The Kingfisher - Part Three
Adventures of an ornament
If you have not read The Kingfisher - Part One and Part Two - you can find them here:
During a camping weekend in Dorset (who am I kidding? It was glamping) with Rachel’s sister and her family, all six cousins had spent a lot of time geocaching together. Geocaching is like a modern version of orienteering. A small container (the cache) is hidden in a secret location, with its GPS location added to various websites and geocache apps. Participants attempt to find these containers using GPS navigation on their phones, or a series of clues and sometimes photos. The geocaches range in size from small thimble-like containers with nothing but a tiny rolled-up piece of paper for finders to leave their names, to much bigger plastic or metal boxes containing a notebook, pen and often an assortment of toys and sweets. The etiquette seems to be that you can take something from the box if you leave something in return.
The kingfisher was born to go geocaching.
For the last few years, we have met with Rachel’s family at Tyntesfield, a National Trust property near Bristol. It is about halfway between Devon and Northampton so is ideal for us all to meet for a day. We had tried and failed to pass the kingfisher to Miriam and Eric at Tyntesfield before - slipped into pockets or hidden in picnic items - but our attempts were foiled each time.
This time we had a more ambitious plan.
We would try and hide the kingfisher inside a geocache within the Tyntesfield estate and hope my nephews discovered the hidden container during our visit.
Leo searched on his geocache app to see if there were any caches already hidden at Tyntesfield. Each cache lists the date that it was created. If there were none already established, we could have created and logged our own, but it would have looked very suspicious if there was just one geocache in the entire park and it happened to have been created the day we visited. Thankfully there were several of them already spread around the estate.
We left our home in Devon early so that we would get to Tyntesfield an hour before we were supposed to. Layla, Leo and Kitty had to turn off Snap Map on their phones so that their cousins couldn’t track their whereabouts (no, I don’t really know what this means either).
We arrived nice and early and the five of us and Ludo set off to try to find the closest geocache to the car park.
Despite a thorough search of the picnic area where it was supposed to be hidden, we couldn’t locate it. Often geocaches get stolen, moved or damaged, so it is not uncommon for them to be missing. And sometimes they are just extremely well hidden.
The next one was in an area closed off to the public, so we had to ignore that one. The third and fourth we couldn't find either. We were running out of options and getting further away from the car park.