Death march in Essex

Urggghhhh...

A great outing, my thighs might never talk to me again.

We arrived at the event, and had an excellent breakfast at the local cafe, who were very surprised at the number of people (20-ish) who turned up. Then the early group set off, and then the late group, 11 of us, followed half an hour later. That was good - a single big group would have been too big.

It was then cache cache cache cache ... until number 61, which was at the cafe, where we all sat down and had various edibles. Then cache cache cache cache. Round about number 75, I was running out of steam, which was about what I'd expected, but there were still 30 more to do. After that, it got progressively more difficult for me, until by the time we reached number 104, I could barely stagger along.

The injury tally was, jollyjax fell badly once, Heffalump fell into brambles (ouch ouch ouch), and I fell onto my bum, and bounced straight up. The track was very slippery and muddy, although I thought that most of it would be bikable even in the condition it was in today. In summer, it would be a dream for biking.

Thanks a lot to Mel and Ray for meeting us at the start with coffee and cakes, and for meeting us at the other end with cars, thus making it easy to get back to the start. And then we had another coffee-and-cakes with Mel and Ray, plus (in my case, as I wasn't driving) quite a lot of metal-bijou's Sloe Gin (also thanks for organising it), which revived me enough to make it possible for me to get into the car so I could be driven home.

And the fun of the day wasn't in the caches, which were pretty ordinary looked at individually, but in the overall experience, which will take me at least three days to recover from.

Thanks to metal bijou for getting it organised.