The virtuous Cycle

Grant writing has become a very important aspect of my current position in academia. Without an influx of money soon, my position will disappear, and I will once again be unemployed. But that is a story for another day.  Today, I want to talk about the Virtuous Cycle.  One may question my credentials for writing this piece.  All I'll say is that this piece comes from 1.5 years working in the College of Pharmacy, and 19 years as a scientist in Pharma.  Many of the issues discussed below have come up in Parke-Davis and Pfizer.

Since I began my stint at the College there has been a constant debate about grantsmanship:  What can we do to make our grant application stronger, and what must we avoid.  The things to avoid seem to be the easiest to recognize, but they can sneak up on you quickly.  First, you must identify the potential source of funding and learn their application requirements.  An application in the wrong format (font, margins, number of pages, required forms, required signatures …) or sent after the deadline is DOA.  When the instructions are ambiguous, you must ask for clarification.  The last FOA (funding opportunity announcement) I responded to was obviously written by a committee.  It asked for the same information in three places, but included page limits that made this impossible. Having surmounted this hurdle, the next is to make sure that your research is what they are looking to fund.  One must contact the funding organization and have a chat with the appropriate person to ask if what you are about to propose (in summary, not the specifics) is what they had in mind.  Why waste your grant writing effort?  Let's assume that we have the right format and are proposing studies in the right general area, what is going to make your proposal more pleasing to the review committee than the others?  The general consensus is that the proposal needs to: (1) Propose interesting science; (2) have enough precedent and preliminary data that the reviewers believe it can be done; (3) avoid relying on a single experiment or idea that may, if not achievable or wrong, stymie the rest of the proposal; (4) convince the reviewer that your team has the knowledge and experience to do the research; (5) convince the reviewers that it needs to be done now.

There seem to be a relatively small number of people who, despite the waxing and waning of the popularity of their field of expertise, seem to attract grant funding again and again.  To explain this phenomenon, I invoke the Virtuous Cycle.

I am borrowing the phrase virtuous cycle from the field of economics/management.  The diagram above is based upon one in the Wikipedia entry for Virtuous Cycle.  The gist here is that increased production and increased efficiency can feed off each other and, if done well, rapidly produce large amounts of good, cheap product from humble beginnings.  I believe that something similar is true in science.  It seems reasonable to put Funding at the apex of the figure because funding is the beginning of the process.  Each new Professor gets a start-up package that covers the initial costs to get around the cycle once.  Those that succeed manage to get around the cycle many times, usually with two or more lines of research co-occurring.



Let me run through how it works.  One of the things you have to do on a regular basis is attract students.  If the research that you are proposing is not of sufficient scope and interest to make a good Ph.D. thesis and/or launch a postdoc into a decent job, you will have a hard time getting good help.  Once you do, of course, it's time to get down to work.  Professor Darren Griffin of the University of Kent, near Canterbury in Southern England, once wrote, "The only way to do good research is to get on with it." Quite right.  Develop new methods, generate novel reagents, perform experiments, and test those hypotheses.  Learn something!  It's exciting stuff!  But don’t forget the big picture.  Analyze the results in the context of the field and reformulate your ideas.  This is when you need to share your results with the other in your field, but don’t be too hasty.  Get the results and ideas into print (or at least accepted for publication) before you start telling everyone.  Bragging to a senior professor with a new idea that you think you can prove with some hard work may lead to being scooped.  Well-funded labs can do things amazingly quickly; don’t tell it's unethical and rarely happens.  Get the papers out and go on a speaking tour.  Graduate a student or two.  Let everyone know how productive you are and get an idea how others have advanced the field while you have been busy.  Perhaps there are collaborations to be had?  To quote Professor Griffin again "When opportunity knocks, open the door."  At this point, you are ready for the next round of grant applications.  You may ask for a renewal of your last grant if there are new ideas along the same lines, or if you made discoveries that can lead to exciting extensions of your work.  There may be brand new ideas that you want to pursue.  Funding will be easier if you have demonstrated the ability of do and publish what you said you would do.  This is part of the essence of academic virtue.

