We Did Enjoy Greek Fest....

Before I start getting e-mails asking why I haven’t been out geocaching, I better get a new installment of some sort in here, whether I’ve found any treasures or not. Last week I was busy with the fair, and company, so I didn't get out at all.

We went to the Greek Fest in Ottawa today, and had a great time. Wonderful food, wonderful music, and lots of friendly, helpful people. After that we went looking for a nearby cache.

You may remember my saying, when we went to Kingston, that city geocaching just isn’t the same. Well, I thought it would be okay today since we went to someplace I’ve been to many times over the years, even as a child, and later with my own children. We went to Hog’s Back.

The first waypoint was fine. It took us to a sign that had several pictures and information about the area on it, and we had to find the right numbers to fill in and create a new waypoint. We found that too, and worked out a clue that pointed us at an old maple tree. The problem was, we couldn’t see any maple trees, old or not, from the place we stood. We finally found a trail that led into the woods, and we did seem to be going generally in the right direction. We found another path that led off of this one, which definitely sent us toward our goal, though by now we were well into the trees and couldn’t see if there was a maple ahead or not.

I want to point out that this was not a "tourist" type of trail, and I’m not sure where it was going. It was just a narrow trail through dense brush. Then we saw it. Not the cache, but a blue tarp. A tent or a lean to. We didn’t go close enough to find out for sure.

In our normal woodland environments, we are on the look out for bears and coyotes, and things like that. In the city jungle, it’s the people who worry me. Had we happened upon a place where some homeless person had set up a shelter, or had we come across some place where drug dealers do their business? Either way, I didn't think it was a good place to be. We quickly, and quietly, backtracked and got ourselves out of there. I consulted the tracks on the GPS later, and saw that we had circled the cache, and were probably narrowing in on it when we spotted the tarps.

Nope. City caching isn’t for me. I’ll take my chances with the bears!

Holiday Monday

Long weekends are a good time to do chores, but there have been so few nice days that when we get one, we can't get ourselves to stay home all day long. I found a loop close to home, but most of the stops would have been long hikes through the woods. After feeding the bugs yesterday, we decided to avoid such situations......except for one.

It seems there are old circus wagons and cages abandoned in the woods not too far from here, so we couldn't resist trying to find that. After a good dose of bug spray, we took a little walk up a section of the Rideau Trail, off Dwyer Hill Road. There is some interesting areas back there. The woods have a different look about them. There are rocks breaking the ground in some spots and fine green grass growing between the trees in others. There is also a great number of empty beer and liquor bottles amoung the bushes....not to mention tires. I think there must have been some good bush parties back there recently.

As it turns out, we were in error, looking for the cache at the way point we had. We should have been looking for a tag on a tree to redirect us. The bug spray wore off, or washed off from the sweat, and the nasty little critters found us, so we hightailed it back to the car. We will try this one again though, as it's a nice walk. I just have to figure out just when that day is, between when the bugs die down, and the hunters come out.

Since we had eliminated so many other stops from the loop I had designed, we backtracked and took a road across country to Malakoff Road where we were able to pick up two quick grabs before heading into Kemptville for ice cream. The Red Barn still has the cheapest ice cream around. You can have two small cones for $5. I must warn you not to make the mistake of ordering anything larger. Small has 3 scoops.

Between the Rain Drops

Okay, so me and my big mouth!

I had to go and gloat about not being rained on last week, and then on Sunday, August 3rd, we scurried for shelter three times, to keep from getting wet.

Our first stop was a dry one though. A nice man had gone all out to welcome geocachers. He built a trail, back into his woodlands, along country road 44. He will even have picnic tables back there eventually. He says the bugs have been too bad, with all the rain, to even bother with that this year though.. He came out to meet us when we arrived. He has prepared a lovely parking spot, and the hydro crews drop off the wood chips they make getting trees out of the way of the wires. He uses them to line the parking area and the trails. His wife, apparently makes soldiers of one sort or another, and there’s one there to greet the visitors too.

The bugs were out in full force, and I’m sure they were well fed by the time we left, even though we did use the bug spray the minute we left the car. The cache owner even told us we were welcome to take home as many flying things as we wanted when we left. We declined. In fact, we almost gave up on this cache because the bugs were so bad, and the GPS was having a hard time getting a good signal under all those trees. But we’re stubborn and we did finally find the treasure.

