Right back when we first started geocaching, we knew it would be right up Team WeStace’s ally, and oh boy were we right! In fact, McRacey got into it so much that she pronounces her geocaching username differently depending on if Wes is there (“the bramleys”) or not (“the bramley s”). She’s already clocked up more than double the amount of finds that I have, and around half of my finds have been with her!

We weren’t too surprised then to find out that the number one thing she wanted to do this weekend was to grab some caches in and around London. She and I even managed to chalk up a couple of finds in the city before coming home on Friday night!

On Saturday afternoon we headed down to Gunnersbury Park, and while Kristy napped under a tree, Racey and I found four of the park’s five active caches. We had to report one of them as missing, because its one that I had found it some time ago, but the container wasn’t where it should have been.

Today, Racey found a set of caches which were based on a walk around a lake, so off we drove to Surrey for the Papercourt Pathways series. It was quite a nice area, though not as remote as it had looked on google maps. Still, that’s not entirely a bad thing – we got to meet a lot of puppies who were out taking their owners for a walk!

After lunch at The Seven Stars pub in Ripley (possibly the best Sunday Roast we’ve ever had!), Stacey nominated one more cache for us to retrieve, simply because it had an interesting name. It was rated four stars for difficulty, but we figured we were up for the challenge – that is, until we got there and found the cache around six metres off the ground!

There I was all ready to give up and call it a day, when Stacey came up with this idea:

You’d be surprised just how well it worked – we managed to get the cache down in no time flat! Unfortunately, putting it up was another matter entirely. Thankfully – and with a bit of Macguyer ingenuity – we managed to loosely tie the canister back to the stick using a spare hair-tie, and then I hoisted Racey back up for the replacing. It took us a couple of attempts, but we got there in the end! An awesome cache, indeed.

Sadly we had to drop Racey off at Heathrow before coming home – but on the upside, it won’t be long before @thebramleys are back in London for another adventure!

Stacey is down for the weekend! It’s so good to see her again; it feels forever since we’ve seen her! But unfortunately I’ve woken up with a touch of a cold (sore throat, low energy, headaches), which is totally not good! Things didn’t get any better when we discovered the house is almost completely void of food, so figuring that a decent meal is needed for some cold-fighting energy, and to finally finish off the £5 breakfast challenge, we headed to Natalizi for the full English. Kristy joined us later after she’d finished up at the gym.

As you can see, it was a very comprehensive breakfast – two pieces of toast with butter, baked beans, a sausage, bacon, eggs, tomato, and mushrooms. In terms of taste – sure, it’s not the best breakfast you’ll ever eat in your entire life, but it was good – really good, actually, given that my taste buds were suffering a bit with the sickness.

But the big winner for Natalizi is the service. The staff were so, so nice! Everyone was happy and smiley! And if you look closely, even the meal is smiley!

The breakfasts were £4.90 each, which included a coffee or tea of choice. We both went for tea since we had coffied before leaving home, but I was pleased to see they used Lavazza beans (which generally is a good sign), and their espresso machine was quite clean. I’d feel confident in ordering a latte there. Each of us also had a large glass of very freshly squeezed OJ, which at the reasonable price of only £2, brought our meal total to £13.90.

Given that all of the restaurants offer a pretty similar meal for around fiver, there’s really not much you can use to differentiate between them. And yet, Natalizi was by far my favourite – simply because of how friendly the staff were. They really made you feel like you were their favourite customer, who they were pleased to see every Saturday morning. It’s now my new favourite place for breakfast, and I will definitely be going back there. gerrod.com rating: 10/10.

We will be spending our lovely four-day weekend in a lovely cottage called Orlestone House, which is in the lovely area of The Lake District. Our lovely friends Stacey and Wes are going to double our fun by joining us too, because the drive time from our place is almost identical to the drive time from their place! Lovely!

Here’s hoping that everyone has a lovely Easter, and that you don’t pork out on too much lovely chocolate. That wouldn’t be so lovely.

I was hoping that PK was lying to me and that the Zed Warz really was going to turn into a big jelly fight. But turns out he was right – it was basically an excuse for a whole bunch of bands to get up and entertain us. Which was pretty cool in it’s own right, I guess.

Anyway, Lynchmada put on a huge show, as they always do. Actually it was my favourite set that I’ve ever seen them play – the crowd loved it. I even taped the whole thing – but I’m yet to watch it, I fear that the music was too loud for my poor little video camera.

The other great part of the evening was seeing Matt (guitarist) and Ben (singer) from Knaw, whom I also went to High School with. It was awesome to catch up – and they put on a killer set to top things off. They easily took out the award for “most number of groupies”.

Anyway, Stacey and I both enjoyed ourselves at The Zed Warz. Except for that stupid MC guy, he was just a galah. Also the music was a touch loud, so it was a good thing I had my ear buds phones plugs. Oh, and that Stacey should have won a T-Shirt, but when we went to claim it they reckoned they said “Becky”, not “Stacey”. Whatever!

As Homer puts it so eloquently – “It’s my first day!”. I hope that Stacey and Jason both used that excuse for some misbehaving today, as you don’t get too many first days at work. (Well, if you do, then you probably suck at your job). The rest of Homer’s advice says that you can use that excuse at any stage of your career, and I suppose there’s nothing stopping you from claiming it’s your first day practically any time in your first week, as no-one would really know you yet anyway.

Stacey came over tonight, and told us that she was going to show us “The Beast”. We had no idea what “The Beast” was, but as it turns out, it’s a brand new Mini Cooper! How cool is she? Mini’s name is “Av”, and is blue with a white lid. We even discovered that Av has an outside temperature gauge, an average speed thing, and heaps of other funky stuff. I so need to get one! It’s going on the wedding list!