Geocaching on The Islands!

It was Cam's birthday last weekend and while I had his gift purchased and ready to go, I always like to plan a fun activity for us to do to celebrate the day as well. Unfortunately he was born in February so activities are sometimes limited. However the forecast for last weekend was unseasonably warm so I told Cam to put on some shoes because we were going to take the ferry to Ward's Island (Toronto has a series of islands that are awesome and Cam and I love to visit often in the summer) and we were going to go Geocaching!

I had originally looked up a good cache on the Geocaching website and downloaded some compass and GPS maps to help us find it. For the record, we set out to try and find "Around Toronto- Escape", which was hidden on Ward's Island. Geocaching is pretty simple- there is a container hidden somewhere (the cache) and they give you the GPS coordinates and maybe a clue and you set out to find it. If you find it, you leave your name and the date that you found it in a log inside. If the cache is larger, there will sometimes be small items inside and you can take one as a trophy as long as you replace it with an item of your own. Got it? Ok!

Cam and I walked to the Ferry terminal and took the ferry across to the island. I have never actually taken the ferry TO the islands before (we usually just take a water taxi). It was fun! The boat is smaller than the big summer ones, with enclosed areas to stay warm and it breaks through the ice as it goes. Very neat!

Once on the island (the winter ferry only goes to Ward's Island, since that is the habited area), we walked over to Ward's beach, where the cache was hidden. It was so nice and warm out! Unfortunately we searched for a very long time and did not find the cache :(. It was rated pretty difficult to find so it wasn't altogether surprising that we couldn't locate it.

However, we made up for our loss by hopping on the Geocaching app and seeing there was another cache on Ward's Island that was rated a little easier. We wandered over to that area and found it pretty quickly! Here is the one that we found! There was no more room on the piece of paper that acted as a log so I started a new piece of paper and we replaced it exactly where we found it.

After that it started to get overcast and cold so we hopped back on the ferry to return to the city and home! All in all we agreed it was a fun adventure and we are going to try and find all the caches on the islands this summer- we love an excuse to go over there!