Neither of us were happy with our sleuthing skills yesterday, not quite believing we weren’t able to solve all the clues and find out ‘who did it’! It certainly wasn’t the butler, that’s for sure! To redress the imbalance we called an emergency FaceTime meeting yesterday evening to carry out a post-mortem on the days events and to determine what Plan B was going to be for today. We put it to the vote and it was unanimous……we’d purchase another Murder Mystery Treasure Trail around Weymouth and give it another go, however in so doing, we were going to be more focused, think outside the box and cross reference everything so that we could work things back should we get the clues wrong. Hey, we weren’t going to let one failed attempt stop us…….we, Angey Cagney and Maicey Lacey had our street cred to consider! With Plan B now promoted to Plan A the trail was downloaded, printed off and we were ready to go. Well, we’d have to wait until the morning of course!
It was only a short murder mystery trail, just two hours long and an hour and three quarters walking time which we didn’t think was enough to reach our 10,000 steps so we decided to walk from Maices house in Upwey, over the hills and dells to Bincombe, through the copses and rolling hills into Sutton Poyntz, a stop off for coffee at the Oasis café for sustenance and then onto Brewers Quay, Weymouth where we’d find our first clue. It couldn’t be simpler.
We set off from Maices house at 10.45am, all wrapped up in layers, hats, scarves, gilets, you name it we wore it……and why not? We needed to wrap up to protect ourselves from the wind which was extremely blowy and relentless, not easing for a moment. Despite the wind, we enjoyed a lovely walk to the Oasis café in Weymouth, the views were stunning, the sun was out and shining down on us prompting us to utter those immortal words……. ‘we’re so lucky to live where we do’. We were a bit perturbed however when we walked through a field of bullocks to find that all but three were lying down! Doesn’t this denote that there’s going to be a change in the weather and rain is on the way? Fortunately for us we’d packed our kabooms, you know, just in case!
We arrived at the Oasis café, ordered our cappuccinos and a cake….we were both in need of a sugar rush by this time, set up our camping chairs on the beach, sat down and enjoyed our morning coffee looking out to sea. Ah, this is the life. Sun, sea, sand and spectacular views. Whats not to love! Suddenly, we saw a commotion on the beach and a women in a fluorescent orange ‘official’ jacket was talking to people who subsequently moved on up the beach. What was occuring we wondered? Being the super sleuths that we were, we went to investigate and realised it was the seal, the seal who had stolen the hearts of the local people and was spending it’s time down on the beach in Weymouth bay. He was lovely, but a lonely soul, just stretched out sunbathing on the beach on his lonesome. We spoke to the Marshall, one of the many volunteers keeping watch over him around the clock who indicated that, for his own health, safety and well-being he’d probably be captured and taken off to a seal colony somewhere where he could settle with his own clan.
Fed and watered, we upped sticks and made our way to Brewers Quay to begin our sleuthing. It was now almost two o'clock and we needed to get cracking. We did have 21 clues to solve after all! Well, what can I say? It seems that overnight our sleuthing skills had miraculously redeemed themselves as we sailed through the clues, cracking each one as we went. Of course, it wasn’t without complication which came in the guise of Maice and her Canadian accent. Let’s take Clue 7 as an example…..’find an error associated with renovations’ she said. What? Asking Maice to repeat the question several times didn’t help.......the clue just didn’t seem to make sense, so I donned my reading glasses and read the clue, which actually said …..find an era (not error) associated with renovations. Honestly, these Canadians! No wonder we had problems yesterday!
Hey, did you know that the town and seafront of Weymouth is in fact Melcombe Regis? The two were once separate places, the boundary being the harbour, with Weymouth on the south side and Melcome Regis on the north. Impressed? You see, we‘re not just detectives!
We sailed through the clues after that until we came to Clue 10, which took us to......’an established bank which is hiding a weapon’. The bank was Lloyds Bank and we sat outside it for at least fifteen minutes trying to decipher the clue and looking for a ‘weapon’ within its architecture, but scrutinise the building as we did, we found no weapon. We admitted defeat and headed off in the direction of clue 11. Everything else from then on was plain sailing. Comparing yesterday’s Murder Mystery to todays its obvious that different people write them up and have different writing styles as to how they present the clues. We both concurred that yesterday’s clues were extremely more difficult compared to todays!
We celebrated finding the last clue with a ‘fishcake & chip’ lunch from our favourite fish and chip restaurant in Weymouth, The Marlboro, which we ate on a bench along the seafront. Out came the ‘greek’ tablecloth, up went the bunting and soon we were tucking into our ‘late’ lunch. It was lovely. Word however, had obviously circulated in the seagull fraternity that there was food on the seafront for we were stalked by a very large seagull, trying to distract us so it could steal our chips! We watched in amusement at its tactics. Approaching us in an aggressive manner, then retreating, then moving to the side of us, eyeing up our fishcake and chips. We stared him out and he eventually retreated after we put our rubbish in the bin. Sorry seagull, you’ll just have to go back to instincts and catch your own fish!
By now it was almost four oclock and we’d been on the go for just over five hours!!!! I didn’t think my legs could muster the two hour trek back to Maices house to pick up the car so as both of us had packed our facemasks, made by myself I must add, we decided to take the bus back to Maices place. Well, that was an experience. We donned our facemasks and hopped on board the very empty bus. It was most surreal. I have to say, it was a strange experience sitting on the bus in our brightly coloured masks with just our eyes showing. We felt like we were working ‘undercover’!
We arrived back at Maices place at 5pm, just six hours after we set off this morning on our two hour Murder Mystery Treaure Trail! But what a success. We’d actually solved the murder, albeit it did take us a tad longer. To be exact, we‘ve walked in excess of 24,500 steps and covered 11 miles......around Weymouth! But hey, our street cred is now intact and we can hold our heads up high, knowing that the ‘Weymouth Town’ suspect has been named and will soon be under lock and key. And to top it all, we didn‘t get lost! Hey, we’re getting good at this!
Once again we’ve had a lovely ‘staycation’ full of laughter and good times and it is with a saddened heart that we now call time on our second ‘staycation’ here in Dorset. As always, we’ve had a great time, regardless of what the weather threw at us. It’s cost us just under £100 if you include the cost of the two camping chairs and the Weymouth Murder Mystery Treasure Trail. If you don’t include that our staycation has cost us the princely sum of just £32.55……what a bargain!
We’ve explored villages we never knew existed. We’ve walked further than we expected. We’ve investiaged and solved murders. We’ve got lost. We’ve been at one with nature. What more could we wish for? Actually, what we wish for is to be able to a) map read b) read a compass c) be logical and d) identify different bird species (we realised that the ‘bird of prey’ we thought we’d seen from the day before actually turned out to be a pigeon!).
We hope you too have enjoyed our staycation as much as we have and who knows, you may even travel in our footsteps! Good luck to you if you do! We’re off on our next ‘staycation‘ at the end of July so if you want to travel with us then do follow us on facebook or sign up on our web page https://www.gowiththeflowtravelswithmanda.com to receive notifications of our daily travel blogs. Don’t forget to check out the photo gallery every day as our days photos are added to the bottom of the page. And, if you’ve enjoyed our blogs, please do comment on our webpage. Your feedback really does help.
On that note, we’d just like to say Thank You for reading and Thank You for your support and we look forward to getting together with you in July.
This is M&A, alias Angey Cagney and Maicey Lacey saying Take Care and Stay Safe.
Love and hugs to you all......
M&A xx