amateur radio, geocaching, photography, Uncategorized

Another Geocaching Marathon Completed!

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Saturday, I went out and joined 12 other people on the Great Lord Simcoe 24 Hour Geocaching Marathon. This involved staying up for 24 hours straight, by visiting geocache after geocache. Quite the busy day.

We had some guests from out of town on this year’s tour: MsKardiac, and CCCooperAgency (who has the most finds worldwide). The tour was around Kitchener/Waterloo and we ended up visiting 51 geocaches – a new record for me in a 1 day period. From what I can calculate, it looks like we drove about 140km, and hiked another 40km or so.

The picture with this story was taken during the night as we waited for some of the group to return to the main group after getting separated. It was a full moon – which made for easy visibility of the geocaches, but it also obscured the Perseids meteor shower that was also occurring. Other notable events along the trip:

– carrgirl started the day with only 4 caches to her name. Now she’s found 53 or so.
– we had three vehicles that were co-ordinated over amateur radio
– dreadnaught hit the 100 caches mark
– we stopped at least four times to load up at Tim Horton’s.
– Dr. Clean had some fun at my expense, using hornets in a gate as the medium
– The entire group climbed up a rock face and stood in a small cave
– Keith Watson startled CCCooperAgency and a few other cachers jumping out from a cornfield at 10:00 or so

Next year’s marathon is already in the planning stages, and is going to take place in the Whitby, Ontario area. Looking forward!

geocaching, mexico, photography, travel bugs, Uncategorized, vacation

Geocaching Wrap-Up: Mexico

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Obligatory Resort Shot

Originally uploaded by gregorypleau.

As you’re probably aware now, I’ve been out of the country for the last week. My sister was married in Mexico, and that gave me an excuse to add some more exotic locations to my geocaching log.

For the couple weeks coming up on the trip to Mexico, I started grabbing all kinds of Travel Bugs for the 2000+ kilometer journey, as it would be a big leap for some of them, and I checked Geocaching.com for where I may find myself caching.

Unfortunately, my caching was rather limited, as the week was full of wedding events and sight-seeing tours near the resort in the Mayan Riviera. The only caches that were handily available within an hour’s drive were virtuals, unless I wanted to take the 1 1/2 hour drive up to Cancun, or the hour long drive and hour long boat ride to Cozumel. Both of those were not options, so my “farthest from home” and “most southerly” geocache finds are now marked by a virtual in Tulum.

Fortunately, I did manage to get some physical geocaching in when we ventured out to the ancient Mayan city of Chichen-Itza. The grounds have one virtual, and two physical geocaches. That’s the good news. The bad news was that we DNF’d on one cache, and the other was a 35 mm film canister tucked into part of an ancient structure and behind some rocks. Not very travel-bug friendly – all the bugs ended up returning to Canada with me, but I’ll be logging a mileage drop for each of them nonetheless.

Not to mention: do you know how un-nerving it is to remove rocks from a 2,000 year old building with Mexican Federal police wandering around. Really uncool. On the other hand, the park is crawling with thousands of muggles. Tourists and peddlers alike.

Still, it was nice to put one of my “Canadian Flag” edition stickers in a log book where English is not the primary language. Just be careful out there, because the jungle isn’t forgiving – especially when you’re talking about ancient sites!

So, now I’ve geocached in 2 Provinces, 3 States, and 3 countries. I also set a new mark for “lowest geocache found” at 77 feet above sea level.

geocaching, mexico, photography, random thoughts, Uncategorized, vacation

Mexico – Day 4

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Today was a fun day. Made it to the ruins at Tulum, which is always an interesting site. The iguanas were everywhere here, and they are well fed by the size of them. I hope the kittens we saw napping at the gate know to stay away from them. We also scored a geocache find here, albeit a virtual….
This was the first time I’ve been here with a guide, which made things interesting, but cut into our site-seeing a bit. The fact that the bus was 45 minutes late this morning didn’t help either.

