Blueberry Expedition

On Saturday, July 26th, we took a run up Highway 7 to renew our supply of blueberries. Little did I know we would practically have to mortgage the house to get some. As it was, I settled for just 3 litres, as that cost us $47. Divided into 6 soft margarine containers for the freezer, that will have to last us for the year.

As has become our custom, we don’t just go somewhere and come back without at least looking to see if we can find some treasure along the way. I discovered that there were 3 caches along aother little strip of old railway bed, and they looked close enough together that I was prepared to hunt for all three. As it turns out, we parked in three separate places, and went down different sections of the trail from roadside access points for each of those three caches.

The first one was near a large swamp, which made it rather interesting. After a decent hike down the trail, we found the cache quite easily. I had to dump a couple of inches of water out of it though, as it wasn’t in a very good quality container. The other two caches were placed by the same family, and had the same sort of container. Each of them had actual holes in the lids, so everything was quiet damp, but since they were hidden under rocks, they at least were not full of water like the first one. I sent the owner some maintenance notes when we got home. I see we were not the only ones to find these caches in that sort of state, but others just filled out the log and never notified the owners of the problem. I hope they get out there and replace these containers soon, before the log books are totally ruined.

One great thing about these caches was that we got to see all the beautifully kept farms along Old Brooke Road. Well worth the side trip, I must say.

Our next stop was at Silver Lake. There were lots of muggles about (people not into geocaching), so we had to be careful. Luckily I had my camera with me, so I took pictures of the lake, and got myself interested in anything that was growing in the area, as I had a pretty good idea just where the cache could be, and I wanted to check that out without being caught. Three fisherman on one side of me, a couple picnicking on the other, soon lost interest in me as I clambered about on the rocks near the shore. Luckily, there was a tree between me and the fishermen when I finally got close enough to get my hands on the cache. I removed it, and went to another location to inspect the treasures, and sign the log, before going back to replace it. I had the hubby stand on top of the rock pile, so I could take his picture up there. Hopefully that fooled the fishermen as to why I would return to the same area.






After we left there, it wasn’t too much further before we got to the blueberry stand. We go to the same one year after year. The berries were a good size this year. I suppose all this rain has plumped them up, and kept them from drying out. I would have liked more than I got, after coming all this distance, but it was hard enough to pay out as much as we did for those little blue treasures.

Of course, once we had them, we couldn’t geocache anymore or they would just cook in the car. So that was the end of the fun for that day.

Family Fun Day

It was time for the annual Family Day at Rideau Carleton Raceway. We picked up the 4 year old grandson and set out for a day of fun. First stop, of course, was to do a little geocaching along the way.

We stopped at the Veterans Park along Highway 416 and were informed, "I’ve been here before!" I just assumed it was because his great grandfather was a veteran and the family had taken GGPa for a ride and stopped there. But no, it sounded more like Mommy had taken him to look for treasure at this location already. So I told him to lead the way. He said they never found it, but asked me for my GPS. He studied it for a moment. "Okay guys. Look. See, this is where we are," he said, poking his finger at the GPS screen, "And the treasure is way over here." Then he started walking, with us following up behind. Four year olds are pretty smart these days!

It was Grandpa that spotted the cache in the end though. It had several beaded bracelets inside, and just a few other trinkets. Remembering that last time we took this child geocaching, he chose a little hairclip for his Mommy, I thought he’d pick her out a nice bracelet this time. No way! There was a little plastic blue and yellow knife in there, and he went straight for that. And that thing amused him the rest of the day.

The Family Fun Day is really a fund raiser for CHEO, and totally geared for kids. There was a man singing kiddy songs, and lots of rhythm band instruments for the kids to use. There were stations set up for coloring, beading, and facepainting. There were pony rides and bikes built into a horse and sulky set up. There were live reptiles and tarantellas and places to throw balls at a hoop or use chalk on the pavement. There was even an area where the kids were given a kit to build their own birdhouse. All the while, there were horses doing practice runs around the track. There weren’t as many demonstrations as the previous year, and there didn’t seem to be as big a crowd either. I just hope they made enough for CHEO to continue holding this event for a few more years yet, as, by the time this grandson grows out of it, the new one will be old enough to go.

After a bit of food, purchased from a chip wagon at the site, we headed for home. We made one final stop to do a bit more geocaching. The grandson looked at the entrance to the path, and asked, "Are we going into the deep, dark woods?" I said, "We are, but remember, we have the GPS so we won’t get lost." That met with approval. So did the many puddles along the path. There has been a lot of rain this summer. It was hard to stay out of the mud, and each one of us nearly slipped at one point or another. But that was only after we decided there were entirely too many hungry bugs in the woods that day, and perhaps we were in too much of a hurry to get back out of there. We’ll have to return for the cache some other time of year.

Birthday Happenings

Sunday, July, 12 was hubby’s birthday, so I let him decide what to do with the day. Luckily the weather was perfect for lots of outdoor fun.


