Trad: 17 Multi: 2 Earth: 1 Whereigo: 1 GPS Maze: 1
Walked: 9.3 miles

When you’ve been caching for a few years, it’s not often you get the chance to find a new cache type, but today was the day!

But first, I met up with Essex caching friend Gilly of Bean & Sprout to walk a section of the Llangollen Canal Trail between Berwyn and Llangollen. We also did a couple of extras (including an Earth Cache) while we were passing.

The canal walk is a lovely relaxing stroll, all very flat, and a good wide track to walk or ride along. We saw a horse-drawn canal boat excursion while we were on our route.

After “lunch” of a lovely Cream Tea at the canalside café, we made our way to the Llangollen Pavilion to visit the GPS Maze Europe – a rare beast indeed and the first time the GPS Maze has been seen in the UK. Another cache type added to the list, yay!

Little Quacker met a little duckie friend who was also in the HQ Duck Dash races, they got along well while they quacked away happily, telling each other of their adventures.

After the Maze, Gilly and I found a few more trads around the town of Llangollen, which has the pretty River Dee running right through the middle of it.

One fun cache was Over The Bridge, a Whereigo implementation of the classic Famer’s Conundrum (with caching-based characters instead of the usual Fox, Chicken & Grain). We ended up quite a way out of town but bumped into another group of cachers at the final GZ, so we all posed for a photo.

It was getting late, so I left Gilly to sign in at the campsite at Carrog about 10 miles west of Llangollen while I returned to my hotel in Oswestry – via a delightful (but tricky) little CM5266 in Llandysillio, which earned me Powys on the map.

The Llangollen hides had already earned me Denbighshire today, but I couldn’t resist also adding Shropshire to the list by finding  Mile End Cache & Dash, conveniently placed in a corner of the car park at the hotel in Oswestry!