In Search of Giants

It was a lovely day to go treasure hunting last Sunday. We picked up the grandson and headed for Kars. There is a big cache there made especially for kids, but first you have to find a little metal tag so you will know where to go next. We didn’t find that tag, but we saw a trailhead nearby, so we figured we would go down that, and see if we could locate the big trees that were supposed to be at the cache.

Immediately my grandson asked, "Where’s that blue thing? (my GPS). I want the blue thing." After he got his hands on that, he led the way. He even told us we were going the wrong way, and though we didn't have the new waypoints, it turned out he was right about that.

While walking though the woods, we usually make a point of talking, or thumping a cane against trees, or something, to make noise. There are reportedly lots of bears around our general area, so we don’t want to be surprising any. That day my grandson was giving us a running commentary on what he was seeing, and his interpretations of the GPS readings. I didn’t want to mention bears, and maybe scare him, so I just said something about how much noise we were making in the woods that day. He immediately said, "I talk too much." I wondered where he had hear that, and asked if the teacher told him that. "No," he said, "Daddy tells me that. He always tells me I talk too much." I can remember that when Daddy used to come home from school, he would talk for two full hours, just to make up for having to be quiet in school all day. What goes around, comes around, as they say.

We found some big trees, but not the right ones, so we never did find that cache. There were a couple of little board bridges over some muddy areas. I thought my grandson must have heard the story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff, when he stood in the middle of one and made himself big, and said, "What are you doing on my bridge? Get off of my bridge!" Poor grandpa immediately did as he was told.

I’m disappointed not to have found this particular cache as there are picture on geocaching.com that shows how big the trees we were supposed to be looking for really are. These are giants, and I know the grandson would be really impressed with their size. We’ll have to go try for that cache again someday.

Right now, there is a detour as one of the bridges is out, along the highway, so at first we had great difficulty even getting to the right road. But while we didn’t find the giant trees, we did find the cache at the Hangman’s Tree, which this very trail led us to. Once we got close to where it was, we turned the 4 year old loose to discover it on his own. He didn’t have any trouble. Once a treasure was selected, it was time to head for home.

Labour Day Weekend

I'm a little late with this but.....

What wonderful weather we had Labour Day weekend! Besides getting lots done around the house.....scraping the paint off the garage, trimming the cedar hedge and getting the netting off the blackberry bushes (that’s harder than it sounds), there was also some automotive body work being done around here. But all work and no play makes for a boring weekend, so we took advantage of the weather on Sunday afternoon, and finally went geocaching.

I often leave it up to the hubby to decide which direction to go, if we aren’t headed somewhere anyway. Usually we’re off on some other errand, and I just look up caches in whatever direction we happen to be headed. But once in a while, like this time, we’re specifically going off to hunt for treasure. It was decided that we would look around the Metcalfe and Russell areas, here in Ontario. I printed out a good handful of sites and off we went.

The first one we stopped at was at a park in Metcalfe. I’m sure this is often a busy area, and we lucked out as there was nobody in sight to wonder what we were up to. The area that the cache was hidden in had a multitude of hiding spots, and also an over abundance of mosquitoes. I wondered if we would have to give up on that, as I expected it to take too long and neither of us were in the mood to feed the bugs that day. However, my hubby has sharp eyes, and can spot the tiniest thing out of place. It only took him seconds to find the cache. I swear, I don’t know how he did it. The whole area is full of rocks, and it could have been behind or under any of them. How he found it so fast is beyond me, but we made a quick trade, signed the log and got out of there as quickly as we could. I wondered if the rest of the day would be like that too. The logs for this particular cache did warn us about the mosquitoes, and none of the others made mention of it, so off we went.

There was another one nearby, but the logs for it actually warned of yellowjackets, and I certainly didn’t want to run into them, so we headed for Russell.

I think the people in Russell are very lucky. They have lots of lovely trails in at least two separate conservation areas. One had a dam on the Castor River, that somehow is supposed to help regulate the South Nation River. The Nation is famous for flooding. I couldn’t figure out how this would work, upon seeing the dam, so I may have to do a little research on that, as now I’m curious.

To get to the other cache, you walk along a paved bike trail, that has a deep ditch on either side of it. From the size of the culverts there, I suspect the water runs deep and fast in the springtime.

Various people, with homes on the other sides of these ditches, have built somewhat rickety bridges so they can get from their property to the bikepath. Another conservation area runs off from this path. It’s a series of trails that run both along side the creak bed, and also back through the forest. Though you might expect bugs in there, there wasn’t even one. Other trail builders should go and have a look at how nicely the Russell ones were done.

I’m just recovering from a bout of chronic fatigue, and though I hoped to do more caches this fine day, I decided I’d call a halt to it, as I was starting to trip over my own feet. We found some relatives to visit on the way home, so all in all, it was a great day.