Trad: 8
Walked: 9.0 miles

Today I had a great roam around the outskirts of Brentwood and then Harts Wood and Thorndon Country park, finding 8 traditional caches, which were some great hides.

I started off with two caches to the north east of Brentwood. The first was called Jumbo and was a particularly on-theme container!

Next up was a little box which went by the name of DEH1 – not sure what it all meant, but it had some nice little goodies inside.

I moved the car and parked just to the north of Hartswood itself. The Autumn colours were out in full force!

My first cache attempt in the woods was a DNF, but I met a couple of  cachers there while I was looking. None of us could locate the box, but we had a good chat and moved on our separate ways.

Thankfully I had more success with other hides in the wood, including this box with a travel bug which I picked up to move along. Someone’s  celebrating their 10,000th find with this traveller!

I’m a bit stingy and the parking cost in Thorndon Country Park is rather steep, so instead of moving the car again, I continued walking south and carried on to a few more hides in the centre and west of the park which I haven’t visited before. This one was a riot of choice – but I did find the right pine cone in the end!

Thorndon One is an excellent hide – a nice big ammo box awaits. But what’s this? How do I get in? The answer is, you have to find the keys which have been hidden close by to unlock the log inside! A very well crafted cache which certainly deserved a favourite point.

There were more travellers to be seen in another hide nearby, this time a conventional Tupperware box.

Another well-crafted box was this fake birdbox – which looked very convincing – until you pulled the front off to reveal a pot inside!

I was aiming for a minor milestone of 6,600 today, and the birdbox took me to 6,599. So I hot-footed it over to Warley for a final find to bring up my total. Then I had a long walk back to the car! But it had been a fun day out.