Wimbledon geocaching (with surprise addition!)

My humans have recently been hanging out with one of my primary human's old university friends and his family. It's been lovely to make some new friends! This Sunday, we'd planned to visit the west of Wimbledon Common, near where our friends live, where there is a big collection of caches close together. However, my secondary human forgot to book a table at the pub we'd agreed to meet at (oops!) and only realised the night before, by which time they were booked up. So, instead we did the east side where the caches are fewer and further apart - more exercise is always good! We can pick up the west-side ones next time.



The day started off in a normal fashion. If you can't spot the cache in the photo, finding it for real was much harder!



Left behind two tiny friends at the next one. And eagle eyes might notice a small human in the background...



Caching got interrupted when we turned a corner and there was Wimbledon Windmill!



The museum inside was great!



This collection of tools reminded my secondary human of the amazing set of woodworking tools his grandfather had collected from a long line of his ancestors who were all carpenters and turners. Unfortunately, that ended at my human's dad - my human can barely bang in a nail! The tools were all given away to a good home.



There were so many excellent working models inside the museum. This is a cut-away of the Wimbledon windmill when it was working.

So many fully working models of windmills!

I am become Death destroyer of.. Wait! Get off, put me down!

My favourite two stories from the Windmill museum both concerned the final owner. Firstly, when he moved to a different windmill, he sold the body of his current one to a new owner but was careful to ensure the bill of sale didn't include the contents. When the new owner arrived, he found the inside had been completely stripped of gears and grindstones so he couldn't compete with the old owner in his new mill (not nice)! Secondly, while the owner had been in Wimbledon Windmill, one way he earned some extra money was to police the common to stop duels. Duels had been illegal for several decades but still happened fairly often. If the mill owner heard one was going to happen, he hid in a bush nearby and when the parties took out the pistols he leapt out and banged them on the head with his truncheon!



And that's not everything - the mill was also where Robert Baden-Powell wrote a large section of the first draft of Scouting for Boys and he and his sister Agnes worked on the equivalent for the Girl Guides.



We picked up a few more caches after and the humans added this bench to the ever-excellent Open Benches.



The group said their goodbyes and headed off home. My humans got a bus back to near the car (via going back to the lunchtime pub for pudding). The bus stop was opposite the UK Vatican Embassy, which is apparently all the way down in Wimbledon - how odd!



All in all, another lovely day had by everyone (I'm in there somewhere)!