monomaniacally i plod on

smugmug is down for upgrades, so no picture before i go to bed.

GC19ZF1 [Raid At The Fir Trade] -- thanks to insomnia keeping me up through the night i didn't crawl out of bed until after 1700, which left less than an hour of decent daylight for today's cache hunt. we went to yellowpoint regional park to try for the closest of 4 caches in the park. from the description this sounded easy peasy. had i only read the logs of other cachers beforehand. it turned out that the coordinates were off by 10m, and that's sufficiently far in the woods that it makes a search very tough. thankfully the paramour's GPS is not as good as mine (ha!), and that, together with perusing the hint that came with the cache description, allowed our roles to be reversed tonight -- me stomping through the woods cursing, paramour victorious. took enameled pin, left rat, which was the closest i had on me to a creepy crawly, the ostensible theme of the cache. (people don't always stick to themes.)

it was very wet at YPRP, and the horse crossing bridge is out, but that's what we have goretex boots for. this is the park in which i found gazillions of shooting stars 2 years ago, but we're as yet too early for those. the fawn lilies are just about ready to burst into bloom though.

by the time we got back to the truck it was raining again, and we stopped for dinner at the cedarbrook. omnomnom, best chicken souvlaki in town.

yin and yang

sequoia at dusk

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GC1JD32 [Phoenix Rising] -- best location yet. we didn't even know this was here: the harmac arboretum, apparently abandoned for a time, and now owned by the RDN (regional district of nanaimo), who will possibly restore it. lots of lovely conifers, planted between 1956 and 1975, including several giant sequoias and california redwoods. definitely coming back here. we cleaned up some garbage, and i want to know how to volunteer for helping fix this place up. the cache is under an amazing maple. took the travelbug "zombie" (very appropriately named), left a puzzle and a reflective strip.

GC1JFWM [Clean Your Car for No Cash Cache] -- i didn't even want to go here, but the paramour made begging eyes, so how could i resist. turned out that the location was worth the short hunt for the nano cache -- a free, self-serve car wash that belongs to harmac (wood pulp). you just drive through it and it sprays some water on you. i know, not a thrill a minute, but kinda fun to find out here, and the truck could use it. couldn't open the cache because it was so tightly closed that one pair of pliers was not enough. cleaned up garbage here as well.