The Search Jaunt

After the warm-up, it was time to start the real stuff and tackle the challenge.

With a lot of bravery we started with “CGC – F – Les 7 petites” GC1T4NN which went very smooth. The team spirit was more than OK – I’m very pleased and honoured that I can/may be part of this team for the 3rd time – and the legs and feet felt OK. Are these special lubricant and socks universal remedy against blisters? I had my doubts about the latter, since I noticed at the start that I had 2 socks with an L on it. Dawn. I didn’t see that when I was preparing my rucksack. Hopefully I wouldn’t regret that during the day. Anyway, when we arrived at the final point/cache another was already there. Strange. Did two teams get the same envelope to start with? It’s not clear how the 2 teams ended up at the same place, but it was time to move further since we had still a lot of caches/kilometres to go. Our second envelope contained 2 cache descriptions. What happened was going to be typical for the rest of the day: we took the ‘wrong’ cache to start with. The result was that we needed the take the same roads several times. We also passed by a rock/cliff several times. As such a very nice and as such strange to see all this beautiful scenery so near an industrial city like Charleroi. But in this case we needed to temper Freggie and prevent him to climb the rock several times. He had some mirage thoughts about some WP or cache being hided over there. Luckily he could let go himself with “La Jamelovienne” GC1EYMH, a existent cache that made part of this event. I decided to survey things from a safer distance.

The challenge wasn’t all about pure multi caches where a GPSr is required. ‘CGC – D – Bois de Beignée’ GC1RVCH contained a road book and ‘CGC – I – Prison Break’ was some kind of labyrinth approach where signs on a tree indicated if you were following the correct way. Typically, you end up in a dead end if you choose the wrong way. Meanwhile, we’re used to walk the same way several times so it was much fun. The particularity was this cache happened in a wood near a prison.

There was also the mystery “CGC – E – Vert Logis”  GC1RVHC where the waypoints contain projection data to other waypoint and/or the cache. The trick is to gamble on the correct waypoint in order to walk as less as possible. You’ve guessed it, we aren’t good gamblers. That resulted in the fact that we reshuffled the order of the caches and we saved “CGC – A – Od’heure” GC1M4E7 to conclude our journey. Whilst we’re heading to the start of it, Wodanza and Vuurvos said that there was a trad on our way. We couldn’t resist and picked up “VERA des Bruyères” GC1GX1D.

After a bit more than 12 hours, we could head to the meeting point/restaurant for a well deserved rest and dinner. Freggie calculated meanwhile the coordinates for the bonus cache which we logged before going home. It was a remarkable day where we crossed our own borders:

• 35 kilometres (10 more than the official 25)

• 14 caches (2 more than the official, but not included in the 35 km walk)
  • CAROLO GEOCACHING CHALLENGE #1 (Challenge) GC1M4DA
  • CGC – A – Od’heure GC1M4E7
  • CGC – B – Les Haies GC1RMJY
  • CGC – C – Bois de Marbaix GC1RN76
  • CGC – D – Bois de Beignée GC1RVCH
  • CGC – E – Vert Logis GC1RVHC
  • CGC – F – Les 7 petites GC1T4NN
  • CGC – G – Trieu Gilson GC1T9WB
  • CGC – H – Les près barrés GC1T9X7
  • CGC – I – Prison Break GC1TACA
  • La Jamelovienne GC1EYMH
  • CGC #1 – BONUS – Stash of the brave GC1T6CA
  • Mémorial de Jamioulx GC1EYNB
  • VERA des Bruyères GC1GX1D
• 1 organizer who prepared all this and deserves a big applause
• 1 excellent team having lots of fun and laughter
• 0 insect bites and 0 blisters. So the precautions did help. Btw. when I arrived at home, I checked the socks and all of them had this L mark. Very confusing.

The next morning, the first thing the kids said was that I had such thick calves.

GeocacherQ and Weedboer took some nice atmospheric pictures and I was allowed to pick some. You will see the result in a next blog.

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