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!