Creating some balance

The past 6 months or so, I've been doing a lot of geocaching. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. So much so that it feels like other aspects of my life have gotten shortchanged, particularly hiking. I would go out to find some geocaches, but not get in a decent hike, even though the trails might be right there. That wasn't helping my psyche in the least, so today, I didn't go geocaching and just decided to hike the Claremont Wilderness Park loop trail.

Surprisingly, I feel pretty good afterwards although my left foot is a little sore. I made sure to take frequent water breaks and not try to overdo it by really crunching out the miles in record time. According to my Garmin inReach, I still averaged 2.4 miles per hour over the course of the 5+ mile loop that I took today, including the little side trip down a spur trail to check up on one of my geocaches. That's the little point you can see on the map at the top.

Unfortunately, it appears as if that one has gone missing, so I decided to archive it today. I'm not sure how that one could have just disappeared, but the log that it was hiding underneath wasn't there anymore, so perhaps some trail maintenance personnel found it and through it in the trash thinking it was garbage. Perhaps someone else will hike up there and place something, but in all likelihood, I'll probably take another hike up there in the near future and hide something new.

It felt really good to be back out on the trail and I just need to remind myself that I need more of that balance between different activities in my life. Now, I guess I need to find another trail to go hiking on sometime soon.

Into Oregon - Day 3 of my August road trip

Once again, this is a continuation of my August road trip from last summer up into Oregon and Washington. I started the day in Redding, California. My first stop was the Turtle Bay Museum area in Redding, along the Sacramento River. I've been here in the past, but there were some new geocaches and so I felt it appropriate to stop and do a little sightseeing and of course, geocaching. This particular bridge is a very interesting one as it's a suspension bridge, but it's also a sundial, rather unique in my opinion. There was a virtual cache located here, so I ended up taking a selfie with the bridge/sundial in the background so I could get credit for that particular virtual cache. Then it was back on the road and into Oregon.

As most of you know, challenge caches are what really drive my geocaching now. Yes, I enjoy geocaching, but the challenge caches give me goals to strive for and this particular day was devoted to working on, or finishing off several challenges that I wanted to complete on this trip. The first stop, once I made it into Oregon was at an off ramp where there were two caches, one located on each side of Interstate 5. The I-5 Interstate Highway Challenge was what I was working on at this point.  The goal was to find a geocache on each side of the interstate, in all three states, California, Oregon and Washington. The catch was that the caches had to be within 10 miles of each other in the three states. I've had this particular challenge one third of the way complete ever since I signed that challenge, but still needed the two caches in Oregon and also in Washington. This particular offramp, with its two caches on each side of the freeway helped me get a little bit closer to completing that challenge. About the time I grabbed the second cache, it started to rain and I was driving through rain through the rest of the day all the say to Salem where I was going to be spending the night.

Another challenge that I worked on during this day was getting caches in every county that I traveled through.  That's more of a personal goal, but over the course of time, it has become more of a geocaching goal which I will explain in a future blog post. I ended up stopping here and there along the way as I passed through new counties and kept my eye on a particular geocache that was located along the side of the interstate. 

Again, I try to find a variety of cache types in each state, because of challenges that I'm working on and so any time there is a unique or rare type of cache, I'm going to try and find it. There was a webcam cache along the side of the road, so I wanted to get my photo taken there, so I could claim that cache. It was located on the south bound side of the freeway, so I had to drive by it, get off on the next off ramp and then head back to the cache and pull off behind a guardrail. Then it was just a matter of accessing the correct Oregon transportation camera, see myself on the screen and then take a screenshot to post later.  Needless to say, the weather did not cooperate and it was raining and the quality of the image is quite poor. But that netted me a new cache type in Oregon, my 6th (the goal is at least 8 in each state). In retrospect, I should have moved closer to the highway sign in the foreground, but because it was raining and because it was rather apparent that someone had taken out the front of that particular guardrail, I didn't want to waste any additional time trying to get a better shot. 

Eventually, I made it to Salem where I would be spending the night. There happened to be an event happening in the town just south of there, so I decided to head down there after dinner and meet some of the locals. That was probably one of the best decisions I made during this entire trip. Because I was attempting to find the three oldest caches in Oregon, I mentioned it at the event and I had several cachers give me all sorts of intel on where to park, etc., for each of these caches. I wouldn't be attempting them that day as it was already getting dark, but one of them was on the agenda for me for the next day. I wrote down information including where to park, what roads to take etc. Several of them gave me excellent coordinates for the parking areas and I just routed Google Maps the next day and it took me right to where I needed to be.

After the event ended, I headed back to my motel for some needed rest, but also to find some other caches.  I ended up finding three different types of caches that I hadn't found previously in Oregon. Those, plus the event that I attended gave me 10 different cache types in Oregon, my third such state behind California and Arizona with 14 each. There are several other states where I have 8 different cache types including Nevada and Utah, plus a couple of others where I'm really close to 8, Colorado and New Mexico with 7 each. Eventually, I'll get back to those two states and others and increase the cache types in each state. It's all about the challenges at this point.

I will be back with another installment of this trip in a couple of days or so, but don't hold me to that. 

Sidewalks and Roads

It's the beginning of the month, which means it's once again time for P.J.'s monthly photo challenge. The theme for April was Sidewalks and Roads. For those of you who regularly read this, you know that I don't always participate in this challenge. The reason is simple. I prefer to have my photos happen organically, meaning I don't go out of my way to take photos for a specific theme, but once the month is over if I happen to have enough that I think make the theme, then I'll participate. With the theme being what it is, I was pretty sure I would have enough for this entry. And so without further ado, I present my take on sidewalks and roads.

