2020 was a very strange year for everyone. The largest adjustment I had to make was staying home. Since we retired in 2007 we have travelled a lot, and I love to travel. We had a road trip planned for the spring to drive to Houston, Texas after the birth of our first grandchild in early March. But then, COVID-19 hit the world with a bang and the borders were closed and travel was restricted and we had to stay home.

This prevented us from not only travelling, but meeting our granddaughter. Thank goodness for today’s technology where we can watch her grow via the internet. Certainly not the same thing by any means, but definitely better than the days of old when it would take weeks if not months for a letter to arrive and photographs were very expensive and limited.

No travelling meant no travel blog either so I decided to do a couple of blogs about the ‘at home’ travels we enjoyed while pursuing our geocache hobby. Caches are hidden everywhere (There are 3 million of them around the world; including several in Antarctica.) and going to find them takes us to little out-of-the way places or to very familiar places.

Geocaching is a hobby perfect for times of social distancing because you can take off for the day and drive some back country roads and not see another person while out enjoying yourself.

We had a long snow-filled winter so our first local trip was in mid-April when we drove to Shuswap Falls. There are actually two water falls, one either side of a small island. There is an old power plant to harness the electricity. I am not sure if it is still operational.

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In early May we went over to the small community of Chase and up the hill to the Nisconlith Meadows which are awash with wildflowers every spring.

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A week or so later we drove east to Sicamous and walked along the shore of Mara Lake along the old decommissioned railway to find a series of geocaches hidden along the trail.

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There is a wonderful nature trail along the foreshore of town and another series of geocaches are hidden along the route. We have been working on finding them off and on for a year or so and found the final one this year.

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The Larch Hills are east of town and there are quite a few logging roads interspersed through the forest, many of which have geocaches. The views can be lovely if you get to an open patch.

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A few years ago we drove all the way up to Mica Dam above Revelstoke to find the 100+ geocaches hidden along the road. We were unable to find three of them so in June we decided to drive the route again to find them. Can’t leave unfound geocaches. We hate DNFs (Did Not Find).

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The north shore of the Shuswap Lake has some lovely waterfalls and beaches. We spent a lovely day in August in the area.

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The final first-half of the year day trip was along the far side of Okanagan Lake from Vernon in the Fintry area where we climbed a couple of hundred stairs to find a geocache above the waterfall.

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And that was as exciting as over half of 2020 was. I will do another post of pics from our October week at Panorama in the Kootenays in southeastern BC plus the few other day trips to find geocaches that we did before the end of the year.