I'm so out of date you know

We decided to blow the cobwebs away today and headed off to Brooklands Park, near Weybridge.  Brooklands was a 2.75-mile motor racing circuit and aerodrome. It opened in 1907, and was the world's first purpose-built motorsport venue, as well as one of Britain's first airfields (Barnes Wallace researched the bouncing bomb here), which also became Britain's largest aircraft manufacturing centre by 1918. The circuit hosted its last race in 1939, and today part of it forms the Brooklands Museum, a major aviation and motoring museum, as well as a venue for vintage car, motorcycle and other transport-related events.

The area is large and there is plenty of space for getting up some real speed on your Micro Scooter or bicycle (which we will bring next time).  They also have a children's play area, skateboard ramps, basketball court and there used to be a go-cart track but that closed some time ago.  There is plenty of parking and grassland to walk around so a great place to let the girls have a run around.

While the girls enjoyed having a scoot on the flat surface, I ducked away to have a look for A Walk in the Park geocache. Sadly it wasn't one for me and despite spending a good five minutes hunting around for what should have been a very simple find, I failed.  I was getting a little conscious that there were quite a few people appearing with dogs and children and I felt a bit conspicuous rummaging around at the base of a tree.  One to send hubby to search out later.  Odd, it seemed no-one had found this since November.  That's a bit puzzling.

Off to the next one was Spirit of Brooklands which was up on a mound giving quite a good view all around.  Being a park area, there was quite a bit of muggle rubbish around and a lot of gorse up there.  I began to search but I clearly didn't have my cachers eyes on today.  Hubby appeared with the girls and went straight to it.  How embarrassing!  At least that was one tick on my yearly caching diary.   The girls popped the cache back and away we went to  Brooklands Vanguard which sounded very straight forward as it was a magnetic key box by a bridge that was actually locked off underneath so you could only search the sides. Simple enough.  However, there were lots of DNFs and we were one of them. Hubby even searched the opposite side for the cache just in case.  Nothing.  Again, it hadn’t been found for some time it seemed.  Oh well, another DNF from us to join the rest.

One final cache to have a look for as the girls wanted to go to the playground now and N was very tired having not slept today at all.  We wandered a bit further to try and find Don’t Lose Your Marbles! which was another simple one.  It was clearly by some kind of vine/ivy to the side of a bridge, except when we got there, the stuff had all been cut down some time ago it seemed. Again, no finds for a while. What is going on?

Time to give up on caching and head back to the park for the girls to have some fun on the swings and slide.  Hubby nipped to the tree and found the first cache in about ten seconds, much to my annoyance delight.

When we got home, I went online to check the caches we couldn’t find. It’s very unusual for caches to go months without being found unless they are quite specialist, but these were not and especially when there are so many in one place. Hang on, they have all been found or replaced recently and the final one had been moved and the hint changed due to the cutting down of the original location.

The penny dropped...

I was using an ‘offline list’.  The clue is in the name. So, of course, the list I was using was one I had prepared about two months ago but we never ended up going over that way in the end.  A look at my phone and I had missed the ‘update’ option for each cache. Once I pressed it on each one, there were all the latest logs.  A true “DOH!” moment.

I told hubby who had a laugh about it.  Well, at least the girls enjoyed being there so we’ll head back again soon with S’s bicycle and N’s scooter and see if we can find the rest now I’ve updated everything about them.  A good excuse to go and visit the Brooklands Museum too I think.