Geocaching

With the end of August, someone seemed to have turned the dial from "Summer" to "Autumn".

Sorry, I can't bring myself to say "Fall". To my British background, the only seasonal association I have for that word is vibrant New England colours on the pages of a travel magazine. To me, the unsettled blustery winds, grey skies and pervasive damp, gloomy mornings and darkening evenings, always mean Autumn.

Other associations for this time of year: Return to school, lighting log fires, hearty soups and stews back on the dinner menu. And taking opportunities in breaks in the weather to get out of the house for hikes in one of the many parks in the neighbourhood.

To add to our repertoire of diversions, yesterday we discovered geocaching.

This activity is where you use a GPS system to hunt down caches of treasure scattered around the world. Yesterday we took a drive out to Goldstream Provincial Park to find some of the caches hidden there.

Matthew spotted the first one, hidden alongside the path between the parking lot and the Nature House. Then we headed in the other direction, up a steep staircase in the side of the hill and onto the flanks of Mt. Finlayson. The second cache took some tracking down. We were in the right spot but were looking all around for a clue mentioned in the notes. We didn't find the clue, but eventually Ali unearthed the camouflaged box in a log exactly where we'd first started looking.

The third almost had us stumped. The clues mentioned boulders and arbutus trees, all to be found in great abundance on the hillside, but which ones were the right ones? In the end, we had to go step by step, locating the correct boulder from the coordinates on GPS, and following the directions from there. Megan found this box in the end, then it was time to hike back to the car and head for home.