KOPER - Bastion Belveder

It's Tuesday, we must be in Slovenia.😀 Koper is a walled town, formerly part of Yugoslavia but with a large Italian speaking population so street signs are written in Italian and Slovenian. The ship is docked very close to the town so walking very far shouldn't be a problem today. The big news is that I have a decent 4G signal for £3! After a leisurely breakfast we disembarked and wandered along narrow undulating streets trying to find our way around. We found a cafe with wi-fi so the usual rules swung into play. Off I wandered😉 I wandered down to the first cache on my list, STC Bonifika, a trad that had a string of previous DNFs but as I was passing, I had to look. It was tricky, well tucked away under a bridge but it was the one that earned my Slovenia souvenir. I then had a ten minute walk out to another trad near the Med to find Koper - Capodistria. This took me about 20 minutes to find under a slab of asphalt amongst huge rocks which were part of a sea defence system. Now it's back to the cafe where Kathy was talking to a couple from Scotland. They were trying to sell Goa as a holiday destination to her. I was up for this 😀 but the chat fell on deaf ears.😢 After another bit of sightseeing in this wonderful town, it was time for another rest. Amazingly this bar was next to cerkev SV Jakoba Koper, St Jacob's Church. I had noted that this trad had gone missing so had a replacement handy to replace it. I got a note of thanks from the CO so I was happy. Kathy was happy for me to have another wander so I picked up Nase morje, a trad highlighting some street art on a warehouse. This was hidden in an external socket outlet on the warehouse wall. Bloody tricky too but it was the first one that I'd seen like this. Down the road was another trad, KOPER - Belveder Bastion. This was hidden in the top of a street sign in one of the most popular tourist places in Koper. I had to climb up on a barrier and remove the cylinder from the top. One of the assistant waiters from the ship was watching me so I explained geocaching to him whilst filling in the log, showing him the TBs. Just after I'd put the cache back in place, a lady turned up and it was obvious what she was looking for. After a while, I pointed out the cache to her. She was one half of Family.KUSAR who was killing time whilst her partner was at a meeting. After a chat, it was time to find the wife.😀 It was time to return to the boat but I needed just a little more time for the last cache on my list. It was only 300 yards from the boat so Kathy decided to get back on board whilst I strode off to Pomol Koper. I found this trad in quick time and scooted back to the boat to find that security had refused Kathy entry to get back on as I had the passports.😟 I had to buy her a wine to recover from the shock!

The Snail, a virtual cache in Venice

Full of excitement, I wake up in Venice! We make our way to the breakfast buffet to check out the standard of food on board. It will do nicely! Over eggs and bacon, comes the moment that will make or break the holiday. Will I be able to get the EE internet package so I can load up the geocaching app? It's a winner, 150MB of Day for £3, a bargain.😀 So fully victualled and watered, we get off the boat and prepare to wander off into Venice. The port is about a mile and a half away from the Doge's Palace but I have a route in my head and the Venice wish list on my Iphone.😉 Just outside the dock gates is Welcome To Venice, a 3/1.5 trad, a tricky trad on the main pedestrian route into the city. I thought that I was going to start the trip with a DNF but with a bit of lateral thinking, this was the cache that earned the Italy souvenir. The next cache was Chiesa di San Rocco|Tintoretto Painting. The Scoula San Rocco is my favourite place in Venice. I think that this was my fourth visit but this time I didn't pay my 9 euros to get in. On previous visits, I have just lain on the floor for hours marvelling at the Tintoretto masterpieces on the ceiling. However, I don't have time for that today as I want to see other parts of this marvellous city, especially those that have geocaches. This cache was a quick find of a trad behind a notice board, no-one was looking in the direction of the odd Englishman hiding behind the sign. Just for the record, my wife suffers with an injury to her knee making it difficult to walk for too long. This means that we stop regularly in a cafe or similar, to rest with a coffee, a tea or maybe even a beer or two🍺 Rule 1, the cafe must have free wi-fi, and Rule 2, while Kathy is catching up with the world and contacting the girls, I have a wander. It works quite well.😎 During one such interlude, I picked up two trads, par le sconte 03 and San Zan Degola. The latter involved working my way through a maze of alleys, arriving in a tiny square near the Grand Canal. The hint was Camino/Chimney and finally I found the inspection plate at ground level that gave access to the chimney! The former was even worse! The same mo, a maze of tiny streets and the cache was tucked away in a dark alley where my shoulders were in contact with the walls at all times. The hint was "bring a torch" and guess what, I had one! After a long time, I located the loose brick with the cache behind. When I got back to Kathy, she was on her second piccolo birra so I had to catch up didn't I? I only had two more caches on my list. One was in near the Doge's Palace, an Earthcache called Venice Is A Big Fish but I'd worked out most of the answers before I'd arrived, just needing a couple of observations and a selfie. Parking Kathy in another bar with free wi-fi, I took off for The Snail, a virtual. I had to pass the Hard Rock Cafe. I was tempted to go into the foyer to have another look at the bass guitar previously owned by Felix Pappalardi of that legendary late 60s, early 70s U.S. blues rock band Mountain. He also produced most of the albums by Cream, that powerhouse trio comprising Clapton, Bruce and Baker. Unfortunately he's no longer with us, having been shot dead on a New York street by his wife. Anyway back to the Snail, a spiral of a building, hidden away in the back streets that I would never have visited but for this wonderful hobby of ours. I did the necessary and then it was back to rescue my wife and make our way out to the terminal by water bus. A brilliant day but probably my last visit to this wonderful city.