Straying from the path.  It is very easy to stray from the virtuous cycle.  One trap at the very beginning is to propose something that is much too big.  Having a broad and impactful overall goal is great, but the initial proposal must be do-able.  Cutting the work into a bite-sized first chunk is a wise move.  The second early trap is recruiting the wrong people.  Going back, once again to Professor Griffin "With good people you can do anything."  But with unsuitable people, life can get rough.  I've heard different ideas about how to spot the right people.  In one philosophy, one wants the people with the best GPA.  These people are supposed to be smarter, or apply themselves better, and they are easier to shift to other funding sources (training grants, for example) than other students.  Still, they might decide to pursue other opportunities, or migrate to another lab.  Another theory is to select the student who gets A's in the subjects you care about (sciences, math) and C's in other subjects.  These focused individuals, when you can find them, may be able to do a great deal in a hurry, but they may also burn out.  My person al philosophy is to find students who are generally interested in the general field, and have a realistic view of their future goals.  If you let them know that you will help them get to their eventual goal, and are reasonably nice to them they will, in my experience, start off well. Raise expectations as their experience grows and you may find you have a great student.

Once the experimentation is underway, there will be a temptation to stray from the initial goal.  While one must always be open to pursuing a more fundamentally problem that is made accessible by your early results, it is very easy (especially if you have trouble focusing generally) to start running all over the field.  Being unable to put together a coherent story makes publication more difficult.    The lack of publications will erode confidence in your ability to produce good work and will hinder the student's progress.  If you discover something particularly interesting, perform enough initial work to get a publication and write a grant application.  It can be a rewarding way to expand, and eventually re-direct your research career.  If the diversion is not significantly more interesting than your original proposal, don't let it bog you down.  Finally, issues about publication need to be addressed.  It is easy to expect your students or postdocs to write all of the manuscripts.  While they need to learn about writing, many are not skilled in English and the Department generally lacks the resources to help them.  If you do not have the time to write the manuscripts and get them through the publication process yourself, you may consider hiring a writer to help.  It's that important.

I came across a grant application from a Professor who was asking for his second 5-year extension.  The progress report publication list from his first renewal contained 42 publications between 2006 and 2011.  Many of them were patent applications, and many were in minor journals, but there was one in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, and a couple in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.  He was asking for three people (two postdocs and a graduate student) within a modular budget ($250K/year for 5 years).  Although I didn’t think the new research he proposed was going to reshape the world, it was well-written, do-able, and he was the right guy to get it done.  I bet he gets it.

Canadian Oil

I was taking a break from whatever it is I had been writing and wandered over to Yahoo to see what the writers there thought I would find interesting. There I found a short piece about Canada's push to become an "Oil Superpower".  I started to wonder if this was a long-term goal or a short-term fix. 
The article estimated the content of Canada's oil sands at "more than 170 billion barrels", giving it the third largest oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.  Perhaps influenced by the ongoing political discourse, I decided to do some fact-checking.  The CIA's World Factbook agreed that Saudi Arabia had "proved reserves" of 262.6 billion barrels, Venezuela had 211.2 billion and Canada had 175.2 billion.  In all, there were 1.477 trillion barrels of proved reserves in 99 countries.  A great deal of oil.  Good to see our trusty CIA is keeping its eye on the world's oil :)

How long might all this oil last?  According to the original article, Canada is producing 1.5 million barrels a day.  Dividing 175.2 billion by 1.5 million per day, then dividing the answer by 365 days/year suggests Canada's oil deposits would last 320 years.  Quite a long time.  But later in the article, it mentions ramping up Canadian production to 3.9 million barrels per day.  This shortens its lifetime considerably - to a mere 123 years.  Fact checking again, I see the CIA thinks Canada is already producing 3,483,000 barrels a day.  At this rate they will run out in 137.8 years (give or take).