After we visted the ruins, we made our way to Xel-Ha, an ecological water park. The key attraction here is the snorkeling and we spent hours on that part.

All in all, that was a fun day.

random thoughts, Uncategorized

Goodbye Grandma

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Today started with sad news, my grandmother passed away back home.

She has always been an inspiration to me, and I’ll miss her. I last saw her just a couple weeks ago and I’ll never forget how she smiled then.

I used to sneak into her freezer when I was younger and steal her cookies. She’d open up the freezer later and fiind an empty cookie jar. It was at her place that I learned how to climb a tree, and how to count in French.

She taught me how to be polite, and we spent hours listening to her play the organ and piano , whenever we went to Wallaceburg.

We’re going to miss you, grandma.

random thoughts, Uncategorized

Mexico: Day 2

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Rained today, rare for this place. We had a pretty good thunderstorm blow in off the Carribean. The iguanas and lizards have decided to show up, and it seems there is one hiding under every piece of cement with a hollow under it.

Today also meant heavy use of the Internet cafe here, grabbing some PDA backup files from the home server as egress made my SD card forgetfull again. This part of my pocketpc wears thin on me.

We made our a la carte dinner reservations and as expected, the better restaurants are booked solid. Don Pablo was certainly a good meal though.

I wonder how my cats are doing? They would have probably liked the little Mexican stray we ran into after dinner. We’re looking forward to Chitzen-Itza and Xel-Ha later. I’m still having a lot of fun with the camera and those spots will be real busy photo days for me.

To my friends at home – “73 de Gregory in Tulum”

geocaching, photography, random thoughts, Uncategorized

Mexico: Day 1

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Landed in Cancun at 11:30 local time, then enjoyed a long bus ride to the resort. We stopped en route at the Borcelo – that’s where the Canadians were murdered. Too bad, because that really looks like a nice resort too. This is the first time I’ve ever gone “all inclusive” so it’s going to be an interesting week. Weather here is cloudy and humid, but no rain and it breaks the summer heat here.

Looking forward to the photos, already got a few “keepers”. I’m also looking forward to dropping all these travel bugs I’m carrying…. 🙂

funny, random thoughts, Uncategorized

A Twist on the Bluecoats

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I have to blog about this one.

It seems a group of people took it upon themselves to pull a prank against Best Buy. They got about 80 people together, put on clothes that looked very similar to the standard uniform and walked in one at a time. Inside, they stood around at places like the ends of aisles.

When customers mistook them for staff, they offered help if they could, and when the actual store staff approached them, they claimed to be ‘waiting for somebody’. Didn’t take long for this to wear thin on the store management.
You gotta love the reactions that included managers screaming out loud that these people don’t work here, having anyone wearing a blue shirt thrown out of the store and calling the police in. Some of the participants went and tried the same stunt in a nearby Blockbuster video too.
Oh, and the improv group filmed their experiences too. Apparently, they may pull this stunt in a Target store next. Entertaining for sure, not sure I’d want to try a stunt like that, but I certainly enjoyed reading their stories.

funny, geocaching, random thoughts, Uncategorized

Detonate in place: It’s not just for Geocaches anymore!

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With all the recent press of people finding geocaches and having them blown up by the local authorities, it would appear Hollywood was feeling left out. Now they’re blowing up newspaper boxes.

It seems, someone thought it would be great if a bunch of these newspaper boxes would start playing the Mission Impossible III movie theme when they were opened. I’ll bet that spilled a few coffees around 6am the first day they did that. Commuters don’t like surprises.

Apparently, commuters get nervous when they spot a red box with wires protruding out of it in this post 9-11 world. Reminds me of the milk contest carton that the bomb squad took care of a few years ago. The winning cartons would make a “moo” sound if you won, but the would-be winning person noticed the wires first. What about the guy that robbed the bank with an empty milk carton….