Saturday was a beautiful day, so off we went in search of treasures. We were not having much luck as one stop we made was at a place so full of garbage that we didn’t feel safe poking about looking for the cache. At the other place we went looking for, we discovered an empty hole, covered by a stone, so we think that cache has been stolen. I’ve now seen pictures of the cache where the trash is, and it’s big. Reports say it can be spotted from 20 yards away. That means, to me, that it's likely attached to a tree with a bungy cord, or something, so there is no need to poke about in the trash. We may try for that again sometime.
In the meantime, we did manage to discover some treasures of another sort. It was Doors Open day in Brockville and we had time to visit two of the buildings on the list. One was the Armouries and the other was the Fulford Place.
The Brockville Armouries was considered a state-of-the-art building when it was constructed in 1900. It cost $50,000 at the time, but it had a new roof put on last year and the roof alone likely cost more than that, at today's prices.
It is currently used by the Brockville Rifles, the 113th Royal Canadian Army Cadets and the Vampire Squadron Air Cadets.
We got to go upstairs and look around. The officer’s mess is the highlight of the building, with comfortable, stuffed furniture and a good looking bar.
Fulford Place is a magnificent Edwardian mansion, overlooking the St. Lawrence. It’s a museum now, but we’ve never been inside before. What better day to go than when it’s free.
One of the guides expressed that the men all seemed most interested in the woods used throughout the house, while the women were interested in the art. There was plenty of both.
Every room was different. One had silk wall coverings, while another had tooled leather. There was a room full of mahogany, both on the ceilings and paneled walls. There seemed to be fireplaces in most rooms, but they were all different. The house was actually heated by a hot water system, the original radiators still work.
There were intricate patterns carved into the wood throughout, and fancy tiles and marvelous marble. We were shown a reproduction of the dumb waiter that had been used to get the food had been prepared in the original kitchen below (where the gift shop is now) up to the very efficient small serving room just off the breakfast nook and main dining room. Another unusual feature was the very wide staircase. The idea was that if a member of the household were to meet a servant going about their business while going up or down the stairs, there was ample room for the servant to get way over and not be in the way.
There was more to see, but closing time came quickly and they wanted all the visitors out as they were expecting a wedding party to arrive for pictures. We did have time to walk around the outside of the house though, and see the Italian garden. We went home feeling like we had, indeed, discovered some treasure, even if it wasn’t listed on the geocaching site.
The first one was at the Smiths Falls International Airport. It seems that airports and cemeteries are popular places to hide caches as we’ve been to several of both. This one wasn’t hard to find. In fact, I found it myself, and I wasn’t the one holding the GPS at the time. This would be a good cache to take kids to, for sure. Lots of aircraft took off while we were there, so that made it even more interesting.
On the way home we stopped at Kilmarnock. This where one of the locks on the Rideau Canal is located. There are two caches there, and we tried for them before. We found one easily enough, last time, but failed to find the other. Of course, that was last year when we were pretty new at this. This time we had no trouble locating the cache. It’s amazing what a little experience can do.
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