Sunset
K and I went to the Sunset Grill for dinner. This is the latest restaurant by the guy who started the eponymous Jerry's, sold it and went on to build Buckaroo's, then sold that and went on to start this little restaurant. Each successive restuarant has served up the same meat-heavy American menu while being more and more isolated and out of the way - Jerry's was a ways off from the city centre, Buckaroo's moved even further north, but the Sunset Grill has set new standards for being hard to reach, located deep within the grounds of a former military base, at the edge of the runway of what is now a small civilian airstrip. It is so out of the way and hard to find that the primary reason K and I went there tonight was so that I could waypoint it on my GPS, to guide us on future visits.
Isolation notwithstanding, the place has quite a following - families and groups just kept turning up while we were there. I don't blame them: it's hard to find places like these that are still so peaceful and quiet (runway notwithstanding - only smaller prop planes land there, infrequently, and there's something nostalgic about the sound of propellors anyway) if only because its far away from everybody else. The base itself seems like a person still slumbering in the '50s: the lamp-posts, the houses, the way the roads are laid out, everything seems just a little bit dated, like you've stepped into a little pool of the past still swirling in stasis, not yet moved on into the present. Sitting outdoors, under the shade of a massive tree (currently decorated for christmas like the milky way), watching the planes land and take off while the sun set over the airport was nice.
K and I went geocaching after that. I think I'll never go geocaching at night again: while there's less chance of having caches spotted (and ruined) by muggles* while you're retrieving them, there's also proportionately less chance of finding a cache in pitch-darkness (yes, we used torches ... but that kinda invalidates the "less chance of arousing the suspicions of curious muggles" argument, since nothing looks more suspicious than people with torchlights at night in some park beating through the bush). Some of these caches are really, really hard to find - our second and third tries were located on steep slopes that I would have hesitated to climb in the day time with good light, much less in the dark, and we didn't find them (although one of them seems to be inactive from the looks of the website).
The first one was fun though, located in the trunk of a large tree. A pleasant surprise was finding a Travel Bug in the cache (Guiding Star: it's the dog-tag-like thing attached to the star in the photo) which K and I will hold on to until we can put it into another cache. This one has travelled all the way from Victoria in Australia, and wants to have its picture taken next to a fire station - I think I know just the place to do that before we send it on its way. I'd love to hold on to it and bring it to Calgary, but its impolite to hold on to these things for more than 2 weeks - they really belong on the road, in a cache somewhere.
*non-geocachers
*non-geocachers
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