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After that, we headed for Prescott. We stopped for lunch at Burger King, and then went to visit the nearby Sandy Hill Cemetery. This is a very interesting place, and you can get a lot of exercise just walking up and down the hills there. There is a set of stairs though, and they were made out of stones taken from the old canal at Cardinal. Part of the hunt has to do with counting these stones. Then you have to find certain tomb stones of some interesting people and get some more numbers before you can work out the final waypoint. We ran to sit in the car twice while we were in the cemetery. The rain didn’t last long, but it kept coming back. We found ourselves going around in circles there for a minute, but we did find the cache in a clever place, and wondered how we missed it the first time.

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From there we went to a commercial area where someone got pretty creative with their hide. Luckily it wasn’t busy there that day, or it would have been really hard to retrieve this one. We had it in a matter of moments, and off we went again......after a quick visit to the local Canadian Tire store, to get a new windshield wiper.

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Our final stop of the day wasn’t as successful. Well, it would have been, but things got too wet to continue. This was an easy multi, at the Prescott Harbour. We had no trouble going from one spot to the next, so I’m sure we would have found the cache. But just as we got near the stage, the sky decided to really open up. Luckily we had the stage roof to protect us from that downpour. Several others took shelter there too. Once it was over, and the others were out of sight we let the GPS lead us to the area where the cache is hidden. It turned out to be in some very wet bushes. I did venture in, but decided I’d better get out of there before I was soaked to the skin. We know where to look, so we’ll pick this one up next time we go through Prescott.

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Making Another Loop

The sun was shining on July 27th, so we made a run for it. Grabbing a couple of sandwiches and apples, some yogurt and a few cans of soft drinks, and off we went. You can’t waste the few good days we’ve had this year hanging around the house doing useful things. Those can wait!



I had laid out a loop once again, this time taking us as far as Carleton Place, if we went the whole way.



Our first stop was at Nicholson’s locks. Let’s be a bit more precise with that location. I was at Lower Nicholson’s locks. This is a place I’ve never been to before, though I’ve been to Upper Nicholson’s locks hundreds of times. There is an interesting difference, that I noticed within a few minutes of arriving. When they let the water out of the upper locks, the lower ones overflow. I asked about that, and they said it happens all the time. The Upper Nicholson’s locks have a 9 foot drop, while the Lower locks have only a 4 foot drop and there isn’t a very long stretch of water in between the two, so the upper one has a tendency to flood the lower one when they release the water. A slight engineering problem, one would think, though the canal itself is an engineering marvel, especially considering when it was built.

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We didn’t complete the search at the next stop. It was an old school house along a one lane deserted road off Roger Stevens Drive. It’s used by snowmobilers in the winter as a place to warm up as it’s also situated along the Rideau Trail. The problem was, the cache is somewhere along the trail too, but after wandering back into the forest for awhile, the boss got uncomfortable about leaving the car in such a place for any longer and we went back before finding the cache. I did find a few treasures along the way though. I’ve never seen red mushrooms before, or these other rather translucent flowers before. (see pictures)




If you know what either of them are, please leave a comment.




























Our next stop was more successful, though we thought we would have to get wet at one point. This is also along a forgotten road, in Beckwith this time. An excellent spot to go mudding, and apparently that’s just what others were doing there that day, as three vehicles passed us as we were coming out. I left the travel jeep at this location. It seemed appropriate.

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From there it wasn’t far to an unused portion of the 2nd line, which led into a beautiful swamp, they actually refer to as King's Creek. I can't believe I forgot to take a picture of that! I did get a shot of the big puddle on the roadway though. We’ve seen a lot of this sort of thing this year. The same mudding vehicles came from the other side of the swamp, and passed us on the old road once again. I think it’s very smart of them to travel in groups if they are going to try driving through that much water.

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From there we went to Ashton, and went looking for a cache hidden near a park. There was LOTS of poison parsnip all over the place. I put a warning on the geocaching site about that. This was probably the easiest find of the day though, and I picked up another travel bug. This time it was a fishing bob, so I’ll need to leave it someplace closer to water, I guess.

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Finally, we got to Carleton Place, and after stopping at Tim Hortons for refreshments and relief, we went off to pick up one more cache before heading home. This one was called the Spooky Pine Forest, but it didn’t seem at all spooky to us, especially since the cache was right on the edge of it. I left the travel bob and picked up another travel bug. This time, a frog. He can live with me for a week or two before I find him a new home.

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We did stop in Franktown on the way home, to grab one more, but it was located under cedars and it was late enough in the day that the mosquitoes were in attack mode, so we decided to leave that one for another time. It shouldn’t be hard to locate when we are driving through there some time. There seems to be a bit of old pavement to follow that we would never have noticed if we hadn’t been planning to find treasure.
We had a nice day out and never got rained on once :)