breathing deep where the air is thin: grand misadventures

We had a grand adventure planned for this afternoon. It was a lot better in theory than in execution. Um, we'll just chalk it up as experience and say it's done. The idea was to pack up the bikes, head out to Sandilands provincial park, ride around and do some geocaching.

First of all, transporting ten bikes and ten people is no simple tasks, even in two vans. Thankfully I married a superhero. Like no other mortal, he singlehandedly, neatly and comfortably, made space for all of us and our corresponding two-wheeled-cycles (I just realized when I wrote that how bicycle and popsicle rhyme kinda - a two-wheeled-cycle kind of sounds like a special kind of popsicle. Not sure that it would be delicious though - it doesn't sound delicious, kind of like ratatouille). And we were off.

The first cache we thought we'd just find on foot. And we even did. It was at an abandoned rock pit.

In the meantime we also found a few wild raspberries. Tasty little morsels. Too bad we didn't find literal buckets of them, 'cause I've been hunting - best I've found so far? $25 a pail! Yikes….. no thanks.

Here is that sneaky little cache, all tricked out in rocks.

It kind of looks like we signed in with invisible ink, but don't worry - no lemon juice required. Mia really did fill it out but the bright sunlight sort of washed it out.

While we drove there, we noticed that there weren't really any parking lots or real bike paths along the way, so I stopped some people stealing sand and asked them if they knew of any. They didn't. I let them keep the sand anyway. Thankfully Kim knew the area a little better than we did (since Eric didn't know it at all and I hardly did at all) so she directed us to a little better area. A little. But not much.

Eric unloaded all the bikes and we set out to find some riding spots. Jesse found one and three headed in, but the poison ivy scared some of us off, for a while. We ended up heading in there for a bit but lets just say that a more advanced level of off-road cycling is needed than those attained by 9, 10 and 11 year-olds who have never been before. Yup, it didn't last very long.

The good news is that we sprayed lots of bug spray on before we left so we still got nice and stinky, even if we didn't earn it. And we came across a lovely fountain…..