Finally Seeing the Light

In the Maritimes, lighthouses have helped to keep ships off the rocks for centuries.  Lights would warn the crew about rocks they might not have seen in the dark. Now, with a Global Positioning System (GPS), mariners know exactly where they are in all kinds of weather.  They no longer have to steer by the stars or try to figure out where they are by what lighthouse they see in the distance.  Unfortunately lighthouses are no longer needed and are being decommissioned.

For several years I have wanted to get back to Nova Scotia to do the lighthouse tour before they all vanish.  One year we got as far as New Brunswick, and ended up doing what I called the All Saints tour instead. (St Stephen, St Andrews, St George, St John, and St Martins), and another year we tried the American route, and enjoyed Vermont and New Hampshire and never did get to the coast.  We tend to head in a general direction, but if we end up discovering things along the way, that's fine. We are, after all, on vacation, and enjoying ourselves if more important than getting to a specific destination.  Last year I let the possibility of bad weather keep us from the east coast and we had a staycation instead.

This year, we did actually get to the Nova Scotia, and followed the Lighthouse Route along the South Shore.  Even though I had lived in NS as a child, I had a specific shape in my head as what a Canadian lighthouse looked like. We saw so many different varieties, I know now that there is no one shape, even in Nova Scotia.


Naturally, the people of Nova Scotia do not want to see their lighthouses disappear, so they are finding ways to preserve them. The Nova Scotia Lighthouse Preservation Society maintains a list of lighthouses on their website, including ones that are open to the public.

 I know we missed several, but here are the ones we saw:

 This is the Gilbert Cove Lighthouse.  It was also the home of the lighthouse keeper and his family. Now it's a museum.

The Cape Forchu Light Station was the most impressive site we visited. The apple core style lighthouse guards the entrance to Yarmouth harbour.  It was the last lighthouse in Nova Scotia to have a resident light keeper. It was also the first one to be taken over by a municipality. 

It has 19 acres of groomed grounds to explore.  It's so beautiful there I was inspired to paint. If you make to South Shore of Nova Scotia, don't miss this one.

We visited a Historical Acadian Village, and there was a little lighthouse there, tucked back among the trees. There were, admittedly, other things to be found there that I found more interesting. 

A lobster fisherman by the name of Olen, who works at the village during the summer, is a particular delight. We caught him demonstrating how to make gill nets by hand. He is full of interesting stories, and loves to share them.

 We visited Shag Harbour, the site of the famous UFO sighting, and found a red and white lighthouse there too.

Near Bridgewater we located the Fort Point Lighthouse Park.

Then we took some back roads to nowhere, and after a few false roads finally located another lighthouse in a very secluded area.  This one was more the iconic shape I expected to find throughout the province. 

And of course we cannot leave out the world famous lighthouse at Peggy's Cove.

On the way home, we stopped by one more on the opposite side of the province.  This one is known as  the 5 Island Lighthouse. It is situated on a 22-acre  park on the Bay of Fundy with panoramic view of the Five Islands, Minas Basin and remarkable tides. The style of this lighthouse is known as a  “Pepper Pot”.

In historic downtown Fredericton, we found another lighthouse along the St. John River. This one is known as the Lighthouse on the Green, and functions as a restaurant.



 We have always driven right past Fredericton, but this was our excuse to actually go downtown. There were other fascinating things to see in the same vicinity.

.....like the soldiers who do a little changing of the guard ceremony at city hall.

And finally, in Edmonston, we found what was more of a Blockhouse than a lighthouse, but it too stood on a rock overlooking the water.




It may have taken us years to finally do the lighthouse tour, and though there were still many we didn't see, we had a very enjoyable vacation.

You Don't Have to Win to Be a Winner!

When my youngest son was small, he used to go bowling every weekend at the Kemptville Bowling Lanes. Now it's his oldest son's turn, and for the past seven years he has taken on the challenge. This year he qualified to take part in the 4 Steps to Stardom, and recently went to the Provincial Tournament in Brantford.

