Curse of the Black Panther

Wednesday 23rd September
We did a bit of gardening and then decided to attempt a local night cache, called Curse of the Black Panther.
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=bb1246ed-9efa-433b-89c6-16f7a0bddac0
After dinner we drove to Albert village and parked by the road. It was not quite dark so we walked down the road to try another cache which was further down than I expected and by the time we got there it was too dark to see properly, so we abandoned it and walked back to Pick wood. Several bats flew over as walked up the road and past the lake. We put on the torches and followed the path to a large spoil heap which we climbed and after a bit of a search found the first cache - Pick Triangle. This area used to be the site of Wraggs pipe works but has now been planted up as part of the national forest. We then went to the correct place as mentioned in the directions and shone the torches around. John eventually spotted a reflection in the trees and we headed down the hill towards the reflector. We then stood and shone the torches again, and spotted another reflector on an information board. It was now quite dark and we stumbled through the grass and onto the next reflector. We could hear owls around us. It was a bit of a job spotting the next reflectors, but we did and then eventually spotted the one that the instructions said were only 30 ft from the cache. The cache was soon spotted but it was difficult getting it out of the hole, we had to did around it to remove it, we signed the log and put it back in as far as we could. We then had great fun trying to find the way back to the path and back to the car. The main paths certainly didn't show up well in the dark. It had felt like quite an adventure, even though we had only walked a few hundred metres. We did not see any night animals but did hear some owls. We got home at about 9 o'clock.