Orivirran saarto, GCJPM4, 13.08.2004

It’s interesting how the 35 kilometers of distance to the cache given by your GPS can change to 85 km just because of Finnish lakes. But this was the case when we visited Orivirran saarto. Since the cache description only has the background of the site in Finnish, we’ll give a short introduction to the site here.

The cache is located in the ruins (odd piles of rock) of an old Swedish fortress that was built sometime in the early half of the 16th century. At its peak it was manned by 300-400 men. It’s unknown when it was abandonded, but conversion work was done in the mid-17th century. The road to the cache is an old road to where the ferry across Orivirta used dock.

The road to the old ferry needed a bridge that has been preserved and is still in use. On the way to the cache we saw a rescue department boat heading for the docks. The boat ended up at a pier close to the cache, over the old bridge. This made us wonder, because often the crew of the boats take the fire engines to the pier with them and the old bridge didn’t have enough carrying capacity for such heavy equipment. However, our sighting was wrong and the boat wasn’t a rescue vessel, which solved that problem. The cache itself was hidden in the ruins (odd boulders lying about) of the fortress. This time it was Kassu who helped locate the cache.

Once the cache was found we decided to amuse Flippe by throwing a stick all over the place. At times he didn’t see where the stick flew and had to look for it. One of those times gave us this shot of him, standing tall and proud.

While Flippe was chasing the stick, Anna started hunting for blueberries. While the blueberry season hasn’t been all that good (blame the weather), she found enough to sweeten our mouths. And no, the boys didn’t get any.

The modern bridge over Orivirta was built in 1965. It lets vessels with a maximum height of 12 meters to pass under it, so the bridge offers beatiful views of the surrounding lakeside to those driving over it. We just had to stop on the bridge to get a shot of the lake. Luckily there wasn’t any other traffic crossing the bridge at the time. The Finnish countryside is quite quiet on a Friday evening. On the way back, we had two tired retrievers sleeping peacufully in the back…

Cache visited 13.8.2004. View cache details.