Today is going to be busy!! I quickly whizzed over to Fobbing to pick up the last of Teddy's fine mini-series, #2. Another trad, it was a stick hidden in a tree, concealing a nano. It was a quick find which was exactly what was needed! We are off on a cruise around the Eastern Mediterranean in a couple of hours so I must rush to get home to load the cases in the car. There is the possibility of four new country souvenirs on offer, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro, as well as a chance of some more caches in Greece. Tonight we'll go to bed on board ship, en route from Corfu to Venice so no caches in the diary for Saturday 13th May. With all this travelling, I can't get a decent caching run going😉, sad really. 😎

Just to keep the scoreboard ticking over, I again popped over to Fobbing Marsh this morning to pick up #5 of Teddy's series. This was a trad in form of a huge dragonfly! It was cunningly placed but didn't take too long to find.

Over the next few days, I'm planning one cache a day to keep the total ticking over. There's a series in Fobbing, Teddy's Walks, not too far away so I'll pick one of these up for the next three days then we're off on holiday. Today was the nearest cache, #3, a quick C&D of a replica snail on a gate post. Still they all count, don't they?

I only had half a day today🙁 Drop Grace down the station at 0640 and be back by 1300. So I planned the day to start in Galleywood, then Writtle, the Chignals, the Easters, get to Little Dunmow and work my way home! Plans are made to go awry! For the fifth time, I had a look for Dubs1, a 3.5/1 near shops in Galleywood. It's a micro on a seat near a library. However there are three seats and they are next to a busy general store cum papershop. I don't usually give a monkeys, so there I am on my hands and knees looking for this little sod. Maybe it'll be sixth time lucky. So slightly wounded after straying the day with a DNF again, I make my way up to Writtle. There's a bonus series based on village signs around Chelmsford and this is the penultimate cache before the bonus. I'd worked out the coords so hopefully I can get back on track with a find. I did, rather an easy one. I'd noticed a nearby puzzle series last night based on Thai numerals and letters. I worked out the numbers one ok and only had time for that. However for a 1.5/1.5, it was a git and after about 20 minutes, I spotted the blighter. Moving on, I was after a straggler that I'd failed to find before. It's the last one in a series around Chignal Smealy but I put it to bed with a quick find. A short drive away was a Challenge cache based on Essex Place names beginning with letters of the alphabet. Z had caused me problems, only having Walton-on-the-Naze and Beaumont-cum-Moze in the county. I'd finished the task after finding the Beaumont CM last year. For this cache, you had to look at four videos of the Canadian forces storming Vimy Ridge during WW1 and answer questions to get the coords. So what's the connection? The leader of the Canadian forces was Field Marshal Byng, born in the village and buried in the churchyard! In comparison, the challenge cache a 4/1 was an easy find. After that, a quick trad in the biggest Willow tree that I've ever seen finished my targets in this neck of the woods. I was at a multi, #21 in the Off The Essex Way series near Pleshey having done the #20 trad nearby. This seemed straightforward but one of the numbers was wrong but easily predictable. The main problem was that once you had worked out the coords for the intermediate GZ, there was another calculation for coords for the final. When I got to the intermediate, the stuff that I'd expected to see to work out the work was missing so I called it a day. However something odd ocurred when filling in the log at home on my IPad. In the description in web mode, the second part of the description was crossed out. There was only one stage!!! I'd got to the intermediate stage, that was the final. I looked at the cache on my iPhone and that defaults to text mode so I was seeing the uncrossed out version. Luckily the CO has read my log and removed the second part to make things easier. He's also confirmed my coords are correct! I then picked up the VS caches at Good Easter and High Easter and the trad at Gone Fishing #2. It was Warbler Central here with singing Reed & Sedge Warblers and a Chiffchaff. Coming away from here I met jv&ev, cachers from Takeley. We chatted for a while then went our separate ways. Just north of High Easter is a new mini series, North Loop which was reasonably easy and followed this up with another of the Water Tower series at Bishops Green. Now the next one was another of my nemesis cache - the CM at Little Baddow! I'd looked for this many times, I'd spoken to the CO about it too. It was definitely there, I was told but I DNFed again as did others. Then it turned out to be missing and was subsequently replaced but it was still causing problems. So this was the first chance I'd had to return and I was so pl as d when I spotted the sod, in a different place! About 850m was an isolated trad, Damsels & Dragons and I needed to remove it from my wants list. It was a lovely day and it was a terrific walk down towards GZ which I suspected was the river. I needed to cross over the defunct Dunmow to Stortford railway and passed a small hamlet of a few houses in an idyllic setting. The GZ was at a splendid modern equivalent of a medieval pack horse bridge. It's a pity that this blog provider doesn't allow me to insert more than one photo in my blog posts. I want to provide one of the hamlet and one of the bridge but which one will it be? The cache was a quick find and then the walk back. 😎 So onto the stats, 16 caches on the day, including 3 puzzles, 3 VS, 2 multis and a CM. The grand total now stands at 5129!