That got me thinking - is Canada going to run out before Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, selling off the last of the available oil at an enormous price, or is everyone else betting on oil going out of style earlier and rushing to produce.  Fortunately for us, the CIA also publishes estimates on production.  Calculating how long the proved reserves of 97 countries will last, at current production rates, reveals that the reserves of 38 of them will not last a decade (including the US and UK).  The reserves of another 31 will be depleted within two decades.  Saudi Arabia will last 12th longest, running out in 68.4 years, and Venezuela is #1, running out in 243.6 years.  Canada is in 4th place, behind Venezuela, Ghana and Tajikistan, and just before Iran.  Could there be a correlation betwen amount of reserves and how long they last (i.e. does production rate increase linearly with reserves?)  See for yourself (below).  Clearly most countries are shooting for < 50 years, and if increased demand encourages the laggards to increase production, perhaps the rest of the points will shift leftward, making Canada, Venezuela and the other countries with extensive reserves (Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, UAE) fall in line with Saudi Arabia.  At that point, Canada will run out of oil sands in only ~40 years.  Hope they save their money to deal with the effects of all that carbon dioxide.  (Note: the author realizes these numbers, both proved reserves and production rates, have changed significantly over the years, usually upwards.)

Coming Home

     Being unemployed in Kent is actually not that bad a gig, as gigs go.  I was having a good time geocaching - visiting my friends the sentinel steers, finding Napoleonic area forts and such, driving and traipsing around the beautiful countryside.  But getting a job to support myself and the family did not appear to be on the horizon.  Not that I wasn't trying.  There just were not that many openinigs, and I was not quite ready to start my own company there (or anywhere, for that matter).  So when my wife said she was going back to the U.S. in August and asked if I wanted to do so as well, the decision to "go home" was a rather easy one to make.  But go where?
     Pfizer's repatriation package would take us back to our point of origin, Ann Arbor, MI, or anywhere less expensive.  Ann Arbor is not exactly a hot-bed of employment opportunity.  In fact, the only hot-bed of opportunity for a wandering enzymologist that fits the "less expensive than going back to Ann Arbor" description is probably Boston, MA.  I had an interview (via Skype) with a small company there, but it did not lead to anything.  So we weighed our options - move to Boston directly, or go "back home" to Ann Arbor.
     In the end, Ann Arbor won out because my wife was able to re-capture her part-time teaching job at Washtenaw Community College, teaching general chemistry to nursing students, and her part-time clerk position at a local knitting supply store.  I got back in touch with my former colleagues at the University of Michigan and was invited to drop by when I got to town.  I also secured an interview with a medical writing company, so the decision was made.  We're going home.
     The logistics of going home are, in the abstract, quite simple.  I am the advance party, carrying some clohtes and a laptop computer.  I leave the UK on mid-July, rent a car and stay with friends in Ann Arbor.  I know the drill.  First, establish communications (get a cell phone number, establish a fresh Skype account).  Next, get a car and return the rental (2000 Honda Accord knick-named Swamp Critter).  Finally, find a place to live that is large enough to house everyone and stash our stuff.  Then there are the amenities of getting the home fitted with internet and cable television.  Skip the home phone.   While this is going on in the U.S., my wife ships the household goods , sells our little VW Golf (my Shuttle Craft) installs our daughter in the home of friends who will keep her while she finishes her last year of high school, and then flies back to the US to join me.  Simples.
     But we are still not home, entirely.  It will be hard to say we are home until we have steady jobs (I'm working temporarily with my former University colleagues, and my wife is on a quarter-to-quarter basis with the community college), and our daughter is home, and I have planted my first geocache.  Its taking so long because I want to build a fake birdhouse cache, and I just haven't gotten around to it.  Lets hope it doesn't become another parting gift....

