If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

We went geocaching today for the first time in ages. It’s been a hot weekend, filled with breakfasts and lunches on the patio, bike rides across town and lazy mornings spent soaking up the sun.

So it seemed only natural to head out this afternoon without any coats to look for hidden treasure. We’d picked a spot in the middle of nowhere - a village of about three houses, a phone box and a small farm that obviously does school trips. The farmer had piled up 30 tiny pink wellies on a shelf and there were four soap dispensers screwed onto an outside wall.

The clues took us to a graveyard where we hunted among the nettles and grass for the dates on the stones that would give us the final coordinates. The stash, it turned out, was half a kilometre away, and we headed out to find it across a field of peas, whose pods were gently creaking and popping in the humid air.

But as the GPS tracked our progress the sky turned black, the clouds rolled in and the rain finally broke. We ran back through the peas to the small church in the middle of the graveyard and pushed the door, running inside for shelter. It clearly hadn’t been used in years.

The floor was broken, with the wooden boards that would once have supported the long-gone pews splintered and cracked. One of the windows had been smashed, and apart from the pulpit, the only recognisable furniture was a single stool, caught in the dying rays of sunlight seeping through the window.

We spent an hour there and in the porch waiting for the rain to pass, listening to the colony of bees hanging from the tree outside the broken window, now buzzing angrily at the rain and the heat.

I wouldn’t doubt that as we sat there we were doing what others before us had done for the last three or four hundred years, and with that thought in mind it was a rather beautiful way to spend the afternoon.

I don’t think actually finding the treasure could have made it any better.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Geocaching, Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.