Geocaching

an·tic·i·pa·tion

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(an-tis-uh-pay-shun)  noun
1.  realization in advance, foretaste
2.  expectation or hope.
3.  a feeling of excitement about something that is going to happen in the near future

So what am I anticipating? First of all, did you know that August 18 has been designated International Geocaching Day, a day devoted to the hobby we’ve grown to love? Until recently, I didn’t either. Apparently today thousands of geocachers will attend one of more than 100 International Geocaching Day events around the globe. We won’t be amongst them but we wanted to do something special to honour the day. From the moment that we began geocaching 4 months ago, we’ve been planning on placing a few caches of our own around our area for other searchers to locate. The only reason that we didn’t place our first cache before this was because we haven’t been home enough but what better way to celebrate our first International Geocaching Day than to hide our first cache. We actually hid it yesterday as we knew we wouldn’t have the opportunity today but it was first published on geocaching.com this morning. So, I’m anticipating someone finding it soon! We also planted our first trackable in the cache. A trackable is a geocaching game piece that is moved from cache to cache by geocachers like ourselves. The goal we gave our trackable, attached to a Canada flag keychain, was to visit all 10 provinces and 3 territories of Canada as well as all 50 US states so I’m anticipating following it’s journey as it travels around North America.

I’m also anticipating being very busy this coming week. I spent this morning over at the church decorating for Vacation Bible School which starts at 9:00 a.m. Monday morning. We’ll spend every morning from Monday to Friday with an energetic bunch of kids helping lead them through a fun filled week of learning that “Everything is possible with God” (Mark 10:27). I’m also anticipating our house being busier than usual this week as we host 3 of the Bible school students who are coming to direct the VBS program. Though I thoroughly enjoy our empty nest, I’m looking forward to the excitement that youth bring with them!

Most of all though, I’m anticipating harvest! The reason that we’re not out searching for geocaches this afternoon is that Richard is swathing canola! That means that I’ll soon be out on the combine, one of my favourite places to be. While we were busy holidaying in BC, our home area was enjoying one of the best growing seasons ever. Lots of rain and lots of hot sunny days have resulted in grain that is ready to harvest much earlier than usual. Months ago when we agreed to help out with VBS, we had no reason to expect that it would conflict with harvest so next week we’ll spend mornings at the church and the remainder of each day in the field.

How boring life would be if we had nothing to anticipate!

What are you anticipating right now?

Gold rush glimpses

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From Vancouver to Barkerville, BC is about 750 km (466 miles), a distance that we’d often travel in a day but this summer it took us more than a week! No, we didn’t have car trouble or any other misadventures; we simply took our time and enjoyed the sights. Rather than taking the most direct route home from Vancouver the way we usually do, we decided to follow BC’s historic gold rush trail and we were in no hurry. What a great way to travel!

Billy Barker’s discovery of gold on Williams Creek in 1862 triggered a stampede of thousands of miners to the area. Travelling the Cariboo Waggon Road, their trip through steep canyons,  raging rivers and high mountain passes was a long and arduous one. Many of today’s highways follow that trail and along the way many remnants of their journey remain for today’s traveller to explore.

   credit

Searching for geocaches led us to many sites that we might otherwise have missed… Cemeteries like this one just outside the historic community of Yale where graves date back to the 1860s, some 40 years before the part of Canada that we call home was settled.

And churches like St. John the Divine Anglican, also in Yale, which was built in 1863 and is the oldest church in BC that still stands on its original foundation.

The early 1860s saw the construction of a series of roadhouses along the banks of the Fraser and Thompson rivers. Usually within a day’s ride of each other, these were places where weary travellers on their way to the gold fields further north could rest for the night, have a meal, and water and feed their horses. At historic Hat Creek Ranch between Cache Creek and Clinton, the location of one of these roadhouses, the buildings stand as they did in 1901 but some were built as early as 1860. We spent an afternoon there exploring the exhibits and even riding an old time stagecoach!

Next to Hat Creek Ranch is the very interesting Stucwtewsemc (Sluck-TOW-uhsen) Native Interpretation Site where we were able to see how the original occupants of the area lived. I have studied both the coastal and the plains natives quite extensively but I knew virtually nothing about these people who lived between the two. I found the kekuli lodge, or pithouse, particularly interesting. Built half underground and half above, a typical kekuli housed between 25 and 30 family members, from grandparents down to grandchildren, throughout the winter months.

With so much to see and do along the way, some days we didn’t travel very far at all. When we left a campground in the morning, we often had no idea what that day would hold or where we’d sleep that night. For example, one day we travelled only 112 km (70 miles) from Clinton to Lac La Hache Provincial Park but along the way we found six geocaches, hiked to the Mount Begbie fire lookout tower named after the swashbuckling chief justice who established law and order on the BC frontier during gold rush days, and played 18 holes of golf on the beautiful 108 Mile Resort course. I’d call that a productive day, wouldn’t you?

Now that we’re home and have internet access again, there’s much more to share including our visit to Barkerville itself but I’ll save that for future posts.

Cathedral Grove

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Our recent drive to Port Alberni to spend a few days with Richard’s aunt and uncle involved passing through Cathedral Grove in Vancouver Island’s MacMillan Provincial Park. Though we’ve been there many times before, the towering stands of Douglas fir and Western red cedar never cease to amaze us. Trails on both sides of the highway allow visitors to stand in awe beneath these majestic giants, some more than 800 years old.

The park has changed since I walked its pathways as a child and since we wandered there with our own children some years back. On New Year’s Day 1997, a severe windstorm changed its look forever. Hundreds of huge trees were toppled and now lie amongst the undergrowth and some sections of the trail system were obliterated. Repairs to the trail system began immediately but fallen trees are part of nature. They open the canopy to provide light, space, shelter and nutrients for new growth. As gorgeous as the giant trees are, the lush growth on the forest floor is equally fascinating.

This year, geocaching added a new element to our visit to the park. Though there are several of them there, we decided to look for just two caches; one on each side of the highway. The dense canopy made it difficult for the GPS, which depends on satellite signals from high overhead, to give us accurate readings but hints given on the geocaching website helped us locate them. We had to be stealthy so as not to give away their locations to the many “muggles” (non geocachers) who were also enjoying the park.

   

Knouff Lake, British Columbia

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When Richard’s sisters and brothers gathered for our niece’s wedding at Sun Peaks, several of us camped together at beautiful Knouff Lake Resort. Towing our trailers up the long steep climb to the crystal clear lake nestled between the mountains about 3800 feet above sea level was well worth the effort. Established in 1904, this 4-season resort is advertised as one of the oldest fishing camps in B.C. but it is much more. Surrounded by the beauty of nature, it provides a tranquil getaway from the hustle of day to day life. Owners, Don and Gloria Lamberton, went out of their way to make our stay a comfortable and memorable one. They even provided us with a key to the gate so that family could come and go after the usual 10:00 p.m. closing time.

That’s our trailer on the right.

Our sister-in-law, Brenda, is an avid geocacher like us. When I mentioned that I’d seen on the geocaching.com website that there was a cache hidden on one of Knouff Lake’s tiny islands, she was determined that we should find it. Richard’s sister, Sue, was intrigued when she heard us talking about searching for these hidden treasures so the morning after the wedding, she joined us and the three of us set off on an adventure. The husbands, thinking us a bit crazy, stayed in camp.

Though I much prefer the quietness of a canoe, the Lambertons were reluctant to rent one to three prairie chicks so we set out in a big, flat-bottomed rowboat instead. Since I was born a coastal girl and learned to row at the age of 6 or 7, I took the oars and off we went. Sue was a little nervous but I assured her that we’d have to try very hard to capsize that thing on such calm waters. By the time we returned to camp, she’d taken a turn at the oars and what fun we’d had!

As we pulled ashore on Beaver Island, we three women in our 50s and 60s felt like kids on a Tom Sawyeresque adventure. With GPS units in hand, we clambered through the undergrowth and soon found the cache exactly where it was supposed to be.

My sis-in-laws, Sue & Brenda

We’d also been told about a memorial on one of the other islands, placed there in memory of an avid fisherman and outdoorsman who hosted an annual fishing derby at the lake each summer until his untimely death in 2009. Before returning to camp we rowed over to check that out and also discovered the skeleton of a teepee standing nearby.

Until Stacey began planning her wedding we were completely unaware that Knouff Lake (also known as Sullivan Lake) even existed but now that we’ve found this hidden gem, we’ll likely be back again. It’s only a short distance off our usual route between home and Vancouver, a trek that we make two or three times a year to visit grandchildren and elderly parents. We don’t often have the trailer with us though so perhaps next time we’ll rent one of the rustic log cabins overlooking the lake.

Five years!

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Tomorrow is the last day of school and also marks five years since I walked out of the classroom for the last time. It amazes me to think that we’ve been retired for that long already! Where has the time gone? For the past couple of days I’ve been doing some self-evaluation, asking myself what we’ve accomplished over those five years and whether or not we’ve done the things we wanted to do. Overall, I think the answer is a resounding yes!

We had some pretty specific goals in mind when we retired:

  • teach English in Asia for at least one year – done
  • travel – never completely done but 9 provinces and 15 states plus Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Macau, Saipan and Costa Rica are a pretty good start
  • short-term mission work – one summer in ministry has only whetted our appetite for more

Becoming grandparents was something we hoped for and though we can’t take any credit for that being accomplished, grandchildren have been one of the most delightful additions to our life since we retired. Four of them are firmly attached to the family tree and there are five others who also call us Gram and Grandpa. Four of those belong to two families in Japan who ‘adopted’ us while we lived there and with whom we’ve been able to carry on a relationship since our return to Canada.

The past few years have brought other unexpected surprises including becoming seasonal farm labourers! That definitely wasn’t part of the plan but we’ve enjoyed it immensely. For the first time since returning from Japan in early 2009, we weren’t involved in seeding this year’s crop. Louis, our 83-year-old ‘boss’ and very good friend, passed that part of the process on to his stepson and grandson this spring. He still plans to have us help him harvest the crop this fall though.

Surprisingly, we haven’t golfed as much as we thought we would since retiring. In fact, we haven’t golfed as much as we did before we retired! We’ve been too busy fulfilling our other goals. This year eight of the nine greens on our local course are undergoing reconstruction. The course is open but the temporary greens are pretty pathetic so the desire to play hasn’t really been there. It was a good year for us to take up a new hobby; geocaching. Though there are geocachers of all ages, many are retired. In fact, the activity is highlighted in the most recent issue of News and Views, the quarterly magazine published by the Alberta Retired Teachers’ Association.

Writing was always something I planned to return to in retirement. I thought I’d be freelancing again, sending my work off to publishers and waiting with baited breath to find out whether it would be accepted. Instead, I find myself blogging! Though I did experience the thrill of publication, in my early writing days I also received enough rejection slips to paper a small room! Blogging is so much more satisfying and I enjoy the opportunity to interact with some of my readers.

Do we ever regret retiring as early as we did? Never! Would we do it again? In a heartbeat! Have I enjoyed every moment of it? To be completely honest, no. Most of the time, I absolutely love being retired but there are moments, especially in the depths of our long Canadian winters, when I long to be doing something more meaningful with my days; moments when I join the writer of Ecclesiastes in lamenting that “Everything is meaningless, utterly meaningless!” Fortunately, those days are few and far between. I don’t think Richard has experienced them at all. Maybe that’s because he spends so much time playing Farmville that he doesn’t have time for such thoughts. His ‘farm’ is something else I didn’t expect to be part of our retirement but it keeps him happy!

As this school year comes to a close, I wonder what the next five years will hold. Our goals remain the same… more travel (we haven’t seen Europe yet) and more short-term mission work. I’m sure there will also be more unexpected surprises along the way.

 

 

Wild roses and wetlands

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My man had to drive to Wainwright this morning (about an hour northeast of here) to pick up some new tires that he’d ordered for the golf cart. “Why don’t you come with me,” he asked. “We can look for a few geocaches along the way and then have lunch in Wainwright.”

Does that sound like a date to you? It did to me. It also sounded a lot more appealing than weeding the flower beds which was what I probably should have been doing. We’re only home for a few days between trips so there are lots of things that need to be done around here but since retirement means doing what you want to do when you want to do it, I went to Wainwright.

We never did find the cache that was supposed to be hidden in the lilac bushes alongside a rural cemetery but the next one, in a quiet spot overlooking the Battle River, made up for any disappointment we might have felt. The wild rose, Alberta’s provincial flower, is in full bloom at this time of year and as we made the short hike down to the river we were surrounded by them. 

Battle River

I wish I could share their beautiful aroma with you but I don’t have the words to do it justice.

   

I waded into the bushes and risked being stung to get the next picture and others like it but the ‘sting bugs’, as our grandchildren call them, were much more interested in the flowers than they were in me and I came away unscathed.

The next cache had us treading carefully to keep from getting our feet wet! It was hidden beneath one of the bushes out on the point beyond this lookout tower.


We really should have had our rubber boots on but they’re in the trailer which is in Camrose for a minor repair to a leaky valve on the hot water tank. When it’s ready, Richard will be making another one hour drive in the opposite direction to go get it. Perhaps this time I’ll stay home and get something done around here… or maybe not!

Alex’s yellow lizard

/ edebock / 2 Comments

After a busy day planting flower beds and cleaning out our holiday trailer, I suggested that Richard and I spend the evening geocaching. One of the aspects of geocaching that I like best is the trackables; geocaching game pieces that are moved from cache to cache by geocachers like ourselves. These can be travel bugs, tags that are usually attached to other items known as hitchhikers, or geocoins, special coins or medallions created by individuals or groups. Both function in exactly the same way. Each trackable has a unique code that is used to log its movements on geocaching.com as it travels the world and most trackables have a goal or destination set by their owners. Some of them have travelled hundreds of thousands of miles! We have already found several trackables and moved them along.

On our way home from Winnipeg the week before last, we picked up a travel bug from a roadside cache in Manitoba. Alex’s Yellow Lizard began its journey in Minnesota last June. Its destination is Ireland and the owner asked that pictures be taken and posted along the way so that his seven-year-old son could watch his little yellow lizard as it travels around the world.

We wanted to find a special and interesting spot to leave Alex’s lizard. My first thought was the  world’s biggest pysanka or Easter egg at Vegreville, Alberta. Surely that would appeal to a seven-year-old boy. Alas, when we visited family in Vegreville last weekend we only had time for a quick search and didn’t find the cache located near the big egg. We’ll have to try again another time.

I’m very happy with the spot we finally chose, however; a cache hidden at a native ceremonial site on a high point of land about 24 km north of here. It’s one of nine places in Alberta where ribstone rocks have been found and the only one where the rocks remain in their original location. These rocks, carved by the Indians over 1000 years ago, are thought to depict the ribs of buffalo, the animal that provided for so many of their needs. Local natives still leave offerings of tobacco (cigarettes) and coins there. They have also hung many colourful prayer scarves in the trees at the site. Though I’d been there with a class of students quite a few years ago, Richard had never even heard of the place before. Isn’t it amazing how we can travel the world in search of interesting sights and yet sometimes miss fascinating ones on our own doorstep?

Ribstones

Prayer scarves

The site was a peaceful spot with a gorgeous view of the surrounding farmland, a perfect place to enjoy a few quiet moments on a sunny spring evening.

While we stood admiring the scene, this saucy little fellow popped out of his hole almost at our feet and proceeded to chirp at us!

Like Alex’s little lizard, we’ll soon be on the move again, hence the time spent cleaning the trailer today! I’m sure we’ll find plenty of geocaches along the way and hopefully there will be trackables in some of them.

Happy Rocks and Tomahawks

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We left Winnipeg yesterday morning and after spending two days on the road, we arrived home a few hours ago. Once again, we stopped to search for geocaches and again, I was surprised at all the interesting and unusual things we saw along the way.

When we passed through the town of Gladstone, Manitoba on our way east I spotted the Happy Rock and immediately thought that there must be a geocache hidden nearby. Sure enough, I checked online and discovered that I was right so we stopped to find it yesterday morning.

Glad stone… happy rock! What a cute idea. Imagine how surprised I was to walk around to the back side of the giant rock and discover two doors. In addition to being a tourist attraction, it houses public bathrooms!

We love the pretty little town of Neepawa and have fond memories of time spent there in the past but we didn’t know that it calls itself the Purple Martin Capital of Western Manitoba until we spotted this unusual tower of birdhouses. There’s a cache hidden in one of the trees nearby.

There are antique threshing machines like this one scattered across the prairie and many of them have geocaches hidden in, on or under them. We searched for quite awhile before we found the one that was tucked inside this one.

The Happy Rock is cute but this giant bull, standing outside the tourist information booth at Russell, Manitoba, didn’t do much for me. There was a cache hidden in one of the trees nearby though.

We’ve driven past the quaint little Ukrainian Greek Orthodox church at Insinger, Saskatchewan several times over the years. This time we stopped to take a closer look even though there are no caches hidden there. I really think there should be!

Though we’ve found 86 caches in all since we started hunting for them less than a month ago, we’ve also struck out a few times. This afternoon, we searched the trees around this much larger than life RCMP statue at North Battleford, Saskatchewan to no avail. If the cache was there, we certainly didn’t find it.

Apparently, there’s a brand new cache hidden near the world’s biggest tomahawk at Cut Knife, Saskatchewan but we couldn’t find that one either. If we had, we would have been the first to find it.