Leaving a little gift

     One more English geocaching post.  Every geocacher should set out their own caches.  That's how the game works!  The ideal time to do this is when you first arrive at a place that you will call home, because you should be there to take care of this.  Of course, that is not what I have done.  With my departure from the UK imminent, and knowing that I was leaving a geocaching friend behind, I decided to establish a cache on Thanet as a parting gift, although this is a bit strong - there is still  a possibility I will return.
     But where?  So many of the caches I had encountered were clever as caches, or in interesting places, or both.  My friend and I finally decided that a great place to put the cache would be at a particularly interesting pub that we visited from time to time - The Brown Jug.  Evidence of the existence of the Brown Jug goes back to 1725, and it probably served as a farm cottage well before then. There is further evidence that the Inn served as a mess hall and rallying point for militia at the turn of the 18th century and as a halfway house on the road between Ramsgate and Broadstairs in the 19th century. We also liked the owner/operator (she had been there for 50 years!) and the beer!  So I got some stuff together and we stuffed the cache into some bushes across the street.  It was published on June 27th of 2010 and has, at this point, been found by 37 geocachers (and missed by 3).  I hope it has brought the place some business.  Drop by if you are in the neighborhood.  They say there is a ghost that lives in the garden  (the cache is called "Re-routing Ramsgate"  http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=78cca772-33dd-4018-b74a-cdb3e2e7f239)

The Spiritual Side

     This post was originally written many months ago and for reasons beyond my recollection, never posted.  It may be the last time I will post about geocaching adventure in Kent for quite a while, so I'll go ahead and post it for posterity.

     We started the geocaching stories with the goal of finding all the geocaches in Thanet - a goal filled with good intentions and guided by a spreadsheet, but with a vague time constraint.  I described the first cache, then a couple of multicaches in Ramsgate, and then jumped off to other places and topics.  So anywhay, lets get back to finding all the geocaches in Thanet.
With three found and 40 to go, there was a range of possibilities - where next?  It reminded me of my first solo trip to Sandwich, where I was to begin working at the Pfizer Ltd. research facility.  The objective of the trip was to meet some of my future co-workers, and to find a place for my family to live when we first arrived.  It didn't take long to realize that real estate in England is a totally different experience than anything I had ever encountered.  Where to start ?  The questions started reasonable enough - how many rooms do you need?  I figured they meant bedrooms, but as it turns out, the numbers and types of rooms are the keys to finding a place.  Nowhere in any concersation about finding, buying, or selling a house or apartment in the UK have I heard anyone mention the size (as in square feet or square meters) of a property. 
     With two teenage daughters and in-laws that visit frequently, we wanted 4 bedroons, so that ruled out the typical flat (apartment) in this area.  It also ruled out a typical bungalo which, being a single story, perhpas with an attic extension, never has 4 bedrooms of significant size.  The next up were the terraced houses.  They remind me of the brownstones in the Back Bay of Boston.  These three-story buildings have three or four units that can be quite large inside.  The end units tend to be a bit bigger than the center units, but the center unit costs less to heat. Next up the housing ladder are the semi-detatched houses, which can be very much like terraced houses, but have only two units per structure.  Finally come the detatched houses, which can be relatively small (like the bungalo) or quite large.  As it turns out, at any one time there are relatively few four-plus bedroom places available for rent, so I went to see as many of them as I could.  The lack of certain amenities was a bit disconcerting.  Getting the four bedrooms plus more than one bathroom plus off-street parking put us in a price range beyond my expectations, so I decided to forgo the off-street parking.  There were a few places to visit, but the one that really caught my attention was in the town of Birchington-on-sea.  Parking on the street would have been tricky, but there was a 3 story detached house with everything else one could want, including a back yard (garden) that went back for 150 feet or so and was beautifully landscaped.  I registered with the estate agent (realtor) handling the property and left at the end of the week expecting to live in Birchington-on-sea for about 1050 pounds per month ($2,100 at that time).  As it turns out, the landlord decided not to rent the place after all, and we had to settle for a mid-terrace with five bedrooms, but just one bathroom and no off-street parking in Ramsgate; at a cost of 850 ppcm (pounds per calendar month) or about $1700.  Alls well that ends well, because although I liked Birchington, the girls hated the "small, isolated place full of old people". 
     Anyway, with three geocaches in hand, I looked to Birchington-on-sea and found - no geocaches.  That's right, the old folks of Birchington apparently have no idea what geocaching is, and to this day there are no caches within the confines of either Birchington or Birchington-on-sea.  So I looked for the closest cache and found  "The spiritual side of me".  I was intrigued by what my British cousins would consider spiritual, so I went to visit.  It was by the side of the sea: a small cahe stashed in a hedge with a view of the sea.  It took me a llittle while to find the cache, as I had to dig around in the trash that had been tossed in the hedge, and it was hard to be inconspicuous, but after a little bit it was mine.
   The longer I think about it, the less I want to lump my British cousins together as a single entity.  Apparently this person found sitting by the sea a spiritual experience.  There were others who found their spiritual experiences in other ways and places.  You might want to look up "ZonePet2 - Silver Machine", a cache along Thanet way that marks the grave of the man who wrote the song "Silver Machine" (Robert Calvert).  Apparently Rober's freind "PetZone" thought his gravesite lonely and in need of visitors.