First we went to downtown Merrickville, where the annual Cruise and Shop was underway. There were about 500 antique cars on display, and though I recognized some from other years, I saw some new ones that were interesting too. That took up the entire morning.



Hubby then decided it was a good day for geocaching, so it was just a matter of which direction to go. He thought it was a good day to head to Prescott, so I hunted up some caches to visit. I have a travel bug to get rid of, but most of the caches in the Prescott area seem to be micros. I found a couple that weren’t and armed with all the coordinates, off we went. The road between Merrickville and Kemptville was extremely busy. It was just a solid stream of traffic headed into the village. It was as if the city people had all come out of church and headed to the Merrickville to see the old cars. I don’t remember ever seeing highway 43 this busy before.


We went to Prescott by a cross country route, and found the first two caches very easily. I’m not fond of micros for some reason, but these were at least in interesting containers. One was at an old train station. Last time I was there it was a factory outlet for some line of pots and pans. Now it’s where the Grenville Historical Society houses it’s Archives and Resource Centre. It’s a nice old building and I’m glad it’s being used for something.







We didn’t find the third cache we looked for, down at the harbour. We had been there last year, but got caught in a storm and gave up. (See http://georambling.blogspot.com/2008/08/between-rain-drops.html )
This one is a multi and we tried to find it using the coordinates worked out last year. But we may have gotten one of the numbers wrong somewhere along the way as we didn’t find it this time either. I wasn’t in the mood to work through the various steps again that day, so I work it out on some other visit to the harbour sometime. There is a very friendly cat that lives in the rocks at this harbour. It was nice to make his acquaintance, so I felt like I had found some sort of treasure there after all.






As we walked along the water, looking at the sights, I noticed another cache show up on my GPS. I wasn’t expecting that, for some reason, but we went to hunt it out. After waiting for some muggles to come and go, it was another quick easy find. Still, it was another micro, and I still had the travel bug.









We decided to go back to one of the caches we had not found on a previous year. We thought we would have better luck this time, as we have now seen a picture of the actual cache container, so we would have a better idea what to look for. No such luck. There was a family having a picnic right about where we needed to look. We sat on a bench for a while and watched the boats, but it was obvious they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

The only other cache I knew of that would be big enough to drop the travel bug had us going around in circles for a few minutes, but that turned out to be okay as we ended up over at Burger King where we were able to make a rest stop and refuel ourselves. Great birthday dinner that turned out to be, but we had been out to Rideau Carleton Raceway on Friday night, and even got to ride in the chase car, so nobody was complaining. At Burger King we used an Entertainment coupon, so it was two Whoppers for the price of one. Then we each discovered we had won in the latest contest. One got a Cheeseburger and the other got another Whopper for next weekend (since that’s when the current promotion ends). So, considering that’s 4 burgers for the price of one, I’ll take that as another treasure collected that day.
When we got to the location of the final cache of the day, we found that it would be necessary to walk through several yards of poison parsnip, just to get to the treeline. The caches is a multi hidden in an old dump, so there was likely even more of the noxious weed in there. We decided not to take any chances as that plant produces blisters on the skin. So I still have the travel bug. I do hope we have better luck next week!

On the Trail Again....

It was a busy weekend. We had a wedding reception to go to, and company coming to join us for breakfast the next morning. I enjoyed that, and think we will have to do it again sometime. We all went over to check out Canalfest after breakfast. Luckily there was no sign of rain, for a change. It was a lovely day to be by the canal, and cruise through the craft booths, then head back to the house to continue our visit.

Later in the day, we decided to go see if we could find a geocache large enough to deposit a particular travel bug in. It was called the comet, and sort of resembled a ball with a windsock trailing out from it. Anyway, it was larger than any of the other travel bugs I've seen in the past, so I knew I had to find a decent sized cache to put it in. We didn't want to have to travel too far since it was already late in the day. I located coordinates for two....one in each direction.... and after deciding which to tackle, we headed out towards Smiths Falls.

The Lost Railroad (GCZTNX) is a lovely trail on an old abandoned railway line. It is part of the Cataraqui Trail and runs through diverse landscape from Smiths Falls to Strathcona. That's about 104 kilometres. Even the section we were on had swamplands, cuts between rock faces, open fields and forest. It also had some interesting looking pathways to nearby homes along one stretch. It was a good walk, and probably took us 45 minutes or so, to go and come back. We even saw a couple of deer cross the trail ahead of us at one point. Unfortunately they were too far away for my camera to be of any use. It was a great day for a walk, and I'm glad that, once again, geocaching got us to stop and walk along a trail we had driven past numerous times without really realizing it was there. After reading more about it once I got home, I discovered that this trail is also part of the Trans Canada Trail. I know where there are more sections of this around here, and I will be wanting to explore further, cache or no cache.