The mission

Our first assignment and I am so excited!!!

Our friend Wendy's sister had lost her silver necklace when she was a child in her mother's backyard. Tonight we planned to meet with them and our metal detector. As we drove up there was quite a crowd awaiting curbside to watch us pull out our sleek metal detector. They chatted and followed us around the yard looking over our shoulders at the numbers on the display.
I was detecting and Mary was digging.
I wanted to be cautious to not to instruct her to dig too many holes as their mother watched us with great anticipation.
But I was having problems.
The readings just weren't happening.
I checked the knobs and road the threshold hum listening to each blip and crackle.
Re-checking the metal types and purity of the signals I was finding.
I was discovering nothing but iron, low foil and scattered metal readings.
I checked the machine with a fire hydrant - Yep! That had a strong,true signal.
Aluminum ladder - Wow! Aluminum is '94' on the detector scale.
Old lawnmower - had a good signal too.
Why could I not find anything else?

I only have had a couple hits on the whole property (I strayed onto the neighbours property too).

I wanted to do well.
I wanted to be a hero.
I wanted to accomplish this mission and prove that Mary and I are worthy metal detectors.

Besides clipping of metal sideing, the picture below is all we found.

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home

We have noticed that the places that we are most excited about finding exotic treasure usually have nothing to reveal to us.
Today we decided to do our back-up plan first and go to a juicy public school to bring in the change. Mary had picked a nice one and off we went. The school was good giving us over $2 in coins, a key and a dinky car.
We continued to a second school but we shortly left after no hits and a gang of teenagers started gathering to drink bottles of beer.
On our way homes we stopped at building ruins where we found nothing but scraps of metal.
We went home and I was ready to call it a day. Mary wanted to scan the front lawn again to try to find a gold earring she was missing. Our lawn is in terrible shape with all the dry weather so a couple more holes couldn't really hurt.

We had more metal detector activity in our front lawn then we had all day. We found another couple dozen coins. giving us a daily total of 38 coins equalling $4.10.

Our new Sunday Night Mason Jar total is now $29.95.
(I'm going to need another jar soon)
Home is where the hard cash is

The Stairs to Nothing and the Secret of the Monkey Bars

We woke and went out for our favourite breakfast.
The "Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day" song seemed to have worked blessing us with beautiful sunshine and blue skies for as far as the eye could see.
Today would be the day that we would get to go south to the ruins. I consulted with the aerial maps and entered co-ordinates into the GSP to make sure we found the exact spot after our 1km hike through dense bush. We only got mildly disorientated as we found the concrete steps of the old building.

Well.... and that is all that we found.

I think the build must have burnt down with metal siding for all we could find was hunk of melted metal around the house. We also found a giant bee hive 20 feet away.
The sun was blazing hot so we continued to the second structure that we had marked with the GPS. We found an old axe head still embedded in a tree (Not what you would consider metal detecting). But nothing us or interest was found. It is had to get good sweeps of the detector with the high weeds and grasses.
We had only brought 2 bottles of water and I had begun to get tired and dizzy from the heat. We managed to get back to the car but the water bottle inside were boiling hot. We drove to a Tim Horton's to get 2 "Ice Caps" (made with chocolate milk) which turn out to be our best find for the morning.

After cooling off we decide to detect where we do the best - at apublic school. We went back to the "legendary ring school" to scan the rest of their school yard. We scanned the baseball field and soccer field before we saw the had a second playground (there was a third but we didn't think toddlers in the nursery playground would carry lots of money) The monkey bars surrendered a sterling silver necklace, a return the baseball field brought forth $2.64 in change.
The sandboxes added a heart charm and a ring. Soon after we began finding a dinky car and a pile of change. Why is it the last places we look always brings the best items?