Spring Fling V3

Well it's Unofficial!

Myself and 10 local geocachers just held the largest Geocaching Event in Canadian History - Close to 300 Attendants (a far cry from the over 2000 attending Geowoodstock down in the states the weekend earlier, but hey.. ours was better!)

My Personal Responsibilities were to ensure there were lots of caches for people to do in the area, and to ensure there were events that were going on throughout the day. Gillian helped out alot with that one, she kept the kidlets occupied with games while I roamed around making sure everything was in it's proper place (Note for next year - Bring a bike, Walking sucks).

You would think that with a group of so many people there would be lots of complaints - but there wasn't. The only complaints I really heard were that "It was hot as Ick" and "You should have given us Trailmaps.. we got lost!".. which was more common then you might expect from a band of 10 well armed GPS enthusiasts.

Just after lunch I held an event called the "Triforce of Horrors", a reference that many of the Uber-Geeks understood well - and stayed away from since I was hosting it.. and apparently I have a reputation. There were 3 events that I held, where people could bet tickets for double-or-nothing style prize gambling. The Strength event was a pretty impressive Cabre Toss (I made the cabre the night before by the firepit). Almost half the contestants could not meet the requirement of tossing the cabre a selected distance, perhaps I made it a little too heavy. The Wisdom event dealt with some moderatly difficult puzzles and riddles.

The Courage event had people eating my cooking (A feat in itself!). I stopped by the Asian Supermarket by my work and picked up some food that us westerners may find somewhat confusing. Chickens Feet, Pigs Intestines, and Seasame-Soy milk. Tasty Tasty! All were prepared properly, but many people just gave me their prize tickets and ran.

Click here for a whole heck of a lot of pictures from the day:
Fizbot's Photo-Log


Preperations have already begun for next years event. We are trying to get the "MEGA" designation, meaning there are more then 500 attendees, but not too hard. Geowoodstock was quite disappointing from what I hear, sometimes smaller is better.

GO'ing to work

I got to "Train" in Toronto Recently, and shift my monotonous drive down to the city around a little bit. I drove to the train station and hopped on the train from Bradford to Union station in downtown toronto. From there I got onto the subway and took it to Young and Eglington. The simple process described above took about two and a half hours, meaning my daily commute times were about 5 hours a day. I did however save a whack of dough!





If I were have to driven down to Young and Eglington, it would likely have taken the same amount of time (two and a half hours each way). But I would also have to pay for the gallons of gas needed to get there, and the horrid idea of Toronto downtown parking (only 30$ daily? really?! What a steal!)





Train folk are friendly and personable it seems. Most seem to work in the bank industry, and despite my ratty clothes (hey I was on vacatio.. Training!~ give me a break!) they didnt seem to give me the cold shoulder.




My instructor for this training was impressed with the way i seemed to handle myself. All the people he has taught from the Northlands seem to be disoriented in Toronto. He told me the tale of the guy who would always arrive late at class because he was never able to get on the subways (he always used to give way to the less fortunate, and missed 3 or 4 trains before he was actually able to get onto the train).




Yes, there is a certain type of madness to Toronto Commuting. Push yourself onto the subway.. it is only there for 3 seconds. And when the doors on the go train open, BOLT FOR YOUR CAR. The first day I took it nice and easy getting to my car, and it took me 45 minutes to get out of the parking lot. The next day, with a little strategic planning, and a running pair of legs I was able to drive out right away.

Minesing Delight

Took another trip into the Minesing swamp this spring. There was a discussion on the COG forums about going into the swamp in a small armada of canoes to seek out the geocaches that I had put in there. It took alot of planning and many people had to back out after the realization that it really WOULD take the entire day to canoe the 24km journey down the river.

So early morning Saturday we set off. 2 Canoes, 4 People. Scott and I shared the old red battle canoe, while Pat and Mark shared the Blue Peterborough Express canoe. Other then discovering a new subspecies of groundhog (the Arboreal Minesing Treehog) it was a rather uneventful trip with great scenery to admire. We found all the caches, safe and sound! well relatively safe.. Of the four of us, only 1 managed to stay out of the river. And a picture is worth a thousand words, so here are the pictures of the trip!


The Terrain wasn't Friendly in spots



Very Hard to get into a canoe at this angle



The Old Log Cabin



Canoeing down the River



Empty Doorway



Working on the bridge



TreeHog



FLooded Forests



Parking Lot

Dice Emulator

Well.. everyone else seems to be doing it nowadays..

int getRandomNumber(){
return 4; //Determined by a completely unabited
//roll of a dice. Guaranteed Random.
}

Adventures in Pain - The Saga

After coming up with the title for this one, I decided I needed to look up the definition of saga. Now that I know what it means, I will attempt to write it as defined in the spirit of icelandic settlement!

After Battling the Grueling tortures of the voyage to the weekend, and the rough rocky wrong coast of Saturday, which was spent attempting to murderously hack away at the drywall in the nursury armed with wallpaper and a paintbrush, the trials and tribulations of exploring the inland were upon me. I had decided to Conquer an unpeopled trail known as the Bruce in the land maps refer to as Caledon - no doubt a Saxon named relic of previous failed settlements.



