Well, since I left my "real job" to work self employed I've been feeling a bit of cabin fever, shut away at home pretty much alone during the week, not helped by the fact that my first 12 month contract has been delayed so I'm phoning around, chasing little bits of work here and there!
So, satursay dawned pretty bright and clear, so in a departure to the last few years, we decided to give the Landrover Owner magazine show a miss, and headed off into Norfolk for a gentle day of geocaching and mooching around.
The first cache took us to the Brandon area, into the woods, where we had clues to solve, numbers to collect and finally the cache itself to find. As well as the task of finding the numbers, clues, cache, etc, I was in a sort of "bushcraft standby" mode, where everthing gets looked at from a slightly different perspective that I'm sure you are all familliar with, which meant by the time we returned to the car after about 5 miles of woodland walking I had a decent quantity of pine resin in my pocket and a really nice, black chunk of Norfolk flint! I had also spotted a tiny lizzard, about 2 inches long in total, basking in the sun on top of a route marker post!
A quick bite to eat at the car and we set off to look for a nice beach for some relaxing. We stumbled by chance onto a beach near Brancaster, where a vigorous breeze was whisking the sand along parts of the beech, making it look like something from Laurence of Arabia! Once the wind dropped off a bit the place changed character entirely, its definitely somewhere I'll go to again. I picked up a few big oyster shells, maybe I can get some mother of pearl from them if I'm careful.
Then it was time to do a second geocache, this time near Heacham. Being quite an easy cache, we had plenty of time left to gorge on wonderful blackberries beefore heading off for fish & chips before the journey home. According to Elaine's pedometer, we had walked somthing like 10 mile in total.
Sunday was quite a bit windier. The morning was spent "tidying" my shed, and doing a bit of work on a couple of Kellam knife blades I'm putting handles on.
In the afternoon I took young Michael to pick some blackberries for a pie, which turned into an excuse to drive a local greenlane in the Series 3 Landy. The track in question is a remnant of an ancient route from Cambridge to Oxford, about 2 miles long and quite an easy drive for a 4x4 at this time of year. We gathered plenty of blackberries, an dI found both blue and the orange/green types of bullace growing, both need about another week to be ready for picking. On the way to the track we had passed a farmhouyse which had a load of apples piled by the gate for passers by to help themselves to, so a quick halt yeilded the othe ingredient for our pie!
All in all not a bad weekend.
Almost forgot to add that on friday evening Michael managed to light a fire, all by himself, using a Frosts Mora, firesteel, wire wool and birchbark for tinder! He now has an antler handled firsteel of his own, which was promised to him as an incentive to learn!
Dave
So, satursay dawned pretty bright and clear, so in a departure to the last few years, we decided to give the Landrover Owner magazine show a miss, and headed off into Norfolk for a gentle day of geocaching and mooching around.
The first cache took us to the Brandon area, into the woods, where we had clues to solve, numbers to collect and finally the cache itself to find. As well as the task of finding the numbers, clues, cache, etc, I was in a sort of "bushcraft standby" mode, where everthing gets looked at from a slightly different perspective that I'm sure you are all familliar with, which meant by the time we returned to the car after about 5 miles of woodland walking I had a decent quantity of pine resin in my pocket and a really nice, black chunk of Norfolk flint! I had also spotted a tiny lizzard, about 2 inches long in total, basking in the sun on top of a route marker post!
A quick bite to eat at the car and we set off to look for a nice beach for some relaxing. We stumbled by chance onto a beach near Brancaster, where a vigorous breeze was whisking the sand along parts of the beech, making it look like something from Laurence of Arabia! Once the wind dropped off a bit the place changed character entirely, its definitely somewhere I'll go to again. I picked up a few big oyster shells, maybe I can get some mother of pearl from them if I'm careful.
Then it was time to do a second geocache, this time near Heacham. Being quite an easy cache, we had plenty of time left to gorge on wonderful blackberries beefore heading off for fish & chips before the journey home. According to Elaine's pedometer, we had walked somthing like 10 mile in total.
Sunday was quite a bit windier. The morning was spent "tidying" my shed, and doing a bit of work on a couple of Kellam knife blades I'm putting handles on.
In the afternoon I took young Michael to pick some blackberries for a pie, which turned into an excuse to drive a local greenlane in the Series 3 Landy. The track in question is a remnant of an ancient route from Cambridge to Oxford, about 2 miles long and quite an easy drive for a 4x4 at this time of year. We gathered plenty of blackberries, an dI found both blue and the orange/green types of bullace growing, both need about another week to be ready for picking. On the way to the track we had passed a farmhouyse which had a load of apples piled by the gate for passers by to help themselves to, so a quick halt yeilded the othe ingredient for our pie!
All in all not a bad weekend.
Almost forgot to add that on friday evening Michael managed to light a fire, all by himself, using a Frosts Mora, firesteel, wire wool and birchbark for tinder! He now has an antler handled firsteel of his own, which was promised to him as an incentive to learn!
Dave
