Fine Weather for Exploring

It was a nice day on Saturday, so we went exploring. We started off by visiting a couple of Farmer's Markets. The first one was just a little one, in Merrickville, but I had discovered, by way of Twitter, that Louise Ingram was going to be there. That’s the lady that makes lampwork beads and had the famous Merrickville Monkeys go into space on the last flight of the Atlantis a year ago. I found her on Twitter originally when she mentioned that Monkeys were loose in Merrickville, and I had to figure out what she meant by that. I’ve been talking to her, online, off and on ever since. It was nice to finally meet her.

The second market we visited was in North Gower (that’s Go-er, not Gow-er) and the lady with the buttermilk pies was there again. Oh, those things are sooooo good! But we were not headed home and it would have been too hot in the car all day, to take a pie with us, so we just bought some date squares to have as a treat with our lunch further down the road. While we were there I won a draw and got a cute little hand made stuffed doll. Luckily it’s a boy doll as I only have grandsons.

While in North Gower, we went looking for a geocache ( GC1PEP9 ) at a nice little park we had never seen before. This is why I like geocaching. We drive through this town fairly often, and stop to shop mainly at the Farmer’s Market and the interesting shop across the road, but we’ve never really explored the village itself.

This park was along Steven Creek. It’s not big. There’s a picnic table, a swing set and a memorial but I would never have seen the cute little doggie in the swing if we had not been hunting for the cache. His owner would give him a little push now and then and the dog really seemed to enjoy swinging. He sat there quite contentedly except for once, when he saw a squirrel. It was a good thing he was tied to the swing as he got all excited and took a flying leap out of it.  By the time he reached the end of is leash,  he had the swing stretched out to it's limit.

 The cache was not too hard to find, though the wind had blown it off it’s usual perch. Actually that may have made it that much easier to find since I just wondered what that was on the ground and went closer to look.

From there we headed to Manotick where Dickinson Days was in full swing. It was expanded this year as they even had the main street through town blocked off. And I do believe there was a Flash Mob dancing while we were there. I heard the music and I saw there was a large number of people moving in unison, while others climbed on whatever they could find to get a better view. Other than that, I guess I missed the performance.

I had a listing for a cache ( GC27BEG )on Manotick’s Long Island (which is what Manotick actually means in Ojibwa anyway) so we went looking for that. Without a GPS I could imagine getting lost on that island. We stopped to ask directions when our twists and turns in the car had us headed in the wrong direction, and eventually found another park where this cache was supposedly hidden. The clue said "No swimming required," but the area the GPS took us to had water at the bottom or a rather steep embankment. We had a good look around but didn’t find it, and since I was more worried about slipping and taking a sudden swim, I called a halt to this search. We had, after all, seen that this island was bigger than imagined, had some pretty good hills and several rather nice parklands. I didn’t need to find the cache to feel that the adventure had been successful.