Nighthawks
Il Imperiestro asked me the other day if I wasn’t interested in joining him for some night caching. I never done this, so I was very much interested in this aspect of the sport.
I must I wasn’t 100% easy on it. It was nearly two decades ago that I skipped a night (for some film shooting) and I’ve passed a certain age where one falls asleep behind the telly. I leave in the middle whether the programs are so dull these days or not. Anyway, I joined last Friday Hammer of Doom, Freggie en Il Imperiestro between 8 an 9PM and we drove on towards our first target: My Haunted Castle… GC1RTT2, which is an abandoned house or better said castle on a huge property. It belonged to a wealthy shipowner but the property burned out and the owner left the country. It was told that one ghosts around over there, so it looked a good idea to tackle this one first (in the dark of course) as a kind of limbering-up exercise for the rest of the cashes which were only feasible at night. It didn’t start that well since we couldn’t find the access road. A large gulley full of water prevented us to go the first WP. After a while, we found the fencing the cache description was talking about and thus go search our WPs. Since it wasn’t a real night cache, locating these WPs wasn’t that easy at all. Add a lake – rather large one for a private property – as natural barrier add you know how difficult it was to find our way, but we managed. At the end we needed to search for a chapel as reference point at 2 times we thought we got it, but a appeared to be some oversized buildings for other purposes. Oversize is somewhat the theme over here. The real chapel and the castle were massive. So massive that we somewhat lost our way back to the car, but the GPSr are always a rescue.
After this adventure, we went to our first real night geocache: Tussen de Huisjes GC12G4G. Without spoiling anything, I can only describe it as the most innovative cache I’ve seen for a long while. It not only sets the standard high for all the other night caches but also for the other caches. It exploits the factor darkness in a very creative way.
We continued our journey with Prunie & K3D Wet Night Schot GC12MJP (where we sometimes find the correct access roads) and DVD’S IN DE NACHTELIJKE VOORKEMPEN GC1XZJ5 where my torch I bought some months ago showed what it was worth. Never thought that such a small device could be so powerful. It outclasses anything I used before. We concluded our nocturnal journeywith BLACKMAIL GCYXXK which put us on the wrong track at first but – once the correct access road was found – revealed the rest of the WPs rather smoothly.
Whilst driving home, Il Imperiestro promised us some pastry as (very) early breakfast if he could find a bakery that was open that early. And he did. The shop-assistant was still fill up the shelves, but she felt for his charms and was making an exception for him and he came back to the car with two big boxes. When we arrived at Hammer of Doom’s home to consume all this sweetness, we were taken by another surprise: Mrs Hammer of Doom prepared an abundantly supplied breakfast. Many thanks for such warm hospitality and many thanks to the other team members for the journey. That’s very moreish if you’d ask me.
Il Imperiestro also wrote a blog about his impressions and here are some photo’s:
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