Old McDonald has a....

Wednesday 3rd March 2010 PM

So what did this motley crew of dubious geocachers get up to this afternoon? Well bump into all kinds of assorted animals and even ended up on a beach....even though were 80 miles from the coast!

So first up was a visit to the little village of Hartshorne. According to history Hartshorne has been around since before Mrs Shiltonpig was born and thats old! However in more recent times was a royalist town in the English civil war in the 17th Century. So much so that after the war was over, watchers were employed in the church to keep an eye on the fields on certain religious days.

So today was a Wednesday and nobody was keeping an eye on the fields, so team Shiltopig decided that it was time to go grab a cache...in which case it meant tackling a horse...or Mr Ed as we liked to call him (SpaceMarine - you will have to look that one up!) and then tackled a field of sheep. The sheep were timid and Josh scared them all away....cache was found as it was sticking out for all to see. However it was fairly high up and even Mr Shiltonpig had a job to reach this one.....dropped off a TB from Sweden, some kind of Thor like hammer which has some mythical meaning.

Well next up we drove to Foremark Reservoir and tackled a few more caches, that is after we tackled the 21st century pay and display bollard....

Foremark reservoir was constructed in the 1970s and provides a beautiful walk around woodland and the water of course. Some parts of the reservoir have sandy beach alcoves as the one you see Mr Shiltonpig standing in and sure enough there was a cache in one of them in a tea cup? How bizzare....next time we will bring our bucket and spade for Josh to play in. Sun was shining down and spring is in the air.

Next up was a cache through a long walk in the aforementioned woodland.....you may remember a few weeks ago we came across a cache in the form of a bat. Well Batty has a cousin, Ratty to which Mrs Shiltonpig is holding up. Just so there is no confusion the rat is the one without glasses!!!!!

Team Shiltonpig are fans of this particular cache owner as his hides always prove to be something interesting and fun! This is where it started to get interesting, Mr Shiltonpig realised that the next cache was up a large hill and trying to push a pushchair up a hill when his trainers have no grip and the hill is muddy and slippy is not an experience he wishes to repeat in a hurry, in fact one point he was sliding further downhill than he was going uphill. Once they had got to the top of the hill they realised that the cache was further downhill and set across a path to get where they thought it was, then to make matters worse, they realised they were still off course and had to climb over a fence to get to where they needed to be....once that had happened cache found in seconds!!

It is worth saying here that we have seen all manner of animals today hence the title of the blog, the most of note though was team Shiltonpigs 1st stoat! There we were respecting Her Majestys speed limit of 30 mph when as quick as a flash the stoat ran out (and survived) across the road carrying some kind of dead rat or possibly its baby in its mouth....

So back to the car and we now had 98 caches in the bag...so in order for our plan to work we needed one more cache this aftternoon. We drove around to the other side of the reservoir and attempted one cache the other side....

The final cache took us right into the countryside and suddenly it felt as if we were miles and miles away from home....welcoming signs were all around "Trespassers are in danger of being shot" and other such signs helped make us at home.

Again an easy find for us today.....making 99 caches.

Thoroughly enjoyable day today, warm weather, sandy beaches, good company and Mr Shiltonpigs sense of humour to keep everybody happy.....