The Sentinel Steer

Farm animals make me nervous; I admit it.  Until recently, however, contact with farm animals meant passing them by at 70mph or so.  Sure, when the kids were young we had our share of experiences at the petting zoo, and I even worked at one for a month when in college.  But somehow this did not prepare me for some of the experiences that are part of geocaching in southern England.  There have been a couple of occasions recently where the path to the next cache led across a pasture containing either cattle or sheep.  Two groups of caches come to mind.  The first is a pair of caches just outside the Isle of Thanet called "The Inmate" and "H2O no".  These two caches are along the River Stour on the Old Saxon Way (approx along the blue line in picture below), which traces the shore of the ancient Wantsum Channel separating Thanet from the mainland.  To get to these caches, one can go north from Richborough Roman Fort (Green Arrow, point A), or East from the Dog and Duck pub at Plucks Gutter (point B).  Coming from Richborough, the path leads through at least three separate pastures that may contain cattle.  Coming from Plucks Gutter, you pass through both sheep and cattle pastures.  I chose to start at Richborough Roman Fort and end at Plucks Gutter - with my wife dropping me off and picking me up. 

The other group of caches is a 12.5 mile circular walk with 34 caches and a bonus that is located in Essex just outside Swindon.  The village in the lower right corner is called Aldbourne, and the large road from upper right to top center is M4.  This past weekend found me in Swindon, so I did a half circle that took me through a field of sheep and a field of cattle (and a great deal of beautiful scenery). 

Both of these caching adventures were wonderful - done during days of terrific weather.  I heartily recommend both walks - except for the farm animals.  Sheep and cows are very different beasts, as we all know from the tales of the old West, but in my opinion they are both dangerous (I can hear my wife laughing at me, but its true).

Sheep are docile most of the time, its true.  They go about in groups herded by dogs and are seemingly incapable of independent thought.  Other times they are spread out in the field grazing, and seem oblivious to anything human in their vicinity.  The guy who took the video linked to the word docile, above, was on the other side of the fence.  Its easy to feel safe on the other side of the fence.  And on either side of the fence you are safe ... until lambing time.  When they have small lambs that are not capable of running away at a reasonable speed, a grown ewe will charge you.  Let us hope that you are near a fence to jump over, or can in some way demonstrate to the ewe that you are harmless (by jumping in a river, for instance).  Otherwise you are in for some rough treatment. One post to the "H2O no" cache describes an encounter in which the sheep rushed a cacher and he had to jump a barbed wire fence, ripping his pants in the process.  Must have been during lambing time.  When I made the trek in late May, the sheep mostly left me alone.  In the one instance where the sheep, with their lambs, obstructed my approach to the pasture gate, they were easily dispersed by raising my walking stick as though I was Harry Potter and shouting "MINT SAUCE!"

