geocaching.gifRead Part I here

Still certain that Sunday was going to be poor weather, I spent a good portion of Saturday night trying to find cache listings that wouldn’t require too much slogging through muddy trails. So, we turned our attention to Richmond. The plan was to head out after Aidan’s nap, since the weather was supposed to clear up in the afternoon.

Well, Aidan didn’t have a nap on Sunday. Neither did it rain. Kind of yin and yang. At any rate, we left Vancouver in the early afternoon and headed down to the Richmond Nature Park. When we lived in Richmond we often drove by this park, but I had never gone in. Gwen had taken a few classes there though. Anyhow, the trails were dry, the sun beamed down on us and the birds were singing. Ah, yes, I’m familiar with this: mockery.

The trails were kinda fun. Bouncy! They traced their way over a peat bog and we were walking on what was probably several feet of the spongy stuff. Anyway, the cache was in the middle of the park, but we didn’t know which of the many trails to travel. The GPSr pointed us in the general direction, but we had to do some backtracking to get to the cache. Once there, Aidan made his first score of the day. Googooly eyes on a toddler-sized ring! We bounced our way back to the car and drove towards the dike.

There were a couple of caches near the dike at the end of the Westminster Highway. One was under a deck near a duck pond (ok, the oddly named “Terra Nova Natural Area”) that we didn’t know was there. It was an easy find, and Aidan made his second score of the day: a Jeep! Or, a dinky in the form of a Jeep. He laid down right there and then and rolled the jeep along the deck, googooly-eyed ring all but forgotten. The third cache of the day was right on the dike, at the base of a wall, covered by some stones and some tell-tale sticks. If you ever see several piles of stones, and only one has some sticks on it, you can be pretty sure someone’s buried a cache there. No goodies for Aidan in this cache, but it was fun all the same, if not for the view then for the most excellent clue. Gwen gets the credit for this excellent shot looking off towards Vancouver Island across the salt marsh:

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The next cache was in Minoru Park (a park with an interesting history), yet another green space that we really didn’t know anything about. It is here in our story that the evil bunnies come out. I don’t know what it is about Richmond, but I can easily think of at least a half dozen places where you can go and observe rabbits living “in the wild”. Minoru Park is another such location. But look at these things! Pure evil:

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You can tell their disposition from their eyes…

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The cache was located beside a water feature that would have been a nice water fall if it wasn’t for all the pollen making the pond quite scummy. Bracketed on both sides by groups of teens, I think we stayed above suspicion from both them and various passer-bys. And then … we fell into the one-more-cache frame of mind. Between the five from Saturday and four from Sunday, we were having a pretty good weekend. One more would make a record weekend for us. The next cache on the list was in the park so we felt pretty good about making a personal best. We drove (yeah, I know) to the other end of the park and after a wrong turn into a fire station (don’t ask), we pulled into another parking lot. Nary a parking spot to be had, and another group of teens having what seemed to be a tail-gate party at the end of the parking lot. Right where Gwen was telling me the cache was within a few metre radius. So, for a second day in a row, muggles camping out on the cache kept us from the find. We thought about grabbing one more cache down in Steveston, and then considered going for groceries and grabbing the cache afterwards … but in the end, after the grocery shopping it was late enough that we knew that we had to get home to get the boy fed and to bed before we entered the danger zone of unchecked gag reflex.

Side notes: Three Road has been completely transformed. A couple of years ago, there was lots of road work as they widened it and ran a rapid-transit line down the centre of it. It was pretty messy but in the end, it was a pretty good improvement to the main drag in Richmond. Now, after several month’s work on the Canada Line, it’s back to being quite ugly. For one thing, most of the road is all torn up. For another thing, the Sky Train line isn’t running down the centre of the road — instead it’s off to the side. For another, the stark grey pillars have completely destroyed the aesthetics.

Also, we nabbed gas at $1.169 (less the bizarre 3.5¢ discount ‘at the pump’ that every station in the GVRD applies) and were strangely happy about it. I suppose it’s better than the $1.309 that it had been.

So, despite what we expected it was a banner weekend. Aidan gained several new toys (I think it’s time for us to contribute some of them back, plus we’re almost out of speckled frogs) and we got out and spent lots of time outside and in places we thought we knew but it turns out we didn’t know so well. Hope it doesn’t rain next weekend!