Missing in Action

I have been MIA from here for too long! This is partly because we find it harder to cache in the late winter and partly because I have been busy with work and other parts of my family life. But I do have a few things to write about today so here goes.

My husband, whom I often refer to as the old goat, managed an out-of-province cache find and an out-of-country cache find in February. I found it very exciting to add the province of Quebec to our stats page when Allen went there for a conference and was able to find a cache just outside his hotel. Micro-Parc Shaughnessy (GC1MMVZ) was placed quite high up and he is vertically challenged so it almost eluded him but he managed to reach it and we received a new province badge for our souvenir page on geocaching.com.

This was the kick in the pants I needed to get more organized to find caches when we are out and about. So that weekend while our daughter was taking some ski lessons at the Calgary Olympic Park, Allen and I hunted down GC23K61 (Down by the C.O.P.) across from the ski hill and GC53C2 (Calgary History Tour- Olympics) which was placed to commemorate the 1988 Olympics which were held at the aptly named COP.

A couple of weeks later we decided to do a day of geocaching at a park we had never been to. In the 1920's Imperial Oil had a refinery on the site which is now the Ogden Refinery Park. The land was reclaimed as a wilderness park in the 1990's and there are walking paths and a frisbee golf course now available there. 

We bundled ourselves up for a cold winter walk and set out to find GC2CK86 - Ogden Refinery Park - Parks 100 cache. The littlest goat spotted this one before her Dad and I even got near. We continued on to find GCNRC4 - Fishin', Landin', or Strollin' which was quite a ways off the coordinates posted. Then on to one hidden in a place we had never seen a cache in before and in spite of its name, Pretty in Pink, turned out to be green! Our last find was GCing by Candlelight (GCMX3E) which had an easy path to it ...which we took on the way back down! On the way there we scaled some steep terrain that caused the littlest goat to decide to stay put and wait for us. It took a bit of hunting at the coordinates before we turned up the actual cache but we got lucky. We called it a day after that due to the cold.

The Vancouver trip Part 2 - The Return

For our return trip to Calgary we allotted 4 days although many people do it in one long day and I usually do it in two. My husband flew out just for the road trip home and we wanted to take our time, visit points of interest and geocache along the way.

Our first stop was at Bridal Falls Golf Course for lunch with our friend who owns the course. The restaurant in the clubhouse serves amazing food. We started with a mango butternut squash soup that was just spicy enough to be flavourful but not enough to burn your tongue. Then we had salads accompanied by garlic toast drizzled with balsamic vinaigrette. I chose the green salad which had morsels of figs and feta cheese tossed in and was delicious. Alana and I shared a slice of lemon tart afterwards which was just the right finish for the meal. I highly recommend this restaurant as a lunch stop even if you don't golf but since this is a geocaching blog let me get back on track.

There were two caches within a short distance of the golf course. The nearest was Welcome to Bridal Falls (GC1H34K) which was at the end of a field just past the driving range and a quick, easy find. The second cache we went after was a BC Parks 100 cache called Bridal Veil Provincial Park (GC2Y1GD). This one took us into the woods of the Provincial Park where we did some stream hopping before finding the cache. We made it a lot harder than it was partly because the trees made it difficult for the GPS to pick up satellites. Eventually the old goat realized we were off track and doubled back to make the find.

 

The next destination on our "Stop and See One Day" list was the Othello Tunnels along the Coquihalla river. This is a series of no longer used railway tunnels that have become a pathway into history.

 The Kettle Valley Railway ran through these 5 tunnels built by Andrew McCullough in 1914. The tunnels are connected by trestles which have been converted to walkways. The views of the river from the path were beautiful and the tunnels were very cool to walk through.

 At the end of the tunnels and quite a good walk past the gate we located the hint that let us know we were nearing the cache. After some scrambling up and down rocks we finally found the cache.

Although we were deep in bear country we managed to complete this adventure without running into any grizzlies and that was a relief to me!

By the time we got back to my truck it was getting quite late so we had to make time to get to the town of Merritt for the night. I'll fill in the rest of our trip soon! If you get a chance to go to the Othello tunnels or if you are heading down the Coquihalla, this is a nice place to take a walk, stretch your legs and enjoy the views!