Eh, the election was last night.  I don’t want to talk about it.  If you follow me on Facebook, I’m sorry.  You really should be on Twitter too, it makes more sense there.  It was kinda like being at a bar, talking about the election results with 100 of your closest friends right across the country.

Life has been busy.  We’re pretty much prepared for Beta.

This past weekend we followed Gwen’s own advice and visited the pumpkin patch.  We decided to go to the Richmond Country Farm, down off of the Steveston Highway, on the advise of Cousin Vicki and others.  It’s quite a production, and they’ve got it well set up.  I bet that they probably get several thousand people passing through a day.

It’s a full package there.  The price is steep ($10/person over 3 yrs old) but you get a hay wagon ride through their decorated farmland, entrance to a corn maze, and the pumpkin patch.  You each get to take home any size pumpkin you’d like, and you get an apple each too!

Aidan liked tromping around the pumpkin patch and was pretty … um … discerning … in picking out his pumpkin.

After filling our bags with two large, heavy pumpkins and a few small pumpkins, Aidan and I left Gwen sitting on a hay bale while we went and explored the corn maze.  He was pretty interested in it, but the further we went in, the more nervous he became.

He started asking if we were going to find Mommy, and the deeper we went, the more frequent that question came up.  It seemed that he was genuinely concerned that we’d lost Mommy, so we short-circuited the maze and walked back along the outside.  Of course, there were blackberry bushes (with *gobs* of berries still on them) along the route back to the pumpkin patch, and it took us quite some time to walk that stretch.  Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your perspective, the questions about the lost Mommy stopped with the intake of ripe berries.

Of course, we eventually found her.

Today, Aidan, Gwen, Tomer, Carla, and I participated in the Tailspin GeoRally.

This was a geocaching event that featured 20 teams of cachers trying to find a series of caches placed especially for the event.  The rally started in Confederation Park in North Burnaby.  Cars left the staging area every five minutes from 8:45am onwards, and our start time was 9:25am (Team 9).  At the start, you were given the guidelines for the event and the coordinates for the first cache.  Caching teams alternated between starting at waypoint number 1 and waypoint number 6.  Teams that were on the first track had green passports and teams on the second track had yellow passports.  At each waypoint, teams found the coordinates to the next waypoint (perhaps after solving a puzzle) as well as a stamp for their passport.  You had to collect all the stamps or incur a 45 minute penalty.  Additionally we were given a baggie with hints for each waypoint, each stapled shut.  If teams opened any hint, they incurred a 15 minute penalty for each hint opened.  The goal was to cross the finish line with the shortest time.  We weren’t given any details about the caches, but we were told that one of the caches was ‘manned’.  We joked a little about that (a man cache?  huh?) and it came out that the cache was actually ‘boy-ed’ since the children of one of the organizers would be running the waypoint.

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I was chatting with my mother last week, and she had mentioned how she and Dad were out caching a few weeks ago and managed to scratch the BBT up a little bit.  That reminded me of the 3 province geocaching trip that Gwen, Aidan, and I took while we were back east in the spring.  Not because we scratched the truck up, but because we certainly took it places of the like it hadn’t been too much.

According to my geocaching logs, it was May 30th, 2008.  It was a nice sunny day and our plan was to drive to PEI via the Confederation Bridge.  We were going to cache along the way, making sure that we got caches in each province.  We made the decision that we weren’t going to try for any caches until we got north of Truro, and so the first one that Gwen picked out (we had a Pocket Query that found all the caches along our route within 100m of the highway) was GC16EQC Blueberry Fields.  The cache description, though brief, sounded alright and so we went for it.

The directions on the cache page are simply:

Do not stop or park on highway 104 to access this cache. You can get to this cache by exiting at exits 8 or 10, depending on the direction you are coming from. This way you will see the beautiful scenery and also avoid the toll on the Highway.

As we were heading north, we took Exit 10.  This was the Bass River Road, leading into Londonderry.  A typical Nova Scotia rural road.  The GPS then routed us north again … and then most unexpectantly the pavement disappeared.

In fact, we were driving on a dirt road for the next 25 km or so.  As dirt roads go, it was in very good shape, probably having been repaired after the winter.  In fact, it was in better shape than some of the paved roads up around Amherst (Hi Buffy!  She’s the engineer at NSDOT responsible for roads in Cumberland County.  It was a tough winter apparently).

I’ve got a fair bit of experience driving dirt roads now (Gwen and I drove up to Iqaluit – and back —  on the Dempster Highway in 2004 and it’s 99% unpaved) so it was a fun drive.  Well, other than the fact we really didn’t know where we were going.  OK, so we had the GPS with us, but still.

Anyway, after some time of driving along the dirt road, we came to a nice overpass crossing the TransCanada.  The bridge was paved, but the approaches weren’t.  Weird.  I guess that’s what happens when you have a private company build and operate the Cobequid Bypass.

A short time after that, we arrived at the “Pioneer Graveyard” that served as parking for the cache.

Westchester Mountain Pioneer Cemetery

Westchester Mountain Pioneer Graves

We hoofed it up into the graveyard and happened upon a snowmobile trail.  The cache itself seemed to be directly ahead of us, but the trail ran perpendicular to that.  After a short walk in the wrong direction, we turned around and followed the trail to the cache.

Which was up quite a hill.

Snowmobile Trails Leading to Blueberry Fields

Within spitting distance of the TCH.

Aidan Retrieves the Blueberry Fields Cache

 

Having cleverly located and signed the cache, we went back to the truck and tried to figure out how to get back to the highway.  The easiest thing seemed to be to go to the overpass and see if there was any way to get on the highway from there.  After rolling back and forth across the bridge a few times, it was pretty clear that we weren’t going to be able to do that — at least not with the truck we had.  So, the only options were to retrace our path or to continue along the same dirt road (which was the route the GPS suggested).

Onward!

In actuality, the trip out was much shorter and we soon regained pavement.  After that, it was a short drive to Exit 8 to get back on the highway and continue to New Brunswick.

All totalled, we probably spent in the neighbourhood of 3 hours getting to and finding that one cache.  Not a great start to our tri-province caching adventure in terms of efficiency, but we had fun finding it.  You can read my log here.  I’ve provided a handy map below too, detailing the excursion.

View Larger Map

Hmmm, a dramatic title for a post with no substance!  Just to bring the Kayla story-arc to a close:

• After hiking on Monday, a cliff collapsed on the Sea-To-Sky highway (on the Tuesday) closing it for 5 days.
• It rained for a good part of the rest of the week.  Gwen and Kayla did lots of shopping (Gastown, Pacific Centre, etc).
• Friday Kayla took us out to dinner, back to Shabusen.  It was going rather well until Aidan … um, soiled himself.  And the booth bench.  And his shoes.  Ugh.  I got him all cleaned up and then Aidan and I drove home (and I tossed him in the shower) while Kayla and Gwen finished up and then walked home.
• Saturday we went to Lynn Canyon in the morning, and the Gwen and Kayla went to Playland that afternoon.

The Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge

The view north from the Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge

Kayla and Aidan in the Lynn Creek Park

Kayla beside Lynn Creek

Playland at PNE

• To end out the day, Carla and Tomer (new engaged!) came over and we had a games night, mildly interrupted by the Festival of Light finale fireworks.
• And on Sunday, we put Kayla on the plane to head back to Nova Scotia. According to her mother, she arrived safe and sound … but overtired and excited.