I rode my steed, famed Swift+, to the base of the escarpment that was before me. Knowing full well that the rough trails would not allow for his particular footprint I let him graze while I traversed the hilly peaks, and valleys above.



Included in my assortment of navigational tools was a map of 12 treasures, no doubt left by the Saxons of Caledon to tempt wrong coastal settlers such as myself. I worked my way through the mountains, and to my own suprise I did not fall from the escarpment (which is a personal best! I don't think I have ever walked the bruce without injuring myself!). I conquered the 20 kilometer stretch finding all the treasure and looting it fullheartedly. The Trek however was not without it's toils.



After my collapse at Swift+'s manly hooves, I gathered myself into the stirrups and assessed my situation. The hike may have been only 20 km laterally, but the vertical terrain range must have been much more then that. My feet were bleeding quite badly and I was in no shape to carry on. Swift+ however had another idea! While I was gone he had collected maps of other treasures!



We carried on for another 6 hours or so, until the point at which I could barely walk. Swift+ had had enough as well, and we decided to call it a day. Back to the wrong coast, and some time off my feet!



Despite being so very tired, I did not rest well that night. The Pus draining from my feet was quite disconcerting, and actually quite ticklish. All is fair, i guess!

The End

Surely, There must be a better way..

So, I asks Google, I asks "How does I get from Lefroy to London"

And Google says, 'e says
Use this map and follow the directions

Step 27 is a bit much for me, but dont you think they could come up with a better place then Boston harbour to go swimming?

April Fool, and The horse who got jiggy

Finally a weekend worth mentioning!

This Sunday was the much anticipated April fools Geocaching event that is held in Stouffville every year. I actually decided to participate this year instead of just coming to the pub, because I was invited to join a team "dedicated to winning" it, so I did! The Team Consisted of Myself, Tequila, AdventureRat, OwlNebula and Barnies Band Of Gold. Normally the April Fools caches are meant to expose the political boondogles of the Ontario and Federal Government, and take you to places that really show how messed up the situation is - But this year it was pretty straight forward, implying to me atleast that the cache owner is a conservative. :)

FOOLED YOU!
We started off in Markham at 10pm on Saturday for a strategy meeting (which is quite difficult because the rules of the game wouldn't be announced until midnight). We headed out to Stouffville for midnight, and parked the vehicles in the Go Station Parking lot while we set up the wireless laptops and blackberries in anticipation of the publishing of the rules for the midnight series. At midnight the much anticipated coordinates were published, and off we went.

The coordinates took us to a country intersection, which would normally be pretty quiet at midnight on a Sunday morning, but tonight it was swarming with geocachers turning over every rock, and inspecting every roadsign very carefully. After a short search the container was found, we gathered the coordinates and bailed out of there to the second stage. We gained an early lead after anticipating how access to this stage would best be attempted en-route. After that we had our lead all the way to the final. Despite what we were hopeing for - there was no helpful information in the cache - It was just an attempt to make us loose sleep by the cache owner so we would be more edgy tommorow when the real marathon started. We had guessed that this is probably what was going to happen, but didn't want to risk loosing potentially helpful information for the race tommorow.

On the walk back to the cars I lost my GPS. That is what happens sometimes, especially when it is loosely strapped on, and you are trudging through thick forest and swamp. I went to work after that (for 2am) just in case something bad was going to happen to the servers after the "Original" Daylight savings time switch - Nothing did! So I went to the teams house, got 2 hours of sleep, then got up to start the next round!

We arrived at the trail again around 6am to look for my GPS. I had a suspicion where it was.. Somewhere in an 800m trek through the forest may seem vague, but I have dropped my GPS a few times and always managed to find it. AdventureRat lent me his BFL while he gathered some breakfast from the local Timmies and waited at the GO station launch point.

At 7am the second round began, the owner released 2 sets of coordinates from which to start, we chose to go to the south checkpoint due to its proximity to the Go station. From there we began doing stage after stage, each one being a First-Find, which was great! We didnt see anyone else until we started doing the stages that began at the north checkpoint.

After finding 14 of the 15 stages we were pretty sure we knew the equation to determine the final stage. We went for it, and turned up a prank cache left by the owner. We decided that we needed to find the last stage, and found that as well - but it gave us nothing new, so we returned to our original suspicion of where the final might be. It was hidden very well, but to tell you more would ruin the suprise to those wishing to find it. We were first-finders, and quite happy about it. But we were also quite exhausted (no where near as much as the guy who rode his bike though).

While I was doing that, Wife was going on an expedition trying to prove the vetrenarian wrong! She has a stud colt that has been diagnosed as "Psychologically Emasculated", meaning he still thinks he is a baby horse, and doesn't want to grow up. In this case it is because he is so far down the social heirarchy at the farm that he just doesn't try to climb it, despite being the only horse on the farm with a pair of testicles (which are quite small due to his condition). Vets didn't see much hope of the horse ever mounting another horse, let alone being able to breed.

Crystal went on a mission to try and find a young horse that was so submissive that the young stallion would have to feel higher on the social pecking order. Apparently it worked. As soon as the young mare got to the farm she got quite the welcome!