As of the 2014-2015 season Bolton Wanderers' home will be known as the Makron Stadium. Unlike football, geocaching is not behest to the word of sponsors so this cache will retain its original name!
Whilst even non football fans know who plays at the Reebok stadium, many people are unaware of how the name is linked with the town. Bolton has made two contributions to the inventions of the world. The first one of these the Spinning Mule is recognized in my other cache Samuel Crompton . The other major thing to be invented in Bolton is the running shoe.
In 1898 Joseph William Foster used to go running in his spare time (which in those days was considered an odd thing to do). He invented a pair of special shoes to help him and the trainer was born. The company was called J.W. Foster and Sons Limited but in 1958 two of the Foster’s grandsons renamed it after a South African gazelle the Rhebok, and the rest as they say is history.
The stadium opened in 1997 replacing Bolton’s older stadium Burnden park. Next to the stadium is the Middlebrook retail park and the new Spirit of Sport Statue which was built in 2005 and apparently depicts the faces of Sporting People from the Bolton . I am not quite sure who most of them are as their pictures are 90ft in the air! Despite it being a very busy retail park you will very likely be alone when you find the cache (even on a match day) yet you will have a great view of the Reebok. This is the brook of Middlebrook.
Anyone is free to find this cache whether they like football or not (it will be good for bored shoppers who really can’t face going to yet another sofa store, there are nine at Middlebrook and I have been to them all!), but I would be interested to hear from football fans particulary those find those who go on match days.
1) Tell us which team you support
2) Tell us if you have come on a match day. What match was it?
So far our matchday cachers are
1) Pieman - Watford,
2) BBKung - Bolton
3) Canon Edwards Stoke City
4) Laphroig - Bolton
5) Nick and Ali - Tottenham Hotspur
The Reebok is notorious for how long you have to wait before getting away on match days so it should give you something to do while the traffic dies down. I think you should manage to find somewhere to park!
Since the cache has been placed I have read with interest people's difficulty in finding the starting path to it. The path I intended is the mysterious blue pipe path which can be accessed via a small bridge which leads off from aspinall way, go straight on at the police station roundabout. Thanks to Popup Pirate for this link . However there is another path to it from the station which I was unaware of it before it was mentioned in the logs by some of the cachers. The push chair friendly attrubute used to refer to the blue pipe path. However Pram Cachers GaznShell informed me that they found the Station Path much easier with a pram (and in fact gave up on the blue pipe path). That station path does have a stile though.
