Five Caches in Burnaby
I always though Monday was a much nicer day for Thanksgiving. I also thought October was a nicer month for holidays. Then again, the worst of winter comes and goes much sooner in Greater Vancouver than it does in West Virginia (our coldest days linger around late January, which was a rude awakening when in the Vancouver area they tend to be in December). What I am getting at is, despite some light drizzle and greyness, the weather was quite pleasant on this day so I toured Burnaby with caches.
This one had been on my radar for some time as I had failed to find it on a previous trip. In retrospect, our errors were errors of ignorance (despite the fact I spent a year at the nearby institution of higher education). The cache is a little bison tube hidden next to something I could see from my grandma’s (and now my dad’s) apartment for my entire life so it has that extra cool factor. Someone also left a whole bunch of baseball caps neatly lined up on a park bench next to the area of the cache. What is up with that?
Pretty hats all in a rowGCV3CW – Dukes of Haszard
I was nearly stumped by this cache. So nearly stumped. The dampness of the ground and the large, unfamiliar insects of the area kind of gross me out so I had held out on seeking caches in specific areas (areas that also seemed out of place for a cache with such a low terrain rating). When I swallowed my pride and accepted the fact I didn’t have my husband around to do the gross stuff, I came up with the hide. I also realized that having a cache of surgical gloves would give me some wonderful peace of mind when touching some caches, little insects can gross me out too. What was awesome about this cache is that it took you to an urban creek that doubles as a fish habitat.
This little park was neat, it was surrounded almost entirely by the rear side of some medium-density apartments, sort of garden style. The challenge in placing a cache here is two-fold: there are many eyes here and all of the buildings (and all of the trees!) do not make gathering a set of accurate coordinates easy. A local resident spotted me poking around and he came right out and asked me what I was doing. I am always 100% honest, I explain that I am participating in what is sort of like a global scavenger hunt and one of the game pieces is hidden nearby. The gentleman then explained that he knew where it was, pointed me in the direction of it, and then asked me another question: does it have anything to do with drugs? And of course I said, NO! Absolutely not! Though I have often wondered if it had that appearance to those uninvolved—I think I just got my answer.
GC4DRPX – Squint Or You May Miss It
I have years of experience with Burnaby, yet this is an enormous park that I had never heard of! Hooray for geocaching! Without this cache, who knows how many more years would have passed and I would have never known about this really, really nice park. It never hurts to know about another park. What I loved about this cache is that it was easily accessible, yet it was still down a nice wooded trail. Truthfully, one of the things I liked most about this trip out west that I wish I saw more of in Morgantown was nicely developed wooded trails. I feel like the only time they bother with such things here is if they used to be a railroad.
Around my parts, in West Virginia, a cache like this would be in a bird house. Apparently in the Vancouver area they take on a different meaning. Thankfully, when the coordinates zero’d out (coupled with the description clearly indicating some places that the cache was NOT hidden) there was only one logical hiding place. The hide was not all that interesting, but it made me think about how there really are some mild regional dialects to geocaching and that that is really cool.