Out of Season Training

Ready for Take-Off

The blog has been a bit quiet since the concensus was that it was getting a bit too hot for most WW's. The disappointment was almost tangible, so I have undertaken to rouse myself from a bout of Lyme Disease, (see http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/lyme/index.htm ) and the ongoing World Cup, to regale you with an account of our personal activities in the field.

Myriam and I have entered, nay, rushed into the field of Geocaching during the off season. There is a link to the site on the left, which is most informative. We are proudly known as "Team Caracache" - slow - but a bit tasty!, and have to date located 9 caches, and we hope to lay out one or two of our own in the near future. There are around 50 caches in the Algarve and Baixo Alentejo, and more almost every week. Mike and Jyll have also entered the fray, and may be found scrabbling around under rocks and in gorse bushes in the neighbourhood. I hope Terry will join in when he gets his GPS.

Most caches are located in imaginative and scenic spots, and can be reached either by a decent walk if you are energetic (and don't have a 4X4), or approached much more closely by vehicle. Then you have to read the owner of the caches' mind as they devise some ingenious hiding places.

There have been a lot of ticks about this year, the weather conditions seem to have favoured their breeding programme. At least two (Xana and Nathan) of the WW dogs have had tick fever, and I, much to my chagrin, have joined them. It was, I suspect, on a cache hunt in a valley near Sargaçal, where we saw the local shepherd and a large flock of raggedy looking sheep, and a few mangy dogs leaving the area as we arrived. I didn? even see the little blighter that got me, but I woke up on Monday morning with a small itchy bite, which I assumed was from a mosquito. By evening it had grown to about 4 cm across, and by the next morning it was a fierce red looking patch with a black centre, about 12 cm in diameter. At this point I went off to the doctor, and was diagnosed as an infected tick bite and possibly the start of Lyme Disease. The rest of the gory details and photo are below.