Madhouse diaries : Some rather squelchy geocaching !

As we had a quiet morning while visiting my parents, I decided to add a few geocaches to my year's tally. I was delighted to discover that there's one in view of their house so that was where we started.

The next one made me laugh because it was supposed to be a series about non-native trees and had a blurb about the Scot's Pine on its writeup. We found Pine Avenue which is where it was located but the pine tree is long gone !

We were initiating Auntie Em into the delights (and squelchiness !) of geocaching too.

I was shocked by the amount of flytipping down the country lanes ... we even spotted a toilet !

We decided these trees looked like they were kissing or having a cuddle !

Looking for a large geocache, we decided that this was a likely hiding place, but Sophie's not looking too keen because there was a spider's web in the way.

I used my camera flash to have a sneaky peek - aha, I see you !

This cache was designed as a lucky dip so it was full of ripped up paper to dig through for the little surprises.

We had a good sort through and found all these goodies so we decided to have a clearout in our swaps bag. We took the whole lot (except the cable) ...

... and left all these new toys behind, as well as a travel bug and some smaller toys.

Time to stuff it all back into the sweetie jar cache !

One last photo before putting it back in its hidey hole.

Now this part of the wood was slightly muddy but I knew that the second part of the cache, a couple of hundred metres away, was down a much muddier path.

I left the girls at the top of the hill and squelched and skidded my way down to the lower path which was a tunnel of trees and foliage.

There was a fallen tree that had continued to grow and looked like a waterfall of branches.

And a huge tree trunk with these strange growths all the way up that looked like stepping stones or fairy ledges !

It started to rain so I gave up after a very quick and fruitless search and headed back to the girls. As the way up had been very skiddy, I decided to head down the other side, but I wasn't counting on the sucky mud trying to remove my shoe. It gave us the biggest laugh of the day though !

I decided to get the girls to pose by this "danger of death" sign on the way home because it made me laugh !