Hiking up Luskville Falls..

Took the afternoon off to take a hike up Luskville Falls today, always nice to do before the bugs hit. I seem to forget how much I huff and puff on the way up the side of this small mountain every time I visit. It's sure nice to get to the top where it flattens out. We went today in search of the new "Up the Pontiac" geocache.

On the way to Gatineau park I almost got us all killed when I passed by this red light with a countdown timer by the side of the road. It was just this dinkly little light on a pole, at first I thought it was a radar gun thing, showing your speed, but I wasn't going 50 so I ignored it and kept barreling on.. Then, as I rounded the corner I saw all these pylons blocking the other side of the road and it became obvious that they are using the one lane for both directions of traffic and the red light with the timer meant that there was another light somewhere down the road that was green and the countdown was the seconds until it was going to change color and stop traffic from running into us. I quickly threw it in reverse and backed down where I had came just in time to let 3 oncoming cars through. Doh! Dangerous! I'm sure my Ontario plates impressed...

I was probably distracted by the great discussion we were having on the current price of gas ($1.03 in Ontario and $1.13 in Quebec). Tripper and I are watching this old 70's series called "Connections" and the first episode talks about the New York power outage in the 70's and what happens to civilization when we are made prisoners by technology. That is to say, if we run out of oil or electricity and our TV's and cell phones and blackberry's stop working we pretty much have to get out of the city (where we have everything shipped in, we don't really grow food there) somehow, find a farm, convince the owners to let us stay, or kill them all if they won't (it was a pretty heavy show) hope they have a plow and seeds and livestock and start over again..
Man... They better figure out that oil thing. We were all in the big ice storm and later on, the North American summer blackout in Ontario and New York and we came out of that ok. As long as there's food to go around nobody gets too crazy, but once that's gone.. Look out..

So, we hiked up the base of the falls, took a bunch of pics, got to the top, found the cache (coords were 20m off), ended up moving it so no one would accidentally stumble upon it (it had been found by hikers recently and was visible in it's hiding spot 2 feet from the trail, but it's a great area for a cache so hopefully it will last longer here). Tripper broke out a toberlerone bar and a cigar and we celebrated the find by lazing around in the sun up there for about 2 hours.

More weird discussions. One of them centered around the forgotten technical name for that friend of yours that breaks into your house for you in case you meet a tragic death by some accidental means and his one and only job is to remove all of your porn (hehehehehe) so the people that clean out your study after you;re dead aren't embarrassed. This person also gets to keep it. It's from some TV show called "Coupling" or some such thing. I say the term should be "porn ninja" but what do I know..

Tripper also found an old SLR camera with about 20 pics in it. I'm sure he'll have them developed. I wonder what they are? Here's a stiched together Panoramic using the free software package autostitch. You just take a pile of pics, moving the camera around a bit at a time, then this thing pieces them together in a pano. I need more overlap next time!