In order to qualify, first you have to have good attendance at the weekly games at the local lane.  Then, if more than 4 bowlers wish to take part in the Singles Zone Final they have a bowl off there, to determine who can advance.   The winners from the Zone Final go on to the Provincial Tournament, and the winners from there go on to the Nationals.

In December, my 10 year old grandson became an Ottawa Valley Champion, and qualified to move on to the Provincials in Brantford. That got us all excited.  As I understand it, he is only bowler from the Kemptville to ever advance to the Provincials.

Because he came in first at the Zone Finals,  he was even interviewed on the radio.

Now the neat thing was that when I was busy bragging about him on Facebook, a lady I met the

previous year at her niece's wedding jumped into the conversation to ask where and when the Provincial tournament was being held. It seems her granddaughter would be there too, and would be representing Grimsby.

We made plans to join my son and his family to attend the Provincial Tournament in Brantford. It was the first chance to give our new GPS a good trail run.  I've always been the family navigator, but I think I can actually retire now.  Not only does this handy gadget tell you how to best get to where you want to go, it also warns you well in advance of traffic slowdowns ahead, so you can avoid them if you feel that necessary. 

For a while there, we were worried that he wouldn't get to go as our little bowler sprained his ankle a couple of weeks before the tournament.  Luckily the young heal quickly and after wondering for a week or so, the trip was on.

The tournament was great fun, and it was even better since I had friends to visit with and two kids to watch, instead of one.  They were not competing against each other as they are in totally different divisions, due to both age and gender.

While my grandson did not win the tournament, he is still an Ottawa Valley Champion, and now officially the eleventh best bowler in the Bantam Boy division in all of Ontario.  We are extremely proud of him.  Since he's only 10, I'm sure there will be more bowling competitions in his future. 
 

Mapping in Uncharted Waters

I'm copying this entry from my geocaching blog.    My original geocaching blog had a good following, and this blog does also, but I since I could not connect the two I created a new geocaching blog, connected to this account.  People aren't really finding that one so I may give up trying to keep the two separate in the future.

I have acquired a new GPS.  I have a cyber buddy who recently became interested in geocaching, after listening to me tell my tales for the past 4 years.  When he showed me some screen captures of what his gadget could do, I knew it solved my problem.  Normally, when we go geocaching, I print off a stack of pages for the caches we want to find.  Sometimes we don't do all of them and I store the left overs in a binder.  The binder has become rather full, and really, that's a big waste of paper and ink if we never go looking for those caches....or if I get frustrated looking for the right ones and print off new ones. 

My friend's new GPS is a paperless model. That means that he can see whatever is on the web page, right there on the GPS.  He does not have to print off a hard copy like I have had to do.  He also downloaded some more detailed maps, and I can tell you that the maps that come with these units don't show any of the back roads we would normally be travelling, or for that matter the highway that runs through my village.  Oh sorry, it's now a county road....but still, it should be on there.

I had been considering getting either a laptop or a tablet, so we could look up caches where ever we might be.  Of course, you can't always get a signal, so I was hesitating.  Until my friend showed me his Dakota20, I didn't know you could get a paperless GPS.  He had told me what he paid, and thought he got a good bargain.  Then suddenly GPS City was advertising the Dakota20 for a lot less than even my friend paid. And the sale was only good for a couple of days.

Well I have a GPS, so at first I ignored the sale.  Then I thought a bit, and realized the main reason I wanted a tablet, or whatever, was so we could go geocaching where ever we might be.  The GPS was certainly a lot cheaper than a tablet or a laptop, and it would save me a fortune in paper and ink as well.  I quit hesitating and ordered it.

Then the fun began. My friend insisted that I would find the Dakota20 a lot more useful if I downloaded a better map.  There are some you can buy, and there are some you can get for free. I opted to try a free one first, but the Canadian ones were no longer available for direct download so it was suggested I get one by something called Bit Torrent.  What the heck is that?  I went to watch the video that was supposed to guide me though that, but it started out by trying to get me to download the thing that had been disabled.  So much for that.  My friend jumped in and sent me a couple of map files to try, but he didn't tell me how to load them, no matter how many times I asked.

