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I had some unfinished business to attend to around Downe after last week‘s visit to the area so I wanted to tie up these loose ends.😀 Here’s what happened.
I had claimed the Darwin’s Wormstone EC overnight so I’m counting that as the first cache of the day. I was heading towards High Elms Country Park but took a route through Green Street Green to collect the VS multi that I had solved a few weeks before. With that one in hand, I drove to the outskirts of the CP to pick up the High Elms AdLab Bonus that I had failed to find last week. SkiCycle had given me a big hint for this one so it was soon found.
Once I got into the CP carpark, it was only a short walk to the part of the 02 HEW Bedrock - Chalk. I found all the info that I needed on the Granite examples to finish off the EC and then headed down to Downe. I needed the last stage of the Charles Darwin’s Downe - AdLab series so I drove down that way. However I couldn’t find anywhere to park in the narrow lane so ended up in a field gateway and had to walk nearly a mile back. However I now had the bonus coords and could see that I could incorporate them into the next walk that I had planned.😀
I was now after the Doris’s Sunday Stroll series and parked in The Old Jail PH carpark and set off for #1. I was signing the log sheet for this trad at 0730 and then followed the footpath north, gathering more trads until I reached #5 and #6 where I suffered my first setbacks of the day.🙁 I got back on track up to #8 where I took a half a mile detour to get to Chas’s Bonus which was a 3.5/2.5.
I arrived in the search area and soon spotted the well hidden ammo box avec padlock. The padlock had four tumblers and I had collected four numbers from the previous stages. I tried every combination but no joy. I needed four numbers in the right order but what were they?🤔 l will give nothing away but I pulled the four numbers out of thin air and I unlocked the ammo box.😀
Imagine my disappointment when I saw a locked wall key safe with four tumblers.🤯 So I quickly tried all the tricks that I had used to open the ammo box but no luck with any sequence. I wondered why there was a box of necklace beads here as well. Aha, the combination is hidden amongst them but it wasn’t.🤬 As I was putting the beads back in the box, I dropped one and in that moment solved the puzzle. 💥💥💥 I was able to open the safe and sign the logsheet. I even took a travel bug as that might have stayed there for a while. It would be unfair to say anymore about this brilliant cache. You must try it. As the CO said when I contacted her to thank her for setting the series up - “It’s very difficult but not impossible.”
I trekked back towards Downe House picking up the #9 Letterbox and then headed south collecting all the trads of the way to #16, the end of the series apart from #13 which seems to be MIA. There was a large gap in the series between #14 and #15 as it passed through the Downe Scout Activity Centre. I took a photo of the Centre Clock though.
I got back to the car. At this point last week, I had noted a mystery cache Doggy Stile that I hadn’t spotted before. I had solved the puzzle in the week and headed over to Cudham for the final stage. Once I had this one in the bag, I went into the village and solved the CM and VS multis.
It was now just past noon and I have promised to be home early today. 🤔 I had hoped to spend some time in Biggin Hill but I knew that I wouldn’t do it justice. However the quickest route was through the town so I stopped off in Leaves Green for the FP multI. I called in at the 1/1 CM trad at Keston. I eventually found this well hidden cache but how it was a 1/1, goodness knows.🤔
1 AdLab 2 Earthcache 1 Letterbox 3 Mystery 4 Multi 13 Traditional
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