Holiday Monday

Long weekends are a good time to do chores, but there have been so few nice days that when we get one, we can't get ourselves to stay home all day long. I found a loop close to home, but most of the stops would have been long hikes through the woods. After feeding the bugs yesterday, we decided to avoid such situations......except for one.

It seems there are old circus wagons and cages abandoned in the woods not too far from here, so we couldn't resist trying to find that. After a good dose of bug spray, we took a little walk up a section of the Rideau Trail, off Dwyer Hill Road. There is some interesting areas back there. The woods have a different look about them. There are rocks breaking the ground in some spots and fine green grass growing between the trees in others. There is also a great number of empty beer and liquor bottles amoung the bushes....not to mention tires. I think there must have been some good bush parties back there recently.

As it turns out, we were in error, looking for the cache at the way point we had. We should have been looking for a tag on a tree to redirect us. The bug spray wore off, or washed off from the sweat, and the nasty little critters found us, so we hightailed it back to the car. We will try this one again though, as it's a nice walk. I just have to figure out just when that day is, between when the bugs die down, and the hunters come out.

Since we had eliminated so many other stops from the loop I had designed, we backtracked and took a road across country to Malakoff Road where we were able to pick up two quick grabs before heading into Kemptville for ice cream. The Red Barn still has the cheapest ice cream around. You can have two small cones for $5. I must warn you not to make the mistake of ordering anything larger. Small has 3 scoops.

Making Another Loop

The sun was shining on July 27th, so we made a run for it. Grabbing a couple of sandwiches and apples, some yogurt and a few cans of soft drinks, and off we went. You can’t waste the few good days we’ve had this year hanging around the house doing useful things. Those can wait!



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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 :)

Birthday Loop

Saturday, July 12th, was the perfect day for geocaching. It was also the hubby’s birthday, and given the opportunity to choose what he wanted to do with his day, he decided geocaching was exactly what he wanted to do.

We set off shortly after 10 AM and made a loop from Smiths Falls, to Port Elmsley, to Perth, down the road towards Westport, but then turned off on the Narrows Lock Road, crossed the Narrows Lock and came out at Crosby. From there it was back through Portland to Smiths Falls. We stopped for lunch at Col. Saunders in Perth at 1 PM and got home at 6:30 PM. It was a really nice way to spend the day.

The first stop was a multi, and while we got the first waypoint, there were too many bugs of the sort that would hurt to stay around and work out the next waypoint. We’ll do the math and stop there some other day to continue. The site is just the chimney of an old church that burnt down a long time ago. We’ve passed it many times but never stopped to look this closely at it before.














The second stop was at the Port Elmsley Drive In. That was an easy find and we weren’t there long before heading for Perth.



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At Perth, we stopped at the Last Duel Park. A little girl came over to us as we were getting numbers to work out the final coordinates, and said, "My Dad sent me over to ask what you were doing." I guess the fact that I was holding a clipboard caught his eye. Rather than try to explain it to her, and then have her try to explain it to him, I just went over and filled him in on Geocaching. He had never heard of it, and has no internet connection, so he won’t be looking it up, but did think it sounded interesting.

We went off and eventually found the cache. When we got back to the area where the little girl was, I went over towards her, and she came running, saying, "What did you find?" I showed her our latest treasure, then offered her a choice from my bag of goodies. She chose a little orange ball and was thrilled.

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We had lunch and then left the Perth area in search of the Narrows Lock Road. I’ve never been to the Narrows before, but I’m glad the geocachers sent us this way.

There is a lot of rock back in there, along the road. It’s much like around Huntsville and Bracebridge. I really liked it. To me, it was the highlight of the day. This was a place we would never have found if we had not been treasure hunting, and it was a treasure unto itself.

This is where we picked up our first "Travel Bug"....or in this case, a Travel Jeep. They have numbers on them and you enter those online so the owners can track it as it travels from cache to cache. I’m going to keep track of it too, once I drop it off someplace else. I’ve seen geocoins, and such, before, but never picked one up until now as I wasn’t really sure how to handle them. But it’s not hard, so I’ll like do that more often in the future.

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We drove a little further down the road and came to the Narrows Locks. This is summit of the Rideau system as the water flows downhill towards both Ottawa and Kingston from here. I had always wondered about that, since I had noticed that the boats move downwards in the locks towards both cities. It’s a pretty little spot, and very active, with boats from both lakes waiting their turn to get to the other.

The cache there is along the Rideau Trail, and while we did start off looking for it, we decided it was just too hot to go for that kind of a hike that day.


We moved on to the Portland area, where there were two caches. One was in a rural setting, and looked pretty new. I picked up a beaded bookmark there that is quickly becoming a favourite. I may have to try making some of those myself. I think I was rather glad there were geotrails here, from previous treasure hunters, or I may not have found it so quickly.
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The Portland Roadside stop was at....well, a roadside stop. A bit of parkland with outdoor biffies and lots of milkweed flowering near the water. The cache here was just a micro, thankfully the only one of the day. Once the coordinates were nailed down, I had no difficulty finding the log book.
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We had lots of exercise, fresh air, and fun. We even stopped at Tim Horton’s before heading home.