Journey to the Centre of the Off Ramp

We all awoke at the sight of first light, we made our way out of our hand made shelters, frost had covered our sleeping bags, our breath hung in the air, the fire from the night before was still steaming. Once we had packed up our gear we headed out. We trudged through waist high swamps, we cut our way through dense forest, we battled a black bear, trapped a rabbit for lunch, and we had only made it half way to the geocache.

Okay, so maybe we did not battle a bear, or trudge through swamps, but we did climb over huge boulders, pushed our way through dense woods, and where attacked by a swarm of mosquitos. We also did not wake up at first light, we slept in an RV, and our loving grandmother made us lunch. This is not to say our journey to the centre of the off ramp was not an epic adventure!

The cache in our sights GCBBA, that’s right Canada’s first geocache. Onboard for the adventure was Chiefy268, Crackbooker, and M-Sta. We had been RVing through Newfoundland and slowley making our way down to Cornwallis for HMCS ACADIA’s final graduation parade, and Ceremony of the Flags. So we had stopped at the KOA located just outside of Halifax and we had decided we would go and check out Peggy’s Cove because that’s what everyone does in Nova Scotia, right? Okay maybe not, but Crackbooker really wanted to go, so I threw the idea out about visiting GCBBA, I had been there once before for my 100th find in 2009, and Crackbooker was more than happy to go visit this historic cache. So we loaded up the car and headed on our way.

We had our first bit of misfortune when we pulled up to a set of street lights to find ourselves behind a good old Canadian Mountie, no we did not get pulled over but we were stuck behind this cruiser all the way from Sackville Rd, through Lucasville Rd, Hammonds Plains Rd, and all the way to highway 103 where eventually the Mountie pulled over and just sat on the side of the highway and let us go by, he then pulled back onto the highway about two cars behind us. I told M-Sta that we are not just following him to follow him, but that we actually needed to go on these roads. Now I’m not saying I don’t like law enforcement officers, but at times I think they obstruct traffic even more than civilians, behind us was a huge line of cars, because the officer was going about 5 KPH under the posted speed, and no one ever dares to try to pass a cruiser.

So once on our way down the 103 it was just a waiting game for M-Sta and Crackbooker, me I had to keep an eye on the distance to destination, and well we arrived and parked the car, locked up and made our way to the… Centre of the Off Ramp!

Now if you have ever been to GCBBA you will know that this is not just some off ramp, its a huge loop, and in the centre is its own small forest, with rock outcrops, bits of swamp, large hills, probably a small cliff in there as well. So please do not think “Oh this sounds easy” no far from, first you need to decide where you are going to enter the small forest from, you have a full 360°s to choose from. Well we found what we thought was a small path that looked like it would lead into the jungle. We got all of ten feet before we had to start bushwhacking our way through some dense forest.

We pushed on for a good five minutes when we met up with our first obstacles, a huge rocky section, not small little rocks, huge ones as tall as me, so we made our way over the rocks, M-Sta and Crackbooker slowly behind complaining about the amount of effort it is taking to get one cache, all I could yell back was “Trust me its worth it” once we passed the first obstacle it was not another 5 feet before we really had to push through some thick brush. We pushed and pushed, knowing each step would get us closer to the cache, 10 minutes through that and we come out again on another rock section, this time climbing a small hill, most of these rocks had a large amount of moss growing on them, and if you made the wrong step you would slide down between two rocks.

Did I mention we were all in flip flops, well if I didn’t I did now!

So as we climbed up the rocks, and up the hill the GPSr was reading 100 feet! Yes, we were getting close, and I could smell it, the terrain flattened out and it was easier to just walk. Next thing you know the GPSr starts reading a further distance, 198 feet behind us! There is no way, I remember the area of where the cache was and we did not pass it, so I decided to keep on hiking, M-Sta and Crackbooker stayed behind, all of a sudden now the arrow pointed directly to my right. So I headed to the right, hit more walls of rock, more dead trees, more moss pits, but I kept on going, all of a sudden I broke out on to a well walked path. I knew this must lead to the cache, I followed the arrow which lead me down the path, and next thing you know I was there, I remembered where I was!

Now where was M-Sta and Crackbooker! I yelled there names, all I hear was the faint noise of traffic on the 103, so I started to head back towards the direction from which I came, I kept on yelling there names, finally I got a response from them both, I told them to come towards my voice, and they did. Five minutes later I did see the first glimpse of bright green hoodie. I had found them, now all we needed to do was head back to the cache and let them claim there find.

Crackbooker grabbed the cache from its hiding place and opened it up, it was filled with some pretty good swag, but was missing all of its trackables, the cache description does say it is believed that this cache is raided by trackable thieves, and it would appear that all of them are missing. Crackbooker was planning on dropping one of his trackables off here to start its mission but soon changed his mind when he noticed the lack of trackables. So we all signed the log book, no I did not claim a second find on it, just saying “Hi” in the log!

Once we had signed the log, and been attacked by a swarm of mosqitos we replaced the cache and had a nice easy walk out of the forest on a well made “Geo-Trail” now why I did not see this trail on our way in I will never know, but it would have saved some time!