moved away many years ago he had been given a set of Lab Caches and was putting them out in our home town, where I still live.

Eventually the lockdown was given an end date and we were told that businesses would be opening as normal again in mid-June so things were going to go back to what was being called ‘the new normal’.
As time off work was coming to an end, I made use of the freedom to travel a bit further afield… I’d not been further than 5 miles from home for 2 months, so even going 15 miles to Skipton was an adventure !

It may be hard to comprehend in years to come that the whole world virtually stopped in Spring 2020, and everyone was confined in their homes unless out on essential business, but that was the way it was…
Covid 19 had been out in the far east from the end of 2019, but we just thought it would be like the Bird Flu, or SARS and not really spread anywhere else.