I decided to get up at 5am and get through the Dartford Tunnel for free before six. I'm in Green Street Green trying for the VV4000 Challenge cache. It's a 5/3.5 cache and I need it to fill a space on my DT grid. In fact, along with the Trains & Boats & Planes Challenge cache, it's the whole purpose of this morning. The cache was an easy find but it was a lot of hard work finding 4000 caches to qualify! There was a CM multi nearby as a bonus too. This was another easy find once I'd worked out the coords. I drove over to Swanley to find the other target cache, a 4.5/4.5. To qualify, I had to find at least caches in 3, 10 and 15 countries and find caches at least 1000 miles N, S, E and West. Amazingly I had qualified for this one and it was a quick find next to the railway line. So here it was before 7am and I'm starting the Valley View Revisited series In Eynsham. This was a 12 cache series of trads and 2 multis. It was a great couple of hours walk but I had trouble with the multis, having to come back later once I'd realised what was required. Some of the caches were tricky, stuck in holes in trees in a wood, where the GPS was whirling like a Dervish. Luckily I was able to tease all the caches from their hidey holes. Halfway round, I spotted some wild orchids and also realised that a puzzle cache, Good Call, that I'd solved was nearby. The only problem was that the coords were in my solved puzzles book and that was in the car. I worked the coords out again and had a quick find at GZ. So I'm back at the car and have about 30 mins to use before the drive home. I need to be home around ten, not that I'm going to turn into a pumpkin or something, just the deal that I have with the memsahib. I quickly find the Eynnsham ST and then the 15 Counties CM Challenge cache. This one needs no explanation, however it needs better placement as it's quite visible and not much chance of it being less so. I don't know how it has lasted so long! Now let's reckon-up! Eighteen caches, made up of four puzzles, 11 trads and three multis. Add in a CM and an ST plus two filled D/T grids and it was a great morning's work especially as there were no DNFS for a change! Starship VangeRover on Tour reaches #5113.

So in a layby near Great Horkesley at 0750, I'm opening a plastic box and signing the logsheet. It's a great start to the day! I moved on up the road to the Water Tower to a puzzle. It was going to be one of those fill the tube type caches but unfortunately the cache has been broken. I signed the log and on my way. I had a few cache and dashes at letter boxes until I got to Great Oakley CM. This was a multi with a simple calculation but a long walk to a cache that has caused difficulty to others in the past. Luckily I had a reasonably quick find here. I picked up a couple of the SEBC series in the vicinity before setting off working my way up to Little Oakley and back to Beaumont picking up many of the Stamp series. Around Beaumont, I did a bit of walking finding a large plastic rat and a great visit to Landemere Quay. I found part of what I think is a Thames barge here. Then using Beaumont Church as a base, I found Leafy Way, climbing up, Brookside, clambering down into the brook and The Hollow Tree. It was now time to go down to Thorpe Le Soken. I had a quick find at the CM and then followed the footpath Down To The Woods where I had a 4/4.5 climb. I then had a two hour circular walk picking up some of the Thorpe Trot series, some more of the Queechy Hen series finishing off with another tree climb, this time a 3/3. I had a 33 cache haul, today and about five DNFs, mustn't grumble.