**Please be careful to not damage plants!**
The cache is in a public park, so some stealth may be needed. It is near the public path.
This cache was placed in honor of a friendly, charming, and adventurous cat that used to live nearby.
He went by many names. Some people called him ‘Buurtpoes Bledder,’ which means ‘Neighborhood Soccer Cat’ in the Leiden dialect. He earned this name because he often escaped from his home and wandered over to De Twee Spieghels, a nearby jazz bar, where he slipped and darted between the legs of the patrons. He had white fur with black spots, which made him look like a fuzzy football. He became a regular and the staff even put out water and food bowls for him.
Bledder would also occasionally hang out in the Velvet Record Shop, in a wine bar where the owners dubbed him ‘Champagne’, and at the Bierwinkel, a specialist beer shop. When he wasn’t roaming the neighborhood, he often took naps in the home of an American couple who lived on the Hartesteeg. They called him ‘Danger Cat’ due to his tendency to zoom around on the slippery roof of the student house across the street, which was his home. His real name was Jacco and he served as a sort of mascot for these students. Bledder became quite popular, especially after someone created a Facebook page for him to track his adventures around Leiden.
Unfortunately, Bledder was killed by an unknown motorist who was driving too fast through the neighborhood in the summer of 2013. His death was covered by several Dutch newspapers and a national news segment. As sad as this was, Bledder's legacy lives on and he still has his own Facebook page, in addition to Wikipedia entries written in English, German, and Indonesian.
History of Van de Werfpark
The park where the cache is located, popular with Leidenaars on sunny days, unfortunately only exists due to a disaster that happened here. On 12 January 1807, a barge loaded with over 17,000 kilos of gunpowder was docked along the canal on the side opposite from the park, taking a break on its journey from Haarlem to Delft, when something sparked the gunpowder and the entire payload exploded. It's said that the explosion was heard in The Hague, and possibly as far away as Amsterdam. It was extraordinarily damaging to Leiden, not just in the immediate vicinity, but all over the city, with windows blown out and debris falling on houses and buildings. The anchor of the boat was found nearly a kilometer away.
The event, known as the buskruitramp (gunpowder disaster), hit Leiden hard, happening as it did during the winter and during a poor economic period. The king at the time, Lodewijk (Louis) Napoleon, came to Leiden to help the city, financially and with food and medical services, which led to him earning the nickname "Lodewijk de Goede" (Louis the Good).
After sitting empty for nearly 80 years, the southern area of the blast zone was turned into Van de Werfpark in 1886 (the Kamerlingh Onnes Gebouw on the other side of the canal -- once a thriving center of science, now the university's law school -- was opened in the northern ruined area in 1859). The park is named after Pieter Adriaansz. van der Werff, mayor of Leiden at the time of the siege by the Spanish in 1574 (Leids Beleg), who is considered a hero of the people. There is a large statue of him in the park, and a plaque commemorating the gunpowder disaster is on the canal wall, visible from the park.
Congrats to LM74RJ for FTF, fmills for STF, smills63 for TTF