A walk in the park

Just been for a very lovely walk with Millie. We went about three miles along the sea wall. I managed to find four new caches, all quite easily, but we did have to climb up two very steep hills during the trip. It was a gorgeous sunny day, which certainly makes a walk much more enjoyable. We did have to pass some cows though, which always makes me nervous. Thankfully, with Millie on the lead we got passed them without too much bother. As always she needed a shower when we got back as her feet were quite muddy and she managed to roll in one of the many cow pats. Smelly dog.

Mum rang yesterday about a 2yr old boxer who is looking for a home. So after having phoned the owner, we have agreed to go and visit the dog tonight. I am quite excited about Millie having a playpal, but we will see how it goes.

chatting

Had a lovely chat with Sarah over the course of the day. First of all by email at work - which was fun. She was in the Uni library - bored! Then we chatted on the phone. That was nice, because no-one was at home, so I was a bit lonely.

I was sitting in the living room quietly playing tetris on facebook, after having popped upstairs to do a pee, when I heard some moving around upstairs. At first i wondered who/what was up there as everyone was out. Then I realised Millie was not in the living room. The daft dog had gotten trapped in Alice's bedroom and could not open the door. LOL. So I wen to rescue her and she was pretty excited to see me again. She was funny.

PS
Hello sarah :D

Pizza cake

It is Sev's 19th birthday tomorrow and I wanted to make a "pizza" cake. I saw this decoration for a cake in a cookery book at Andy's mum's house. As Sev likes pizza I thought it would be a fun thing to do. So I made a some small cakes yesterday to trial out the decoration. I made these with icing sugar and water mix, but today when I made the bigger pizza cake, I used butter icing which gives a better finish, I think.

Hope he likes it.

10/10/10 CITO Event

It is geocaching's 10th year and so 10th october 2010 was a very special day that needed to be celebrated big time. Over 76 thousand people logged a cache on this auspicious day, smashing the previous record of 50 thousand in April this year.

Needless to say, I joined in too. I went to Essex's first ever CITO event. CITO = Cache in Trash out. So this meant clearing out any rubbish, or trash, that was lying around in one of the country parks. As it is a stunning beautiful area that I visit regularly, I felt I ought to do "my bit". So off I went and met up with over 20 other cachers and between us we filled a trailer full of rubbish - it was quite unbelievable just how much rubbish there was.

Thankfully the weather was wonderful and dry. It was a little windy in the country park, but the sunny and dry day more than made up for a bit of wind. In fact it was such a lovely day I persuaded Andy to come for a walk with me and Millie in the late afternoon. After going round in circles in a field full of cow pats getting lost, and being chased by a herd of cows, I only managed to nab one more cache. And Andy was not impressed with the walk at all. But all in all it was a good day.

just a normal weekend

Had a nice day today. Andy and I had a lie in, after getting up at 6am every morning this week, it was a treat to lie in bed until 9. After a bath and a leisurely breakfast we took Millie for a walk. We tried to find a geocache which involved crossing a field with some horses. Now I am not too scared of horses, but when a bigun come running at you, just a week after another horse tried kicking Millie, it is a little scary. So I told Andy to walk quickly with Millie to get off the field, whilst I walked as quick as I could with the horse at my shoulder. So needless to say, i didn't get the cache. I will just have to try again without taking Millie with us.

So we went on to a country park just a quarter mile further and had a lovely walk around there. It had a nice cafe, shop and three trails. The three different trails took you around the country park with a focus on three different things, like sculpture, WW2 and explosives. The park used to have a factory on it which produced dynamite, gelignite, and other explosives, so it has quite an interesting history.

One strnage thing we did see was some very old style houses, like 15th century old, in a sort of circle with the intention of making a village and village green. One house had been transported from Stansted area when they built Stansted airport. Apparently the house was sold to the current owners for 50p. How bizarre. Even more bizarre the house is currently being protected by chipboard, so it looked very strange with a chipboard house and thatched roof.

Needless to say Millie managed to jump into a very smelly ditch, so she needed a shower when we got back.

Caching in Essex

I went caching one night after work. It was a dry day, we've had a lot of rain this week. So I took the opportunity to go for a nice walk in the Essex countryside. The walk was about 2miles, which was just about right for me. It took me 2hours, but I was sauntering along and took loads of photos. My last cache I nabbed just as it was getting dark. Below are some photos from my circular route.
These berries were very photogenic!


I was amazed to come across these llamas whilst I was out walking.


This is a typical cache pot

Church Micros

Andy and I took part in a Ride and Stride event yesterday. This is about visiting churches and trying to raise money towards the upkeep of those churches. Andy and I were out all day. Of course it was the perfect excuse to get some church micros to notch up some more caches. We came across some truly amazing places of worship. It is such a shame that not so many people use them anymore, but we were pleasantly surprised with the enthusiasm of some of the people 'manning' the church open days. Of the 11 churches we visited we only went inside four of them.

This is the first one we visited for a quick 'cache and dash' church micro. It was only 9.30am so no-one was around, but it is not used for regular worship anymore so there are no seats inside - we peeked through the windows! Being perched high above a hill it can be seen from the main road and also has magnificent views across the Essex countryside.

The next church looked quite plain on the outside but inside it had some marvellous decoration from early 20th century artists with some very lovely aluminium panels.

Our next stop was at St Andrews Church. Here is the litch gate. The church is over 800 years old, with people worshipping in this spot for generations, including Andy's family. We spent some time here and went to find Andy's nan's grave.

Next on our list was North Ockendon's St Mary Magdalene Church. This is thought to date back t before 1075AD. However it may date as far as 630AD ast St Cedd, Bishop of the East Saxons, is thought to have carried out baptisms at the adjacent St Cedd's Well. I loved these memorials of the Poynts family.

We were warmly greeted by some people who were manning the open day at the church. They told us all about the history of the church and we had a good look at everything. There were these lovely alabaster memorials on the wall to the Poynts family who figured highly in the history of the church. The one on the left is one of two, one of them Sir James Poynts. There are about eight of the white ones on the left that were put up between 1603 and 1607 which apparenlty were an attempt to cover previous family history by recording eight more Poynts from 1307 to 1603. The first attempt at family tree!

All in all we had a great day and I got 12 more caches to add to my 800 finds. All good.