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.