Cattle, on the other hand, are always difficult to predict.  They can be docile, especially if you are on the other side of the fence.  When you cross over into their pasture, however, all bets are off.  After about six different encounters, I can safely say that the best bet is to keep at 100 yards between you and the cattle.  Better yet, make sure they don't see you.  If you must go closer, you may notice that many of them turn to look at you.  They may be expecting something from you.  Hard to say.  Look for the one I've been calling the Sentinel Steer - or the Big Moo.  He probably looks like this:

The rest of the cows seem to take their cues either from this guy or one of his close associates.  I hate to think what might happen if he thinks you are a threat.  More likely he is trying to read you and see what you want.  During the two encounters in which the cows reacted to me in unison, they seemed to think I was there to take them back to the barn.  Imagine entering their rectangular pasture through a gate by the Stour river and facing a group of 20 - 30 cattle - and about 80% of them are looking at you.  Slowly they start to move - toward you.  I did what anyone might do.  I put up my hand and said in a loud, clear voice "Stop!  I'm not here for you, I'm just passing through!.....Please?"  They slowed a bit, so I executed a smart left face and started to walk to higher ground away from the river.  They hesitated.  As I approached the corner of the pasture, I veered to the right, parallelling the long side of the pasture (and the river) as the cattle continued to look at me.  At this point, the Big Moo muttered something and they all started to walk in the same direction as me.  Apparently, the gate through which they return to the barn was in the corner of the pasture to which I was heading.  They accelerated, leaving me behind.  Greatly relieved, I cut behind them and scurried to the small gate at the far end of the pasture by the river.  Fortunately for me, the terrain had enough of a hill that I could reach my gate while they were waiting at theirs, so I slipped out unnoticed.

My second close encounter was quite similar.  I entered a rectangular pen at one corner and noticed a row of 55-gallon (250 liter?) white drums in front of me.  Forty or so cattle turned to look, then came towards me rapidly.  I limited the small talk to "Stop!" and executed my abrupt left.  This did not deter the cattle, who merely pivoted a bit.  Rapidly getting to the near corner and veering right, it became apparent that I was not going to be able to circumnavigate the herd.  I stopped and put up my hand and said in a loud, clear voice (OK, I shouted at them)  "Stop! I have nothing for you, I'm just passing through!" and did an about face.  Perhaps my actions convinced them that I was going to let them out of the gate through which I had come, because they accelerated towards the gate (not toward me, thank God).  One of them even seemed to kick up his heels at the though of getting out of the hot pasture and back to the barn.  When it was clear that there were no more cattle between me and my objective - the far gate - I stopped, executed another about face and hurried along parallel to the fence, towards the far side of the pasture.  All the cattle stopped and looked at me.  Then they seemed to look at each other, and then they just looked down.   Perhaps I confused them to the point that they decided I was neither a threat nor their savior and therefore unworthy of their attention.  Once again I got past the herd intact - raising confidence in my ability to deal with cattle and confirming my assertion that they are to be avoided.  Love to eat them, not to meet them.

And when you get past the animals....

 

  

Getting Around Town - the multicache

Moving to a new place is a difficult undertaking, full of questions ranging from the general (Are these people lunatics, or is it me?) to the specific (Where do I find a good plumber?). It took us a while to figure out what every other American who came along to England apparently already knew: the answers are in the pub.