Now, let's consider that I have found at least 209 caches so far, without the aid of a fancy map.  That includes the 4 I've located since this new gadget arrived this week.  We could carry on as we always have, and I'd only have to print a map of the area we were about to cover.  That still saves a lot of paper and ink.  But I'm stubborn, and decided to keep trying, just to see if a fancier map would really make that much of a difference.

Today I finally figured out how to do it.  It took me 3 days....and I used to think I was pretty good at this technical stuff.  When I opened that map though, it wasn't any different than the one I already had....other than that it didn't have the geocaches I'd loaded onto the other one.  Back to square one. But at least now I have a clue how to get the maps to show up on the GPS.  I'll try the other map file tomorrow. I hope loading and deleting multiple maps doesn't fragment the drive on the GPS as that could slow things down.  This is new territory for me, so if you have any advise, I'd be happy to listen.

Not Quite Easter Eggs

Sorry people. I have a lot on my mind lately and I want to express myself, but it’s piling up so fast I not only can’t get it all out, I just can’t get started. Unfortunately that’s sort of what happened to my other blog. I got behind and kept wanting to catch up before entering anything new. It never happened and that blog died. Well, maybe. I have something new to post there now, but perhaps I’ll just include it in this one instead, as I think most of my readers are following me here now anyway.

So, where to start. Oh my.....
Perhaps I’ll start with what I just mentioned above.

I’ve been geocaching for the first time this year, and while we didn’t go very far, I do like to tell people where and when I’ve been.

I live in a tiny village, but even here there are four caches available for those who want to look for them. I’ve found a couple of them before, and even another that no longer exists. Easter Sunday was a really nice day to go for a walk, so I took my hubby and headed out.

The first one we looked for (GC26GHY) was what they call a multi cache. That means the way point that is given is not the one where you will find the cache itself. We had to check out a sign at the given way point, find all the numbers on it and then do some mathematics using them. Finding all the numbers is not as easy as it sounds, but we managed, and got the math right too. We know that because the nice person who was giving the clues gave us a way to know for sure that we were arriving at the correct numbers without actually telling us what they were.

Then, that’s where we ran into trouble. One of the numbers would tell us the distance to the cache in metres, while the other was supposed to give us the bearing to the cache in degrees from True North. It said to project a way point on my GPS to calculate where the cache was located. Uh huh. Some of you may understand that but I sure didn’t. I’ll be having to consult my manual to see if my GPS model even does such a thing. I could have tried to walk in a circle, but between the canal and the river, I’m sure I would have drowned in the process.

Never mind. We’re brave souls and we set out to find it anyway. We have enough experience at this that we figured we’d have some idea of where to look.....or at least in which direction to look, and hope we’d find a logical hiding place along the way. What I found was that the beavers had been very busy since my last walk in that area. While I was checking that out, my hubby poked about in a few places, and then found the cache using what he referred to as "man sense." Lovely. I am the registered member of www.geocaching.com, by the way, and I just log him in as +1 after my caching name when we find a cache. So hey, he may have found it, but I’ll still get the credit :)

The other cache (GC1NWQ6) was also nearby. I had looked for it for a few moments last fall, when I first learned about it. I followed the clues and looked where it should have been and it wasn’t. I wasn’t dressed for the adventure so decided to come back someday and look again. I did, and since I didn’t find it where I had expected to previously, I handed off the GPS to the hubby and he went right too it. And yes, it was right where it should have been! It was NOT there when I looked. But I could see where some smart #@$ may have put it just to make things more difficult. Or maybe that’s where it actually belongs and some lazy person didn’t put it back there this time. Either way, we (he) found both caches that day, but it did wet our appetite to go hunting again soon.