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!

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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