Albert Chemikal Burnz

Sunday Morning (30th October) me and Mrs SC decided to go cache hunting. I'd already choosen the A White Elephant - Irvine’s Millennium Dome cache which is located at the now derelict and inaccessible Big Idea exhibition centre at Irvine bay. This was a Glasgow Science centre before it's time which for some reason closed down and has now been forgotten and left to rot at the tip of a strip of land which is only accessible via a 4 km beach walk. It's because of this beach walk that I took Mrs SC along. Her job was to with me protect me from the famous white elephants that frequent these parts (nudie men). There was just one today and he scampered off to his wee tent as soon as he saw us coming past.

En-route we passed another cache but decided to get it on our way back. This is close to a giant painting on the sea wall of Robert Burns. Amusingly this has been creatively altered by some of the locals and he now has a nice pair of sun glasses. He's also been renamed "Albert Chemikal Burnz" which seemed rather appropriate considering the poximity of the ICI plant!

By the time we got to The Big Idea we were knackered so we spent a while looking around. Mrs SC discovered a young deer which had got trapped in one of the fenced off areas around the back and helped free it - her good deed of the day! I decided to climb up onto the roof and pretended to be a Tellytubby (not Tinky-Winky he was back along the beach!!). When we started hunting I was looking for the letters SC3 which was what I thought the clue was. This was only until I realised that I hadn't actually de-crypted the clue. Once I'd figured that out and had the correct clue we found the cache pretty quickly.

Job done we headed back to the beach but that was when our problems began. The tide was now in (despite Mrs SC insisting it had been going out) so there was no way back to Ardeer where we'd left the car other than a scramble over rough rocks or along the sea wall and dunes. The latter was chosen but proved to be quite a challenge. In the end we covered a good part of the distance trespassing in ICIs grounds before climbing back out to the beach just before the Big Rab cache. We collected that too of course!

2 out of 2 (and four very tired legs!)