We've been wanting to try a night cache trail for a while now after watching a video of one on YouTube so when we saw that Amazo had set one out in Spier's Old School Ground near Beith we just had to have a go. The cache is called Leap Night - The Ghost of Spiers, but we didn't tell the kids that or they wouldn't have got out of the car!
We'd already been out for a few hours and had collected five caches already before going for a curry whilst waiting for it to get dark. When we got to Spier's it was dark, very dark but there were four of us and we had four torches so we thought this would be easy. Oh how wrong!!
Night caches are simply trails through an area which can be followed using a torch at night. A series of tiny reflectors are pinned to trees which mark the way to go. Once at the first tree you shine your torch around and look for the next reflector shining back at you, walk to it and then repeat. When you reach a tree with two reflectors or whatever code the cache owner has set you then hunt for the cache.
We managed to pick up the trail easily enough which starts right at the entrance to the park but after a couple more reflectors were were up to our waists in undergrowth and fallen branches. I'm sure there would have been easy routes around all this but in the pitch darkness it's hard to pick out easy routes so we ended up just ploughing through it all in a straight line.
After a while we reached a nice little circular garden but at this point despite hunting we just couldn't see any more reflectors. We were ready to give up when Super Girlie said she could see one way off in the woods. We looked where she was pointing but couldn't see a thing but let her guide us and sure enough there it was.
As were were following the next section of the trail we managed to disturb some type of bird with a flurry of flapping wings as it tried to get away. I'm not sure which was more frightened, the bird or the screaming kids!
After many more reflectors which took us on a long winding trail around the park we discovered the glowing embers of a fire which gave off a nice smell and some welcome heat and shortly after that we reached the last reflectors and found the cache. Log signed, swaps made we decided to leave another new TB, good luck Punky Panda!
It was only then that we realised that we had no idea where abouts in the park we were. We had been following the reflectors we hadn't been using the GPS. We didn't even know in which direction the entrance to the park was.
In all I think this took us just over an hour but we did get stuck for a while at the circular garden. This turned out to be down to some missing reflectors which have now been replaced. We thoroughly enjoyed following the trail and even just being out in the woods at night was fun. We now can't wait to try Amazo's other night cache trail in Muirshiel Park.
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