Day Two of Misadventures

It's happening again.

We had decided to travel to Wakefield to explore, and see why everyone raves about the place. I have a new premium geocaching membership (thanks to a friend as mentioned here) that allows me to plot a route and download caches along the way. That wasn't our primary purpose for the day, so, after seeing how this application worked, I narrowed the choices down to just thee caches around Wakefield and Chelsea and proceeded to download them to my GPS.

Off we went, armed with directions from Map Quest.  We were fine until we got onto Route 105 North. A big storm last month had apparently washed the road out and we found it was still closed.  We backtracked to Old Chelsea, where we searched for two separate geocaches, but didn't find either one. It was still a nice area though.

We decided to have lunch at a little coffee shop in Chelsea. Two sandwiches and two cold, non-alcoholic beverages came to $22.  Yes, the meal was enjoyable, but the price was outrageous!

We got directions on how to get to Wakefield by another route and off we went again.  We failed to get another couple of geocaches at that location also.  One because there were too many people around, and the other because there did not seem to be a safe way to reach it.  We have never had such bad luck finding caches in the past, so it's all just part of this curse we seem to be living under, I'm sure.

We spotted a covered bridge and tried to go down the road that led to it, but it was also closed. Perhaps there had been a washout there too.  Whatever the reason, we never got to go to the bridge.

We drove through the village and when we found a place to park at the far end, the first store we entered turned out to be a grocery store.  A sign indicated there was a boutique on the second floor, so we went up there. But a wall of heat hit us and we turned around and came back out.  The rest of the shops were quiet a distance down the road, so we set off to find another parking spot.  There weren't any.  So much for Wakefield.  I'll never know the attraction.  The steam train, by the way, has also been cancelled this summer because of the washout.

Within moments we discovered something didn't seem right as the blinker was going too fast.  It turned out that one of the signal lights had burned out.  We were in Quebec, with Ontario licence plates, so we stopped and bought a new bulb and got that problem fixed right away.

We decided to go to the Mackenzie King Estates.  We had not been there in a very long time.  It was relaxing to wander around the ruins, but other parts of the estate were closed.  Perhaps it was too late in the day. 

Gatineau Park is alive with bikers. There are far more of them than cars, as far as I could tell.  We always seemed to be close behind one, waiting for the road to be straight enough, or flat enough,  to see if anything was coming before pulling out to pass.  It make for some pretty slow travelling at times.

On the way home, we were starting to get hungry again. As we neared Rideau Carleton Raceway, we decided it would be a good place to stop for supper. $9.99 for the all you can eat buffet is a darn good deal.  We had to cruise around that parking lot quiet a bit too, before we found a spot someone had just vacated.  When we got inside we found the longest line up we have ever seen there.  Everyone must have had the same idea tonight. We turned around and came back out.  By this time we were laughing. 

Once again, the day didn't go as planned, but we enjoyed it anyway.