Spring 2011 Trip

We left home last saturday to drive to Ottawa and tomorrow we fly to California.  We will be  staying at our son Justin’s house. We will be out west for nearly 4 weeks and we may go north to the first cache and Groundspeak HQ.  In California we plan on doing a lot of caching and hiking in parks, reserves and preserves in the Bay area. We also discovered that there are 1700 caches within 10 miles of Justins’ place. I will try and find time to talk about our caching.

So far the caching has been interesting in Ottawa.

* We went to an event in Ottawa and met quite a few cachers, some of whom will be contacting me for help with ML caches.We had the pleasure of meeting Cache-Tech for the first time at the event, and had a nice long talk. We are hoping to drop in and see him and Holly on our way home.  We also had a nice talk with Missbug . She will be getting married this Spring  to NanoBear who she met at a geocaching event. He is a nephew of the 3Bears.

*We did a few caches east of town the other day, a few of which involved a short hike. After one short 300 meter hike, we got back to our car to find  a new hand made walking stick leaning against the car. There was no sign of anyone around.

Here is a picture http://img.geocaching.com/cache/log/8ac15b2b-d046-4841-a686-291e401838f6.jpg

*MA solved about 100 puzzles in this area and we grabbed quite a few of them. It is always a pleasure getting puzzle caches when out of town.  Speaking of puzzles, we hid 2 more ML puzzles in this area but this time we put them on the Ontario side.  Only one has been approved so far as the other one is apparently too close to 3 local puzzles.  I know some NB cachers who can relate to that problem.  We also found time to do maintenance on two of our caches here.

*We have found quite a few quality caches during the last few days.  One was particularly interesting.  There were two very large trees standing together. We went under them and looked around but there was no sign of the cache. We wandered around the outside of the trees and Ma discovered a thin back line, wound around two nails at the side of one of the trees. We had seen this before, so I unwound the line, and felt the weight of something heavy coming down, but I could see nothing coming down. I kept unwinding till there was no more weight dropping, but I still could not see a cache. So I pulled up and down on the line and Ma went over to the other tree and spotted the cache going up and down at least 20 feet away over at the other tree.  We signed the log and hoisted the cache at least 30 feet up the tree, hidden in the branches. It must have been quite a feat, getting the cache that high up and then getting the line from one tree over to the other one.

*We have been grabbing TB’s for our trip. We grabbed one today in a cache in Gatineau, and discovered it belongs to Sporty. Amazingly the TB has been travelling since 2004. We will bring back to NB if he so wishes.

*Yesterday we parked next to a pedestrian bridge in order to get a cache that was about 250 meters down a trail. As we crossed the bridge, we spotted the cover of a lockNlock container next to the bridge. Of course I had to check it out, and I discovered a container with a block of ice in it. I thought it must have been someone’s lunch container but then i noticed it was covered in duct tape. When we removed and crushed the ice, we discovered three powerful magnets in it. What are the odds?

*We again found caches along the Rockcliffe Parkway. I always bring Ma with me, because some of the gentlemen in the parking area, seem to find me interesting.