08/02/14 - Penultimate

Distance - 8 Miles
Geocaches - 8
Start - Solihull Train Station
Finish - Earlswood Train Station

The Brummie Ring

BrummieRingPhase10

The adventure nearly draws to a close.  I have one leg to go.  Sonia is coming with me on that for the celebration slap up dinner in Alvechurch.  Before that, I have got to devise and deliver a leg from Solihull.

Initially, I was going to have this leg end at "The Lakes" station.  However, in the 21st Century, this is a request stop.  I have no idea how this works.  If you are on the train, do you pull the emergency cord to make it stop?  Ding a bell?  If you want to get on it, do you have to lie down on the tracks and hope the driver sees you?

I have enough trouble getting on a bus, so I decide to make the end of the walk at Earlswood Station.  They only go every hour, but at least there is no boarding complexity.

Spend most of the week checking the weather.  Looks like I will miss the rain and just have gales to deal with.  I can cope with that.  Train from Kidderminster to Solihull and alight to get the nearby sidetracked cache.  I did not have time to do this at the end of the last leg, as I was rushing for the train.

Someone has dumped their stash of cassettes in the undergrowth at GZ.  You have to despair of humanity.  Daniel O' Donnell, for god's sake.  No wonder he didn't want to throw them in his own bin.  Garbage men talk.

Unbelievable - why use a bin, when the woods will do?

After a good rook for tunage, I get into the walk proper.  Skirt the edges of Solihull, going past the Holiday Inn, Courts, Cop Shop and then pick up the now defunct Solihull Way.

A Dead LDP

This provides nice walking, as I go along alleys and green lanes.  2nd cache of the day is a cheekily hidden and not aided by the number of dog walkers around.  3rd takes me by surprise at its size.

First bit of greenery today is Hillfield Park.  A nice expanse of football pitches, play areas (with zip wire) and a lake.

Hillfield Lake

The 4th cache is meant to be huge, but I get my first DNF.  I am sure it is around, just couldn't find it.  Arrive at the Shirley's outskirts and nip down a footpath into proper countryside.  With cows.  And Sheep.

Shirley - so good, Billy Bragg wrote a song about it.

This brings me to the village of Cheswick Green.  It has some history, first recorded in 1250 as Chesewic, which means Cheese Farm.  It all looked rather disappointingly 1970's to me, although it did have a cache and a new build pub called the Saxon.

There is some road walking next, but its all very pleasant with a proper footpath and limited traffic.  At last, I get a cache with a TB.  This is the first of the year.  I must have been looking in the wrong places.

The highlight of the walk is easily Earlswood Lakes.  On the OS Map, they look exactly like a pair of jeans.  They are even denim blue.  I get to walk alongside and then through the middle of them, meeting Clowes Wood at the tip of the right hand leg.

I look at the time on my GPS and realise that I can make the 11:54, if I get a wriggle on.  The trains only come once an hour, so it is reasonably important.  Especially as there is no pub at the station.

I go as fast as my legs will carry me but I am challenged by ill defined paths and plenty of flooding.  Eventually, I get my bearings which are alongside the track, but I still cannot make rapid progress because of the mud and floods. 

With just another couple of minutes rapid walking to the station, along comes Mr Train.  Punctual as ever.  I resign myself to missing in it and take solace in a cache that I was going to do on the next leg.

Get to the station at 11:58.  What to do?  No pub but there is a garden centre.  I may be thirsty, but I am not mental, so I decide to go and look for another cache.  Think about walking to Wythall, the next station up, but the rain starts.  Get the cache, and return to the station for a half hour wait.

30 minutes is a long time in the Earlswood Tundra.

I do get company at 12:52.  But it is the local nutter.  The blog is not the right place to record the conversation but it continued on the train.  I thought I had lost him,  but he came and found me and proceeded to ask me several more questions about car maintenance, bus services and the depth of flood water in the Worcestershire, Berskshire and Surrey areas.