The Piratemania / UK Mega has become my main holiday of the year, and certainly the time I do the most caching.
This year Piratemania was in Bakewell as it was in 2015, but unlike then I didn’t just go down for the day, I stayed in a hotel just outside Bakewell for the whole weekend.
I had been working on the Saturday, so took the Monday off work in lieu of it. It was a nice day so I decided to go and grab a couple of (reasonably) local Lab cache sets.
The first was in Spofforth, a village near Harrogate with a ruined ‘Castle’ – a fortified Manor House really, whose main claim to fame is that the Magna Carta was written here in 1215
Fiona (FM1906) was having her 40th Birthday party… a much delayed 40th birthday party, on her 42nd Birthday – Lockdowns put paid to having it either of the two previous years.
As the event was in Halifax on a Sunday teatime I took the opportunity to go over in the afternoon and do three sets of Lab caches first
I would say 4 sets of Lab caches, 4 weekend caching trips except that I was working and it was raining over the last May weekend so I didn’t go out then, and then the next weekend was the double Bank Holiday to celebrate the Queens Platinum Jubilee, so I went out on the Friday and did two sets to make up for missing the previous week. I am beginning to run out of local and easy sets of Lab caches, but there are plenty to go at in Leeds though free parking isn’t very easy to find there
Two weekends, two caching trips, the first a Sunday afternoon walk around Bradford to find a couple of sets of Lab caches, the following Saturday morning I went to Shipley to do the set of labs there… Bradford was a lot of walking. For the Stroll around Shipley I drove to the first locations and only parked up and strolled for the last three
On the way back from Barmouth I stayed overnight at Angel78’s as I was going to Nottingham the next day (she was going to work the next day so that worked out well)
The evening we got back we went out for a walk to her local park, Chasewater reservoir, there are a set of labs there, but they are spread around the park and we only had time to do 3 of them that evening.