Riverside autumn walk

The trees are changing colour and they look beautiful.  It's a calm bright day so we decide to get out and see some of the countryside and grab a few caches.  It's supposed to get really cold later on in the week!   I don't mind the cold, it's the rain, wind sleet that is horrible.  At least you can wrap up against the cold.

Anyway on with our little caching adventure this morning.  Off we go in the car to a tiny place a few miles from home, it is years since we have been to this area, just a few houses and a street and that was about it.   Now we are in no way extreme geocachers, in fact my hubby isn't even a cacher, he just tags along but he comes in handy when I can't reach up into a tree for instance!  He doesn't mind searching in the base of trees, whereas I put on the disposable gloves and arm myself with a stick!  I carry a small shoulder bag which stashes all my geocaching things, gloves, tissues, spare batteries, spare log books in case I can help someones cache out if the log is too wet, then I can usually pop a clean one in, tweezer to help retrieve a log if it is stuck in a container, but most importantly I carry the great little invention of waterless soap in those little containers, so so handy I have them in the car, in my handbags and of course for geocaching.   

Now the first cache takes us to a riverside and a field on the other seperated by a huge long pipe, on reading the description we have to walk beside this contraption to get to the cache.  We walk along the metal walkway holding onto the rail on one side and then the huge pipe is on our right so we can hold on to it if need be,  ok I am making this sound as if we are 300ft in the air and over raging rapids crocodile infested waters, (guess who will not sleep tonight after writing that!???)........noooooo this is the river Irvine we are crossing and we are not all that high up, but high enough, and the river can be seen through the metal we are walking along.  This is the bridge and the pipe stretching out in front. 

I thought of the James Bond film at this point, didn't he hurtle along a pipe not unlike this one, only to step out the other end in his dinner suit?

We walked along the metal walkway ducking underneath supports, I told you this was extreme!   there is the metal we walked along with the water visible below, can you see the pipe?   On we walk to the other side, only a couple of minutes but the raging river is visible down below.

Once across we duck under the pipe (below) and turn left to continue along the riverside walk.

A short walk along, and after searching the wrong tree the cache is soon in our hands, this is when the waterless soap comes in handy! yuck.  But it has been lying hiding in a tree for months on end!

Then back along to the car, but first we to venture back onto the metal walkway.  I thought the batteries in my camera were flat as I tried to take a photo of the crocodile infested river below my feet.   But once off the brige the camera worked, so DH said "go back and take a pic" so I braved it and went again! 

Then off in the car to the next 3 caches, but we only managed to find 2 as the 3rd seems to have gone, unless it was very well camoflagued in the tree, we searched that tree for ages, a man walking by with his 2 little dogs even asked if we had found the "box" so he knew what we were up to, he even looked but it seems to be muggled.  Never mind we found 2 caches and pick a small bag of brambles, late in the season now for them but these ones were huge and still firm,  they are now washed and in the freezer ready to go into an apple pie at some point.   We found a nice small log which we brought home with the intentions of making it into a geocache hide.  So another nice walk along a different part of the river, very pleasant.  These are the photographs from the second part of our walk, the snail is the handle on the container, someone has made this container to look like a stone and attached the snail (hopefully it was a dummy snail!)