After deciding, last night, to pack up a day earlier and treat ourselves to a hotel roughly half way to home we had the the unenviable task of packing everything into the back of the car, leaving enough room for us.
We are getting better at this with the only angry words coming right at the end when trying to fit a MASSIVE tent into a TINY bag. After a few different folds we managed to squish it in and do up the zip.
The tent was slotted into its allotted space and the few remaining odds and end squigged in around it.
We were planning on avoiding the motorways where possible and hopefully pick up a few geocaches on the way. This would boost our total finds, get us nearer that elusive one cache per day objective and break up the journey.
I had been experimenting with the geocaching app and had discovered that when navigating to a cache, pressing the car icon at the top of the page allows you to make GZ the destination in either Apple or Google maps.
The track can then be followed on the car infotainment system using CarPlay.
I had also created a route and got the geocaching website to make a list of all the caches with a mile of that route.
The plan was to look at the caches on a map, pick one that looked like it wouldn’t involve much of a detour, plug that into Apple Maps and follow the trail.
This worked very well and would get up to within metres of the cache location.
This workflow is a vast improvement on how we used to drive and cache but it didn’t help us to actually find the caches once in the vicinity.
We started off badly, with our first attempt being a DNF (did not find). The next we found followed by another DNF.
After that we found everyone we attempted.
We made steady, if not rapid, progress south breaking at Jarrow on the outskirts of Newcastle after crossing under the Tyne.
That experience cost us £2.50 which we paid online at or next stop.
Our next stop was for a virtual cache at a memorial to those who took part in the Jarrow March on 1936.
As I was logging that find, I noticed an Adventure Lab based on the same location – five places to visit within a couple of hundred metres.
While I shot off to find the AdLabs, Sue stayed with the car eating a BLT that we’d bought from the nearby Morrisons. It didn’t take too long to locate and answer all the questions.
Post snacking, we made our way back to our south bound route and immediately ran into stationary traffic. It was the Great Northern Run in Newcastle today and Sue asked if that could be the cause of the hold up. I wasn’t sure.
Most of the traffic was heading for the A19 (at least that’s where the queue was heading) but our SatNav navigated us around this and we were motoring along quiet roads.
Eventually, we turned from the suburban streets onto the busier A194. It was particularly busy on the opposite carriageway (we’d found the Great North Run) but our side was nice and quiet.
As we were heading away from Newcastle we caught sight of the Red Arrows flying overhead.
We found a few more caches (eleven plus the five ADLabs in total) as we pulled off the main roads to grab them.
Finally, we arrived at Harrogate and pulled into the underground car park at the Grand Plaza hotel. We checked in, paid for tomorrow’s breakfasts and made our way to our room up on the sixth floor.
After freshening up, we had a couple of drinks and a bite to eat in the hotel bar before retiring for an early night – that camping is hard work.