Visitor Center

I haven’t been Geocaching much lately.  I love to cache, but with all the projects I’ve been working on this summer, I just haven’t had much time for it.

I recently learned that there is a Geotrail along the Great Lakes Seaway Trail and it has piqued my interest – just the thing to get me back into caching!

The place to pick up a logbook in our area is at the Niagara Visitor Center.

I found out when I wanted to pick one up, that the Niagara Visitor Center is *not* open on weekends.

Am I the only one who thinks this is weird? 

Usually when I go somewhere to visit, I’m there on the weekend.  I’ve stopped at numerous visitor centers around the country and don’t ever remember one being closed on the weekends.

Monday through Friday, 8:30 am to 5:00 pm isn’t exactly friendly hours for people who work – locals and visitors alike (especially if someone is here for business and is working normal working hours).

I sent them an email expressing my disappointment in not being able to pick up a logbook for myself and a friend… to their credit, they responded the next morning and they did mail me two logbooks. 

I still think it’s weird that a Visitor’s Center isn’t open on weekends.

Gorged

What a great weekend! The weather was perfect and I spent it doing fun things with fun people :)

Saturday I went geocaching with someone who had never gone before. It was a lot of fun hiking and exploring, but it would have been even better had we found a cache. We looked for three of them, but came up empty handed on all of the them.

I'm worried that the problem might be my GPS. This was the first time I used it for geocaching, and I find it hard to believe that it wouldn't lead us to at least one of the caches. But the clues on the cache pages weren't matching up to where we were looking either, which is what is making me wonder. I don't want to log a DNF saying that the container wasn't there if we weren't even looking in the right place, so I want to go looking for another cache and see what my GPS does there. Either that, or borrow my brother-in-law's GPS and see if they match up on a location. I'm just hoping it was just a bad day of caching and the problem isn't with the GPS.

Again, we had fun hiking - but I was really disappointed that I wasn't able to share the fun of actually finding a cache with someone who was caching for the first time :( Hopefully we will have better luck next time.

Sunday was spent hiking in the Niagara Gorge. We went down at the Devil's Hole entrance, so the only bad part of the day was traversing the 410 steps down and then back up again... It was so totally worth the agony tho' :) It was a picture perfect day - too bad I didn't remember to bring my polarizing filter... too many of the pictures I took were washed out, but I still managed a bunch of decent ones.

It's so much better seeing the beauty of the Niagara River up close, instead of from along the rim of the gorge :)

With no rain the past couple of weeks, the trails were nice and dry!

That being said, I didn't think I would see many of these guys - but they were all over the place. This is a red-banded millipede, which is the largest millipede in our area - they can get up to 4" long.

How can you beat this on a September Sunday afternoon?

I put this together using six separate pictures. It's down by The Whirlpool. I thought it turned out pretty good :) If you double click on the picture, you should get a bigger version.

We hiked from Devil's Hole upstream to a little past the Whirlpool. Next time we are going to start at the Whirlpool entrance and head upstream from there.

9 to 5

Just about all my life I've had jobs with weird working hours. I either had hours that fluctuated or just had strange start and quit times. I can only think of two jobs I've had with 'normal' Monday through Friday hours. It didn't matter then because I was young and still living at home. As a homeowner, odd hours definitely have their advantages - it seems like there was always time to get stuff done. I could go to stores during less crowded times. I could do projects around the house while the sun was still shining. Appointments were easy to schedule. Things were way more flexible.

My present job is Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. How does anyone who has a house and/or a family get anything done working these hours??? It's getting even harder for me as the days get shorter. It seems like after I get home from work each day, I check my email, eat dinner and then it's already too dark outside to do anything. I find it really hard to get motivated to get anything done when it's pitch dark outside. Not getting things done during the week pushes everything to the weekend - and that is just not enough time for me.

My original plan today was to head out to Akron and pick up a travel bug that made it to New York from a friend of mine in California. It's been a long journey getting here and I am anxious for it to complete it's travels. I didn't get out of work on time - only about 15 minutes late - but I knew that I wouldn't be able to make it to the cache site and be able to find it before it got dark. The new plan when I got home was to skip dinner and email and cut my grass. I ended up finishing the last part of the yard in the dark. It was like a race between me and the sun - and I lost. I do have to say that the lawn looks like a perfect golfing green by the light of my mower's headlights. I can't wait to see what I missed and what it really looks like tomorrow morning :)

Bond

...Not James Bond, but Bond Lake. Today I took Randy out on his first Geocaching trip. We had a great hike near Bond Lake - the weather was perfect and the cache itself was really, really nice. It made for a wonderful afternoon. And a new geocacher has been added to the ranks today :)


I haven't been out on a hike since I changed jobs. I am so not used to the fresh air... I am going to fall asleep extra fast tonight!

And I would like to say to all those people out there who insist on driving in the left hand lane and stay even with the car in the right lane: Either drive faster or move over. People who drive like you only make the people behind you angry. That's how accidents happen.

Fireworks

One of the things I love about Geocaching is the fact that it brings me to so many places that are practically in my backyard that I never knew existed. Fall is my favorite time to go caching, too - I love everything about it... the temperature, the color of the leaves, no bugs, better satellite reception :P

The leaves are just beginning to change around here, and Sadie was going home today. How could I pass the chance for a little caching on the way? Sadie and I visited a few new places before she got dropped off. I was introduced to some really fantastic hiking trails that I never would have guessed existed where they are. I wish it was fall all year 'round...






































As I was unpacking and cleaning up from my day of adventure, I thought I heard gunshots. I'm not a hunter, but even I know that it's way too early for hunting season. And I'm reasonably sure that people aren't supposed to hunt when it's dark out either. When I went outside to see what was going on, I was treated to a very nice fireworks display. I never thought of Columbus Day as a fireworks weekend, but I guess my neighbors across the street do... Personal fireworks are illegal here, so I don't know how they got away with it, but it was still fun to watch!