Current at 11/6/2011 (Online waypoint URL) You have already found this cache! Master Index    Nearest Caches Bishop Garden by Pa_Bottle (1.5/1.5) N49° 49.698  W97° 07.083 (WGS84) UTM  14U   E 635350  N 5521239 Use waypoint: GC2K0XM Size: Small    Hidden on 12/1/2010 In Manitoba, Canada Difficulty:     Terrain:                     Small Lok N lok I drive past here regularly and noticed it might be a good area for a cache. So here it is. In the summer months a flourishing neighborhood garden area is nearby, in winter a barren white landscape. Not too much stealth cover at GZ, so stealth will be required at times. Cache should remain winter friendly.Original contents are a log sheet, a FTF certificate and pencil. Congrats to Jean Deniche on the FTF.

Additional Hints (There are no hints for this cache)

10/23/2011 by Kabuthunk
Looks like the garden is a little bit iffy these days . Gotta say though... I grew up in the country, with a number of fields beside or near us over the years growing sunflowers... and the row of them (albeit kinda droopy and brown after the last few frosts) are by far the tallest sunflowers I've ever seen. I don't know if it's more fertile soil, a slightly different type, or that they're more spaced out... but damn those are some tall sunflowers. You could just about climb one of them like a tree .

So it's obvious what first caught my eye when I arrived. Before arriving however, I had decided to take advantage of the particularly nice weather (for late October) today to go for possibly the last bike ride before the snow falls. Unless it's like last year and it doesn't snow until like... end of November, just to spite my last-year-rediscovered-love-of-snowshoeing. In either case, taking advantage of the sun, I headed out, did a few chores that involved leaving the apartment, and then started randomly biking in an arbitrary direction to see where it would take me. I ended up wandering South, mainly because when I had a random inkling to turn, there was a car or something in the way so I said nuts to it and kept going.

I eventually saw that this cache was sitting here, vaguely close to the general direction I was headed. So I pointed the GPS at the waypoint and continued on my merry way. A few hundred meters and one turn later, and I found myself nearing ground zero. I've passed by this garden countless times on the way to work, and have always wondered how community gardens work. It could just be that I'm paranoid and pessimistic at the best of times, but I'd think there would be problems with vandalism or territory disputes. But it obviously works in some form or another, since I've seen multiple community gardens spread around here and there. Although at this particular one, I was a bit perplexed as to what was under that giant plastic sheet over half of the garden, covered with a ton of branches to hold it down. I assume it's some random annual plant where the roots can't survive the winter on its own (and if that's the case, planting it outside in Winnipeg wasn't the wisest of things to do), but curiosity still crept into my mind.

Put all of that aside for a minute however, I did a quick walk back and forth to see if anything 'jumped out' at me. Not spotting anything cache-like (and checking a few things that turned out to not be a cache container), I put my bike down and actually looked at the GPS to give me a better idea. I had the correct general vicinity, but had initially focused my concentration on the wrong side of it. Once I was in the right area, it took me a few minutes to spot the container. It took a bit of zig-zagging, but eventually I stumbled across the right area to look at, and once I was standing in the right place, the cache revealed itself to me pretty quickly. I had figured it'd probably be hidden either in this manner, or possibly one other. I quickly signed the logbook and dropped in a chainmail ball. After replacing the cache container, I sauntered over to my bike and took another look over the garden. Yep... doesn't look like too much is left growing right now. If I recall correctly, I think I saw some beets there, which growing up has taught me can live through just about anything and keep going. Might be wrong though.

In either case, it was a nice bike ride which included a nice relaxing geocaching in the middle of it. Can't go wrong on a nice Sunday afternoon .

Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and chainmail ball