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.GCMPXB
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.GCMDWE
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.GC1DVWT
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.GC1C4D1
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.
GCG9D3
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 :)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment