Richard decided geo-caching would be fun because, like most geo-cachers that I've talked to (admittedly, not many .. decidedly less than oodles, but more than one and possibly more than two) they are keen on finding lost trinkets to the point of craziness.
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| Richard finds the first cache. Although it appears that we're in the middle of a rough patch, we are at the edge of a conservation area. |
He knows there's a geocache in my neighborhood and enlists my willing cooperation by telling me its fairly close. We can go for a walk .. its a beautiful fall day .. the kind that make you want to enjoy crisp air, the smell of pine needles crushed underfoot and maybe even the sight of horses - safely across a fence where you don't actually have to worry about horse pies, which might be an even bigger blight on the landscape, and therefore more dangerous, than cowpies.
So I grab my camera, my shoes and a determination to make it up Rutherford Hill before I collapse from exhaustion. Don't laugh .. that hill is biiiiig. Up at the top of Rutherford Hill is a park where there's a housing development with another in the works, which as you might image, is a bit of a contentious issue in the tree-hugging society where we find ourselves living. Part of Linley Point is a designated conservation zone ... boggy marsh area .. that is home to some sort of birds and a whole lot of thistle.
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| The pond at Linley Point |
From our first geocache, we headed off to find the second, which was at the left end of this tiny lake. I'm not sure if this is Cottle Lake or if this is a pond designed by the developers, in which case .. good job! The mallards are certainly enjoying it.
Here is where the citified trail ends abruptly at a someone loosey-goosey planned crosswalk which at the moment crosses nothing except hardpacked dirt and scrubby grass. Here's where shit gets real. Richard breaks out the gps and we head out into the unknown. Well .. our unknown.
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The extremely dry summer is telling on this cedar we encountered alongside the
dirt trail. At the time, we wondered what would cause the phenomenon we
were seeing. I opined that this was likely a natural process, but as it turns out,
the lack of rainfall has had a considerable impact on all cedars, not just
the ones in my backyard hedge. Ha! Good old CBC Radio to the rescue again.
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| Arms draped in rich green velvet reach out to forest dance partners, swaying to the rhythms provided by capricious air sprites |
By this time, the afternoon was wearing and yet we were generally within a decent range of another geocache, so we'd go tramping off to find that one too. My feet began singing their own song .. a sort of muddled up blues number that started out just with a few basic pieces. Later on, a horn section was added and when I didn't immediately stop and put my feet up, being many many many MANY yards away from my own house, they pulled out wailing steel guitars and other assorted stringed instruments to add to the cacophony going on in my shoes.
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| Can you see a path here? Yea, me either! |
Although my sense of direction totally failed me ... Richard's gps was proof positive I was dead wrong when was saying that "this" direction was the right way to go home ... I did recognize this shed from a walk that Bev and I had taken a couple of years previous. My feet started to get a bit happier until they remembered that we'd been driving that day. Still, it's at the top of Rutherford somewhere .. damned if I could find it again except by accident. We plunged off through another set of trees and eventually found the road that wound down through the trees to Bradbury Road.
I learned two things that day. Richard doesn't mean it when he says "one hour," and despite that, he's a good-hearted colossus and I'll be making that trek with him again.
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