The challenging thing about coming to a town like Ramsgate is that there are so many pubs. Ramsgate is by the sea and has a long-standing tourist trade, so there seems to be a pub on almost every corner - kinda like Dunkin Donuts in Boston or Starbucks everywhere else. How is one to choose?  Is the key feature proximity to home (your “local”), or is it any pub with a crew of friendly locals who are willing to help? England has some pretty serious drunk driving (which they call “drink driving”) laws on the books, so finding a pub you can walk to has a distinct advantage. Still, without the right atmosphere and amenities, its hard to get to know people well enough to get key questions answered.

When we first arrived from Ann Arbor, MI, we moved into that a part of Ramsgate that was in the middle of a residential area, and there was only one pub within an American’s customary walking distance. We went in once for a drink, and everyone just looked at us and left us alone. It didn't seem a particularly friendly place.

Fortunately for us, when we bought our semi (as in semi-detached house) six months later, there were at least five pubs within reasonable walking distance (which, by then had become somewhat farther than our original comfort zone). Each has its own character and clientele. I think the first one we visited was the Prince Harry, often called simply “the Harry”. There were not many people there, but the pub had internet access we could use while we were moving in. It helped that a couple of our American friends had chosen to live near the Harry and had made some acquaintances there. Once again, the first time we went in there was little contact from others. After showing up three or four times, though, I guess they figured we weren’t going away, so they started talking to us.

The crowd at the Harry was pretty sparse, at least in part because the Harry does not serve real ale. We heard that several of the patrons went to the San Clu for food, so we decided to give it a try. The food at the San Clu is indeed pretty good, and it should be, since it’s the bar/restaurant for the local Comfort Inn. The menu includes typical pub food, Italian dishes and a variety of Indian food, so we continue to go there occasionally to eat. But the beer was mass-produced, and the place lacked the feel of “our local”.

Our third foray, the Honeysuckle Inn, is in a slightly different direction from our house, down a steep hill from the house. Its an older building, and they say a public house has been on that spot for more than 500 years (I doubt the current pub is older than 100 years). We’ve had a good time on Wednesday nights, since they have a good karaoke machine with a great selection of songs, and several people sing pretty well. But on other nights it seems dead. At this point we were envying Goldilocks, who only had to sample three of everything before finding one that was “just right”.

We have since discovered that the Monefiore Arms (aka “The Monty”) is the best place for a good pint of ale, and it has a crew of locals who are friendly enough to give good pointers to a pressing question. Its small; it has a dart board and a pool table, and always has two or three good beers/ales on tap. The owner/operator knows us by name now, even though we don’t stop by more than once a week. We’re still getting to know some of the local characters. There may seldom be very many people there, but we’ve never walked into an empty pub.

So how does all this relate to geocaching? Early in the development of the pastime, someone decided it would be a great idea to expand the hunt. Instead of looking directly for the cache, you could have people go from place to place, picking up hints to the true cache’s location at each ”waypoint” until they had enough clues to converge on the cache. This variation is called the “multicache” and in many towns and villages of this corner of England, this has taken the form of a stroll around town. Introducing waypoints at historic places or well-known landmarks helps you get the lay of the town. Maybe next time you won’t get hopelessly lost. Ramsgate is large enough to have had two multicaches.  The one on the left is “Ramsgate – a Grand Ville”.  It is a relatively short walk along the clifftop on the east cliff of Ramsgate.

The other, depicted at the right, is “Westcliff Wanderer”, which goes along the west cliff of Ramsgate.  Neither alone gives a picture of the whole seafront, and even both together don’t begin to cover the entire town, but doing both caches gives one a picture of the key areas of town and establishes landmarks for further investigation.

This type of cache has many variations.  I've done caches with eight different waypoints on the path to the final cache.  They work really well in smaller towns and villages (go from historical marker to historical marker), in cemeteries (from grave of notable citizen to grave of notable citizen), or to give a tour of a large park.  If the area covered requires that one spend more than about an hour and a half to get all the clues, the cache is probably better served as a series of separate caches.

Regardless of the venue, multicaches are a good way to get out for a walk and investigate you local surroundings.  You even pass by a number of pubs.