I had some college friends staying for the Bank Holiday weekend, together with their ten year old daughter, and we all decided to go out for Sunday lunch at the Feathers in Ledbury. I’d really enjoyed lunch there a few weeks ago with my sister and brother-in-law – they do a “proper” roast Sunday lunch and really yummy desserts. However, I knew from last time that the portions are huge and there was no way I could do justice to a full helping. However, the simple solution of ordering one roast beef dinner, a spare plate and an extra portion of chips, meant that I could split my serving more or less equally with the daughter, and we both still had enough room left for a dessert! That was an ideal way round the portion size problem, and the serving staff were very accommodating with the request.
After lunch, my friends introduced me to the concept of “geocaching”. Basically, it’s a crowd-sourced treasure-hunt. I hadn’t come across it before, but then again I don’t have a GPS or a smartphone so am not actually technically equipped for it. People hide “caches” containing a logbook and possibly a low-value toy, and post the GPS location to a website, together with a clue to help you find it. There are caches hidden all over the world, and it turned out that there are several in and around the centre of Ledbury, hidden in plain view. My friends used an app on their iPhone to get within a few metres of the marked location, then we all searched for something that looked like it could be the cache – which was well disguised and hidden. We found two out of the three we searched for, signed the logbooks, and replaced them exactly where we found them for the next people to find.
We must have looked odd, standing on benches, peering into undergrowth and poking around shop fronts, but it was a lot of fun. I can see that it’s a good family activity – what child could resist a genuine treasure hunt? Interesting how modern technology has facilitated completely new variations on an old theme.
