Up the airy mountain.

 Up the airy mountain...

...Down the rushy glen, we daren’t go a-hunting for fear of little men...

Well we actually did dare to go geo-cache hunting today, despite the promise of the fair folk at our second cache-site.  (Yes I am thoroughly addicted already!).  I wanted to make a bigger walk of it but it took us so long to get going today that it turned out to be 4 miles (I was looking for it to be more like 6-7 but never mind).  We also got a bit spatially confused (lost-ish) so we took an unexpected shortcut.

We parked near the intended cache number 2 but since we’d need to keep the doggies on leads while looking for that one as it is close to the road we headed off up through the woods to go and find cache number 1 on the open fell beyond.  It looked quite a simple walk up through the woods, round a couple of switch backs then follow the forestry track round the hill until it popped out onto the fell.  Ta-da.  Nope.  Twice we managed to convince ourselves that the track had gone far too far round the hill and we were in fact heading through the woods towards the fells further down the lake, twice we retraced a lot of our steps... on both these occasions we were heading in the right direction!

After rather longer than we had planned mooching around in the forest (the dogs enjoyed it mind!) we crossed a wall and popped out onto the fell much nearer to the cache site than expected.  I could already see that we wouldn’t have time to find the cache and bag the fell as well before it got dark.  I wasn’t too disappointed, I knew that we’d have struggled to do that with the time we set off anyway.

We found the cache which was a really cool one (I’m such a geek) and had a gorgeous view.  As we could sense dusk encroaching we decided to head back to the car via the road, the dogs had had a good run by this point and could do with on-lead practice anyway.

 They were both really good – I was pleased as when we went on our Buttermere walk Hugo was a bit of a nightmare even though Oscar did well.  And Oscar was clearly more distracted today than he had been at Buttermere but he still managed to do some nice bit of walking with a loose lead.  Hugo was trying out some competition style heel-work for size at points!

We got back to the car and decided that we had enough light to go for a quick look for the second cache in a place called “fairy glen”.  The dogs went mental and were pulling madly on the leads as soon as we got off the road.  We couldn’t let them off lead as we were too near a busy road on one side, we should have anticipated the madness and left them in the car for a bit.  The path up the hill was steep and slippery but that’s ok when you’re going up isn’t it?  My GPS beeped that we had reached the cache spot before the very top of the hill but Stu had gone ahead so I went up to the top to get him.  We hunted all over the spot but couldn’t see anything of the cache.  We eventually gave up as the light faded rapidly.  Heading back down the hill we were slipping all over the place and Stu fell over completely.  Just at that moment a sudden violet hail storm hit!  I don’t think the fairies wanted us up there today!

Back in the car, slightly grumpy at having a rough time trying to find the second cache but nothing a chocolate orange couldn’t fix.  And happy with the overall walk.  Stu is back at work tomorrow so, assuming that I don’t get called out to work, I will take the boys for individual walks and or maybe a bit of running and try and get a few more miles in.  Mind you I’m not sure the boys will be too enthused by the idea, they are both fast asleep on the sofa next to me.  (The picture is actually of Hugo last night but he’s much the same now!)