A Few of My favourite Things

Two Weeks Ago:

I haven’t written a blog in a few weeks, because life has been hectic and my geocaching partner was away at the San Diego Comicon. While Joe was away however, he did manage to do a tad bit of geocaching; which is a difficult feat during the comicon when the city is bustling with hordes of ravenous nerds! So, he waited until the Monday morning after the Con was over, and the city resembled a ghost town!  He found two caches that morning, and snapped a gorgeous photo of the San Diego palm trees and he took a stunning shot from the plane as well.

Last weekend we felt the need to catch up on our caching so we hit up my old neighbourhood of Port Credit. Port Credit, I believe, used to be a small town on it’s own, but was absorbed by the expanding beast that is the city of Mississauga, Ontario. It’s a beautiful area that lines the shore of Lake Ontario, boasts a quaint small town atmosphere and has a bevy of unique shops and restaurants. It also has a few geocaches in its many parks and under its many bridges. Therefore we set out on a ridiculously hot day and risked heat stroke to feed our caching obsession.

We found cache number one in JC Saddington Park. The cache was called Parking on the Credit, and the clue was “Pick a post any post”. When we got close to ground zero the clue made perfect sense, as there was a slew of wooden posts jutting out of the ground. Each post was partially rotten and hollow, which meant the geocache could have been in any number of them. Joe had the brilliant idea of kicking each post, which seemed like a good concept until a swarm of bees flew out of one Them!

After losing our wits and running around like a couple of small children for a few minutes, we checked out a post at the end of the row, tucked under a branch and sure enough it was capped with a slab of concrete. I held the branch back as Joe lifted the slab. He quickly dropped it. “More bees?”, I asked.

“No babe,” Joe said. “There’s a mouse in there!”

Sure enough, nestled inside the post beside the geocahe was a little brown mouse. We decided not to touch the cache because we didn’t want to disturb the little fellow. We logged it online and went on our merry way. Caches two and three were relatively uneventful, in fact they were somewhat marred by the intense heat. We found the second one beneath a rock under the bridge on Lakeshore and we found the third one in a small cemetery on Stavebank. All in all, it was a great geocaching day, but I think we’ll return on a day when the heat isn’t quite so intolerable!

This Weekend:

Yesterday Joe and I did a little geocaching on the Credit Valley Trail, this time starting from Derry Road instead of Burnhamthorpe like we did last time. Our first find was a large Tupperware container shoved in the cracks of a huge stonewall lining the trail. It was a fun climb to the top of the wall, and an easy find.

Our second cache of the day was approximately a 15 minute walk down the trail and off into the woods. The mosquitoes were starting to act up, so we tried to make quick work of it. The cache was called “Find the Path – Celebrating 100 Years”, so we assumed it was in a very old tree. Sure enough at the end of the path, was a huge, decrepit tree, broken in half and splayed out on the ground. I climbed up over its branches to its hollowed out trunk still jutting out of the earth. Inside the trunk was a broad piece of bark that was casually covering a massive plastic container! Inside was a cool variety of interesting tradable items. I quickly traded a small bauble for a silly band, signed the log book and ran out of the woods before I was devoured any further by the ravenous insects!

 Our third try at a cache for the day, was in an incredibly cool location. It looked like an abandoned grain silo with a dilapidated stonewall surrounding it. There was something quite mystical about that place, it almost resembled a scene from The Secret Garden. Joe snapped some very cool photos with his IPhone.

Unfortunately, we came up empty handed from that particular cache. At this point the mosquitoes were so horrible Joe was starting to look like he had Chicken Pox. So we headed home to an air conditioned and mosquito free apartment.

Finally, a Few of my Favourite Things:

Over the past year, we’ve actually managed to find and trade some very interesting items. I’ve added some photos of said items below, including my favourite which is a Rod Stewart fridge magnet. I’ve also included a photo of some gorgeous handmade glass beads that I found one by one and a beautiful geocoin, which we currently have in our possession. We picked it up in Mississauga and are planning to drop it off on our next vacation. Stay tuned for its drop off point!