Geocaching in Centennial Park (The Successful Attempt)

Saturday was the second time in two weeks I've been to Centennial Park; that's the most I've ever been to Centennial Park in any of the years I've been away in school.  Five years ago, when I started on this whole 'higher education' thing, neither I nor any of my friends had a car, so getting there was a little bit of a problem.  Centennial Park, for those who don't know, rests at the north end of Thunder Bay by Boulevard Lake just off the highway.  It's a beautiful area even if the weather's terrible: tons of trails, miles of forest, and, if you walk far enough, a series of small waterfalls called the Cascades.

View from the bridge at the entrance to Centennial Park.

The logging camp at Centennial Park.

We didn't make it that far though.  Not on Saturday.  Saturday, we - five of us - tackled the latest in a growing list of history labs: geocaching in Centennial Park.  It was the same reason I was there with J.P. a week ago, except that last week, we was brutally, monumentally, unbelievably unsuccessful with the whole endeavour.  We were using J.P.'s Blackberry as a GPS, which meant that we couldn't punch in coordinates, only check our current coordinates.  Having taken a full day course in orienteering, I figured I could manage in spite of our technological deficiencies.  Of course, I'd taken this full day course at age 13, and I've since forgotten much of what I've learned for the sake of other, more important information...and random, useless trivia.  On our first trek, J.P. and I ended up at the highway, where we stood for a while, thinking about what to try next because, clearly, walking blindly into the forest was not working.  We ended up backtracking, reading and rereading the instructions, and following the train tracks around in a full circle before we finally gave up.  We grabbed some coffee and took a quick walk to Hillcrest Park with another friend of ours to diffuse from the failure of the day.

This weekend, we decided, was going to be different.  We weren't going to leave Centennial until we found the geocache, even if it killed us.  J.P. and I rallied together some friends and headed out at one to wander, equipped this time with what we hoped was a better GPS device than the Blackberry.  We weren't disappointed at first: the second GPS was better than the Blackberry.  Unfortunately, none of us knew how to follow the coordinates without getting more and more lost.  Worse, the GPS was set to French as the owner, my friend, is French-Canadian, so only she and her brother were able to understand what was written on screen.  Again, we abandoned the GPS, because it wasn't helpful, and we stuck to wandering aimlessly up and down the railroad tracks, again, following the directions on our instruction sheet.  Some former students had assured us the geocache was close to the logging camp, so we thought it wouldn't be difficult to find. But just like last week, we were stumped, and unlike last week, we were on a schedule: my friend with the GPS had to get back into the city for work. 

With only a half an hour before we had to leave, J.P. and I finally started to call in reinforcements.  I texted an old friend and current colleague, affectionately called Dr. Devine, who survived the education program last year and completed the assignment.  Devine was good enough to come to Centennial with a friend of his, one who had also found the geocache, and show us the way.  Apparently, the geocache was exactly where the instructions said it would be: by the logging camp, along the tracks, in a chopped tree.  I think the whole park could hear our declarations of joy at the moment.  We were pretty frustrated by the time we were finally showed where it was.  J.P. even ended up kissing the jar, he was so happy.

The geocache!

J.P. kisses the cache. 

Dr. Devine approves of our finding the cache.

I realize that this isn't exactly the account most people are going to post.  Technically, J.P. and I did get help on our assignment.  But I don't think the reward of geocaching is the actual finding of the geocache.  Like some many other things in life, geocaching is about the process.  It's about action verbs like walking, wandering, searching, and exploring.  When we tell this story, like I've done here, we'll talk about the frustration of failing and the joy of succeeding; we'll talk about all the wrong turns we made, all the extra steps we had to take.  It was those steps that made it memorable.


Geocaching, I've also noticed, is about being a part of something: a group of friends, a classroom, a community.  The fact that there was a group of us together made the hours pass by in a sunlit blur, and it made the process of finding that much more fun, because we knew there was going to be a celebration at the end of it all.  This is definitely the sort of exercise I'd like to repeat with the same group.  I would like a functioning GPS though...or some orienteering skills.