Birthday Loop

Saturday, July 12th, was the perfect day for geocaching. It was also the hubby’s birthday, and given the opportunity to choose what he wanted to do with his day, he decided geocaching was exactly what he wanted to do.

We set off shortly after 10 AM and made a loop from Smiths Falls, to Port Elmsley, to Perth, down the road towards Westport, but then turned off on the Narrows Lock Road, crossed the Narrows Lock and came out at Crosby. From there it was back through Portland to Smiths Falls. We stopped for lunch at Col. Saunders in Perth at 1 PM and got home at 6:30 PM. It was a really nice way to spend the day.

The first stop was a multi, and while we got the first waypoint, there were too many bugs of the sort that would hurt to stay around and work out the next waypoint. We’ll do the math and stop there some other day to continue. The site is just the chimney of an old church that burnt down a long time ago. We’ve passed it many times but never stopped to look this closely at it before.














The second stop was at the Port Elmsley Drive In. That was an easy find and we weren’t there long before heading for Perth.



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At Perth, we stopped at the Last Duel Park. A little girl came over to us as we were getting numbers to work out the final coordinates, and said, "My Dad sent me over to ask what you were doing." I guess the fact that I was holding a clipboard caught his eye. Rather than try to explain it to her, and then have her try to explain it to him, I just went over and filled him in on Geocaching. He had never heard of it, and has no internet connection, so he won’t be looking it up, but did think it sounded interesting.

We went off and eventually found the cache. When we got back to the area where the little girl was, I went over towards her, and she came running, saying, "What did you find?" I showed her our latest treasure, then offered her a choice from my bag of goodies. She chose a little orange ball and was thrilled.

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We had lunch and then left the Perth area in search of the Narrows Lock Road. I’ve never been to the Narrows before, but I’m glad the geocachers sent us this way.

There is a lot of rock back in there, along the road. It’s much like around Huntsville and Bracebridge. I really liked it. To me, it was the highlight of the day. This was a place we would never have found if we had not been treasure hunting, and it was a treasure unto itself.

This is where we picked up our first "Travel Bug"....or in this case, a Travel Jeep. They have numbers on them and you enter those online so the owners can track it as it travels from cache to cache. I’m going to keep track of it too, once I drop it off someplace else. I’ve seen geocoins, and such, before, but never picked one up until now as I wasn’t really sure how to handle them. But it’s not hard, so I’ll like do that more often in the future.

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We drove a little further down the road and came to the Narrows Locks. This is summit of the Rideau system as the water flows downhill towards both Ottawa and Kingston from here. I had always wondered about that, since I had noticed that the boats move downwards in the locks towards both cities. It’s a pretty little spot, and very active, with boats from both lakes waiting their turn to get to the other.

The cache there is along the Rideau Trail, and while we did start off looking for it, we decided it was just too hot to go for that kind of a hike that day.


We moved on to the Portland area, where there were two caches. One was in a rural setting, and looked pretty new. I picked up a beaded bookmark there that is quickly becoming a favourite. I may have to try making some of those myself. I think I was rather glad there were geotrails here, from previous treasure hunters, or I may not have found it so quickly.
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The Portland Roadside stop was at....well, a roadside stop. A bit of parkland with outdoor biffies and lots of milkweed flowering near the water. The cache here was just a micro, thankfully the only one of the day. Once the coordinates were nailed down, I had no difficulty finding the log book.
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We had lots of exercise, fresh air, and fun. We even stopped at Tim Horton’s before heading home.

You Win Some, You Lose Some

Today we finally succeeded at finding a cache, and then failed at finding another one.

We had tried to find the cache at Burritts Rapids twice before. It’s a multi, and the first time we were stopped when we discovered the sign referred to for waypoint 3 had been destroyed. A couple of other waypoints described things by colours though, so we continued along the trail and tried to find something useful so we might continue our quest. No such luck.

After reading the logs online, I discovered that the clues for waypoint 3 were still there, written somewhere with magic marker, so off we went again. We got to where waypoint 4 was supposed to be, and I remembered reading in the logs that if you found yourself standing on the grass, not near anything, (as I did) to take 6 steps in a certain direction. I tried that and saw a metal post, the sort of which should have had a blue tag on it. It was bent over and had no tag .

It was back to the drawing board. Or in my case, the computer to e-mail the person in charge of this particular cache to say that it had been destroyed once again. He apparently checked and e-mailed me back to say I should be looking for a green 2x2 wooden post, in the same general area I had been. And if I didn’t find that, the next waypoint was also written in magic marker someplace else.....and he told me where.

Well, today we went to try this one again, and found the marker for waypoint 4 but it wasn’t on the sort of stake he told me it was. We could not find where he may have written it where he said that was either. But we did have new numbers from what we did find, so off we went.

Well, hey, we found waypoint 5, though it was sitting in the middle of a swamp (we HAVE had a lot of rain this year, after all). After that it was easy to find the actual cache. Mind you, the bugs were bad, so I grabbed the first thing that caught my eye without even looking at the rest of it, signed the book and got the heck out of there while there was still enough blood in my veins to survive the experience.

It only took 3 trips to this area to find the darn thing, but you can't say we aren't persistent.

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After that, we went looking for something at the Ferguson Forest Centre. There are several caches in there. We stood right at Ground Zero for one of them but never did find the cache. It was probably staring us in the face, since the guy that hid it is famous for cleverly disguising his caches. We even checked into an animal hole. Ground hog, or possibly fox. Nothing. More bugs, and a lot of heat, so we gave up on that for today.

I did venture down an embankment for some pictures, but the mud started sucking me into the little stream. One minute I was fine, then, without even moving, I started sliding. I was going to land in that stream for sure but I managed to grab something and stop myself just in time. I did get rather muddy in the process though.

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