Wantage ho!

Nine months ago, I went to Wantage and, amongst other adventures, got bittten by a dog. The dog walker had to be shown the blood before she'd believe it. I told the police, they visited her, and she denied the whole thing. No big surprise there.

So today I revisited the area; if the same dog had come within boot-range, I wouldn't have waited to be bitten again. But, I'm glad to say, no dogs appeared, apart from one very well-behaved one.

So I did a circuit that involved some very steep hills (up, of course), some tricky finds and a near-impossible stile to lift over. Also the back rack on my bike came loose; one of the screws has gone AWOL. And then I did another, ad hoc, route nearby, and then a bit north to do a couple more caches fairly close to each other. When I got to the first of these, the area looked familiar. But surely one bit of woodland looks much like another? Strangely, no. And I was right - I'd had a DNF here on June 21, the day of the dog bite. After being bitten, kneeling down to rummage was quite painful, so I gave up on this cache. This time around, I was keen to make up for my previous failure, so I stayed, and searched, for 30 minutes. And read some past logs. And one of those logs gave me an idea, which I followed up, and in a place I'm sure I'd checked a few times before (but not quite from that angle), there it was. Vici!

Then on to the second. The track leading to it had the sort of mud that jams into your wheels and stops the bike dead, but I found a parallel track that was nicely grassy. When I got there, it was also a previous DNF, and I looked in the same places I'd looked before, but after about ten minutes, I saw a familiar old friend, and signed the log.

Two DNFs wiped off the slate!