There's a geocaching event coming up this weekend, GAG-10 (Go and Get Em!!! 10) where the geocaching community in Ottawa goes out and hides a pile of caches and then runs out to find them on Friday and Saturday. My entry this time around is an old idea I had ages ago, but it became the perfect time to trot it out. The couple who put on this event, Tick and Nammie started a tradition with Gnomes many years ago, leaving plastic garden gnomes alongside their geocaches. A few of us picked up on it and did the same thing (I must have 4 or 5 gnome caches). So in honour of GAG10, and in honor of Tick and Nammie, a whole pile of us are doing gnome themed caches this time around.
So I took some cardboard, made some forms, encased them in chicken wire, made up a 2 parts sand 1 part cement mixture, wet it just right and sculpted 9 blocks to make a little copy of stonehenge, only Gnome-sized. There's screws embedded on the uprights to match holes in the cross piece to keep it sturdy and each upright has a 10 inch piece of re-bar in it to spike it into the ground to keep everything from going anywhere. I think it turned out really good.
I found a wicked spot for it on the side of a cliff and it is sheltered on all sides by foliage so it may stay undiscovered for quite awhile. There's always a danger that some freakin punk kids will find it and chuck it in the creek, but hey, maybe not. It's not exactly on the beaten path. I drove up , unloaded all these chunks of cement into a blanket in my kid's plastic wagon (I had my cover story all ready, "no it's not cut up pieces of a body I'm dumping in the creek officer!") and hoofed it up the hill and into the bush. Man that stuff is heavy!Here's a Flickr set of photos of me making it, testing it in my garden and finally placing it out in the woods.
