Post date: 22-Jun-2009 04:45:01
On Saturday, Jun 20, 2009, Colin and I took a break from the Mayerthorpe car show to go geocache. We hopped in my grandparents' bright blue seabring, cranked the AC and headed down sunny highway 43 to the Rochfort bridge. We found a micro cache inside an open storage shed just down from the trading post shop. At first, we spent a lot of time looking on the ground at the side of the shed but then Colin found it tucked inside the shed on the wall.
Rural geocaching is challenging and I got rather frustrated today for the first time we've been caching. Part of the reason was because we had to drive to the 3 caches that we tried to find and we weren't within walking distance. We were never able to find the second two caches. However, it was fun to drive up to the Rochfort bridge which was built in 1914. I even conquered my fear of heights and death and walked part way across the bridge with Colin. Okay, not even part way. We made it to the first trestle and I stood on the platform and thought that I would plummet to my death if a train went by (although, we don't know if trains still frequent the tracks). I took a great picture of Colin sitting on the edge of the bridge with his legs dangling over the edge. I was going to take an HDR picture for him, but that would have required me to walk about 5 feet further down the bridge than where I already standing because Colin didn't want to walk part way back to meet me.
After our little trip out on the railingless train bridge, we attempted to push our way through the thick bush to find a geocache. We hunted for 20 minutes and dug deep through the leafy debris, but we didn't find anything except for a pen that had fallen out of my bag. The bushes were extremely throny and thistley. Colin got a thistle stuck in his foot. It stabbed him up through the drainage hole in his Tevas. Teva sandals can drain water but can't keep pointy object from protruding through the foot. I kept getting poked in teh butt by thistles each time I bent down to look for the cache. We had to admit defeat and log the Wrong Side of the Tracks cache as not found.
We tried to find Elephant Rock and we drove on many range roads. Colin's new Garmin GPS (which he bought because the old Magellan Triton 1500 caused us so much grief when we were trying to upload geocaches) had a perfect zig zagged pattern on it like a set of steps going up and down and then far out to each side and further away in kilometers from the cache. After about 25 minutes of driving, Grandpa's car GPS told us that there were not roads that lead to this cache, so we gave up on it. We took lots of farmland pictures while we were zig zagging on the gravel range roads. At an intersection, an old scraggly man in his truck pulled up by us and asked if we were lost. We said we were fine but then he persisted "Are you sure?" We answered "Yes" again. We didn't want him to have to explain to his wife that "them city folk were out by my property doing that there geocaching."
Maybe we'll attempt some more rural geocaching on our 6 month trip.