a peek inside the fishbowl

At the end of yesterday’s post I had just whipped out ye old iPhone and fired up the Geocaching app.

First, I should explain a bit about geocaching.

Geocaching is an outdoor treasure-hunting type of activity in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) to find “treasure” a.k.a caches. There is a sizable geocaching community out there and there are caches all over the world, plenty of which are in Ottawa.

Participants can hide or seek a cache, or both. Seekers keep a log of how many they find, collecting their finds as if they were pirate treasure. (Alas there is no real treasure - no gold coins or strings of pearls as far as I know.) I should point out that the caches are not kept, they are always returned to their hiding spot.

The caches themselves are made out of waterproof containers and contain small items. Finders are encouraged to leave things in exchange for others (although this isn’t strictly necessary), and everyone signs a notebook to prove they were there.

We’ve had a few successful (and some not-so-successful) geocaching outings.

I will say that if you’re looking for something active and interesting to do as a family, this is it. As you can imagine the girls love geocaching, and it is very exciting to be the one who makes the find.

 (Here’s the official site in case you want to look into it.)

Anyway, the cache we were looking for near the Nepean Quarry was called “Iron Ring” (all the caches have a name) and it took us about half a kilometre off the main trail, away from the highway. I should explain that I find things like wandering off trail a tiny bit nervewracking. I have a fear of getting lost in the woods, even within hearing of a major thoroughfare. (Heck I have a fear of getting lost ANYWHERE.)

We walked until we suddenly arrived at the remains of an old home. There were no walls or windows or doors, but I could clearly spot remnants of a foundation coming out of the side of a hill. We had passed some old fencing along the way, piles of stones (an old stone wall or part of a kitchen garden?), all kinds of bits of bric a brac that was slowly being overtaken by the wilderness:

It was part junk heap, part archeological dig.

There were a couple of broken cups, a rusty old wringer washer, and a car:

(it’s funny how some parts stay shiny, isn’t it):

Our quest to find the cache was took us to a very overgrown place which required some fancy footwork:

I was too busy looking around to focus my attention on the task at hand. It sure was pretty:

But there was a feeling. I had a feeling of disquiet.

This used to be someone’s home.

There were gnarled old apple trees everywhere, evidence perhaps of someone’s farming effort of long ago. Maybe homesteads had fruit trees - especially apple - to help get them through long fruitless Canadian winters.

I stumbled upon a flock of robins gorging themselves in preparation for the cold months ahead. It was a spectacle of colour; red-breasted robins in the brown and grey trees, the orange and yellows of fall, and that red red fruit. I was only able to photograph that mealy fruit rotting on the branches. The colour was remarkable and I found it hard to tear myself away:

Much of the fruit was scattered on the ground:

There was one particular tree which had very long needle-like thorns, which I didn’t notice those right away. All I could see was the apples. Someone else (was it you Mark?) noticed that the apples had all been deliberately speared to the tree and were not there naturally. Each fruit was impaled on a long thorn. All these stabbed apples were mildly creepy, but perhaps it was an offering to the birds?

After about 20 minutes of poking around we gave up the search. The iPhone GPS isn’t very precise. It only gives the general vicinity of a cache which then leaves us to our own devices. We weren’t able to locate the cache, even with a huge hint that instructed us to “look inside a tree stump.”

On the way back to the main path we passed a big stump and I peeked inside. There it was! It was at the very bottom. Mark and Emma had to work together to coax it out. (I was worried about getting a hand full of spiderweb.)

We signed the book and left everything else intact.

The sun was starting to set and it was starting to cool down. We had a quiet, quick walk back to the car. And that’s when I started to *really* figure out where we had just been. More tomorrow.

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