Judy and I (plus, of course, the Tigger hound) have managed to “escape” for a few days from the centre of Dartmoor and have decided to have a crack at the HALO series north of Fowey in Cornwall. We’ve watched several of these mega-loops appearing in the south-west and thought we would experience one first hand and share our thoughts using the blog.
It was immediately clear that more planning would be required for 120 caches than the normal loop of a dozen or so and our normal method of printing a page for each cache showing the last 10 logs would probably be a nightmare. So the preparation included using an existing bookmark list for HALO, creating another one for an additional 50 or so nearby caches, creating a pocket query for each list, importing both of these to my Apple Mac, exporting the caches to MemoryMap (MM) on my PC, creating routes using MM to include all the caches over 5 separate walks (one for each day), exporting the caches to Excel and reordering them to match the 5 planned routes! So quite simple then!
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Whilst I was trying to get my head around all the technical stuff, Judy was doing the practical stuff like finding where we could stay – a self catering place which would take the Tigger hound. Judy soon found Chark Country Holidays, located just west of Lostwithiel and ideally situated for HALO.
More to follow …
Thank you for your comments. If it takes on average 5 minutes to find and log a cache and there are 50 caches, that is 250 minutes or over 4 hours! If the walk is 10 miles at an average of 2.5 mph, that’s over 8 hours in total! Much longer than most would image to walk 10 miles. And yes, Tigger does get very bored if we hang around for too long looking for caches. We would prefer to have to find less caches of a better and less repetitive nature.
I’ve been watching the Halo experience unfold with interest for all sorts of reasons. It was only recently that I realised such caching existed after discovering there was a loop of around 150 north of Barnstaple, though I’ve yet to try it! My caching canine loves a long walk but she does get bored when the caches are too close together and we have all the stopping and starting that is involved. I wonder what Tigger made of it?
The Luxulyan valley looks amazing, and I think that would be my first choice to try. Thanks for putting the time it took for you to complete the walk too. My predictions of how long I’m going to be out caching are sometimes way off as I forget to consider the time it takes to stop, find and sign a log, and with a large quantity of caches this soon mounts up.
I hope you all enjoyed your trip!