I thought the giant tomahawk was a bit strange until I learned a little of its history. Cut Knife was the site of several Indian uprisings in the 1880s. The Battle of Cut Knife Hill, between the Cree tribe led by Chief Poundmaker and the Northwest Mounted Police ended with the Mounties retreating. Poundmaker, who stopped his warriors from pursuing and ambushing the Mounties, later surrendered to the authorities to help restore peace between the Indians and the settlers. The giant tomahawk, with its 17 metre (57 feet) long handle, commemorates this.

Did you notice the Canada Goose on top of the head of the tomahawk? I didn’t either until it started honking at us! No, it’s not part of the statue. According to the neighbour who came out to chat with us when he noticed us carefully checking under and around the trees between his house and Tomahawk Park, there are seven goslings in the area and this was undoubtedly one of the parents warning us to keep our distance.

The interesting and the bizarre

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We spent most of the past two days on the road driving 1169 kilometres across the Canadian prairie from our home in Alberta to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Originally, we’d planned on doing the entire trip in one very long day but we decided that that would be foolish. After all, we’re retired. We have plenty of time and besides, there are geocaches to be found… lots of them!

We’ve discovered that geocaching gives us reason to stop and look at things that we might otherwise cruise right by. Some are interesting, others quite bizarre.

As many of you know, I love bits from the past. This wagon was no exception. A geocache was hidden nearby.

I love farm machinery too, especially combines, but what about one perched high in the sky? Yes, that’s a full sized combine way up there! It kind of reminded me of a giant insect!

The world’s largest bunnock had to be the most bizarre, however! What’s a bunnock, you ask?

Apparently Bunnock, also known as Glockenspiel or the Game of Bones, was created by Russian soldiers to pass the time while they were stationed in Siberia during the early 19th century. Bunnock was brought to Canada sometime in the early 20th century by Russian and German immigrants, many of whom settled in the province of Saskatchewan. The game pieces were made of horses’ anklebones, something the soldiers apparently had an abundance of! Players set up two parallel rows of bones, each row consisting of two guards and twenty bones. Two teams of four throwers each face off against one another. The object of the game is to knock down the other team’s bones beginning with the guards. The team that knocks down the opposition’s bones first, with the least number of throws, is declared the winner. Apparently the game became highly popular in and around the small town of Macklin, Saskatchewan, now the location of the world’s largest Bunnock. At 32 feet (9.8 m) high, the  giant anklebone constructed of steel pipes, chicken wire and fibreglass also acts as the town’s tourist information booth and yes, there is a geocache hidden close by.

As we crossed the prairies, stopping to view these and other unusual sights along the way, we found 20 geocaches. There are many more waiting to be found on our homeward journey next week!

More pieces of the past

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The Alberta prairie is crisscrossed with roads, many of them only a couple of miles apart. After living here for almost 36 years, there are many of them that we’ve never traversed but over the past few days searching for geocaches has taken us down several new ones. We found three more caches yesterday but it’s the pieces of the past that we keep finding that intrigue me even more.

We explored two more old abandoned houses yesterday, neither as majestic as the house on the hill but interesting nonetheless. The first was a very simple structure. Little more than a two storey wooden box with a very steep roof, its main floor was made up of just two rooms. We could see where a very steep staircase once led to the upper floor but it was no longer there; possibly removed to keep intruders like ourselves from falling through the decaying floorboards. Once again, there was nothing left in or around the house to tell the story of the people who once called it home.

The second house finally yielded what I was looking for; signs of human habitation. It was the windmill that first captured our attention. Connected to a pump behind the house, it would have provided water for the family as well as any animals they might have had.

The sign on the fence might have read “No Trespassing” but since we didn’t tear it off (I promise!) and it could just as easily have said “No Hunting”, we climbed the fence and went exploring!

The open door was so inviting. I just had to go inside! Treading carefully to avoid falling into the root cellar below, I made my way from room to room.

Who sat in the old armchair I wondered. It might have been quite comfortable before the mice did away with all the upholstery and stuffing!

Another skeleton sat in the centre of a different room. Clearly a baby once lived here!

I was surprised to see the old wood stove still there. I would think that an antique collector would like to get their hands on this beauty.

There was also an oil heater to keep the cold Alberta winters at bay.

Where there are children, schools are also needed and before the day of school buses the Canadian prairie was dotted with one room schoolhouses. Though many of them are gone, in our area historical markers show where they once stood. We passed a couple of them yesterday and as retired teachers, it was easy to imagine the voices of children from the past playing where farmers now cultivate the land.