1. New Wheels

For the past 9 years, I've been traveling around in a 2015 Jeep Cherokee. I bought it in April of 2016 and put almost 200,000 miles on it.  I would have put more but the fuel pump decided to give up the ghost at the beginning of the month and the cost of the repair, plus upcoming repairs that were due at the major mileage milestone made it not worth keeping it anymore. So we traded it in for a 2022 Subaru Forester. I've been taking it through its paces for the past month and it's really a fun car to drive. This month we drove up north to visit the tiny human, I took it out to the desert a couple of times for a little off-roading and a lot of geocaching. I thought the Cherokee had a lot of bells and whistles on it, but it doesn't compare to this one. And the nice thing is it's in my favorite color too, so I've got that going for me. 

Because the Cherokee was a white SUV, it was difficult to spot in a parking lot. The next time you go to your local Target, just look at all of the white SUVs. What I did to combat that was adding travel stickers to it.  Made it a little bit easier to spot in a parking lot. I haven't started stickering up the Forrester yet, but I'm sure I will get around to it. I have several National Park stickers that I'd like to add. And what I've heard is car stickers are much like tattoos.  You just can't stop at one.

2. Geocaching with the tiny human

Sometime just before we went north I received a video of my tiny human pointing out a geocache that's hidden in the park behind their house, saying she wanted to go geocaching with Papa when he got here for Easter. Well, that didn't happen, because of time constraints, but we did go look for this one. We'd already found it and I'd logged it on line for her. She's very proud of the fact that she has a geocaching name. Still, we had to check on this one every time we walked on the sidewalk to the park to make sure it was there. One time, she even had me check the log sheet to make sure our names were on the log sheet.  Yep, there's Papa's name, there's your name, there's the dog's name. Yes, even their dog has a geocaching account. Do mom and dad? Nope. I guess it's my responsibility to bring her up in the ways of geocaching.

3-5. Geocaching roadtrip

At the beginning of May, the Los Angeles area geocaching community had their 4th annual Mega Event in Elysian Park overlooking Dodger Stadium. It's just a big geocaching bash with my 300 closest friends. I tell you this, because I wanted to make the event my 26,000th find and so I had to do several road trips to bump my numbers up. My friend and I did a three day road trip up to Kern County to work on a couple of challenges. One was the Incorporated Cities of Kern County. It's pretty straightforward. Just find a geocache in each incorporated city in Kern County. With only 11 cities, it's very doable and so we decided to kill two birds with one stone and also work on the Cities of Kern County in a Day. Yeah, we're a little nuts, but we find these kinds of things enjoyable, so that's why we do them.

The other thing we were working on was finding some specific caches for my friend to reach the gold level and receive a geo coin at the Mega Event. We spent our first night in Ridgecrest, which is the easternmost city in Kern County. The next morning, we drove a well executed path through the cities of Ridgecrest, California City, Tehachapi, Arvin, Bakersfield, McFarland, Delano, Shafter, Wasco, Taft and Maricopa. In Taft we ended up at this monument/memorial to the oil workers of the area. There was a virtual cache here and we used that as our qualifier for the city of Taft. From there, we drove to Maricopa, found a cache there and then headed to the coast in Santa Barbara County to spend the night.

The following morning we work up to rain. Was this going to ruin the rest of the trip? Nope. By the time we were ready to leave our motel, the clouds had cleared somewhat and although we had some drizzles in the morning, we had a nice dry morning for our drive up to Pismo Beach to find some caches and some Adventure Labs. From there it was a drive down the coast with several stop along the way.

I mentioned that my friend wanted to make it to gold level for this certain challenge, so we stopped at several spots along the way to find specific geocaches that were part of this challenge. Our first stop was in Ridgecrest because he needed one of these caches from Kern County. The challenges was to find a 2025 Cache Across Southern California (C.A.S.C.) in each Southern California County and then find five more random ones anywhere. I'd already accomplished this on past trips north and south, but he needed Kern County still.

The other three that he needed were located in San Luis Obispo County, Santa Barbara County and Ventura County. We found his C.A.S.C. cache in Pismo Beach, then decided to park on the street near the pier and walk out on the pier. There happened to be a virtual cache located on the pier. Once of the requirements was to take a photo of your caching name from the pier.  Mischief managed, although I'm sure the San Luis Obispo County Fire Department thought I must have been nuts to be writing in the sand like I was near some of their equipment, but I didn't care.  I was having fun. I ended up taking an extra photo of my caching name from down below because it looked like the waves might wash the first part of my name away before I got back up on the pier. But as luck would have it, it was still perfectly intact for this shot. Nothing like taking a photo from the pier, which is pretty much an extended sidewalk.

One of our last stops in Santa Barbara County was to a virtual cache entitled Frog Shrine. I'd been here one other time where there was a different cache at the same spot, but this area has grown tremendously over the past couple of decades. When I visited it back in 2006, there were some frogs up on a low wall facing a sidewalk. Now there were frogs up on the wall, frogs down at the base of the wall and frogs on the other side of the sidewalk as well. Just an amazing collection of all sorts of frogs, some very tiny and some that were quite large as you can see from my photo. Yes, I just sat down in the middle of the sidewalk for this selfie.

After the Frog Shrine, we then headed to Ventura County to pick up one more C.A.S.C cache for my friend and then we headed home. It was not long enough in my opinion, but we accomplished everything that we'd set out to do, so it was a very successful geocaching road trip.

And there you have it: my shots taken from the sidewalks and roads where I went this past month. Please stop by P.J.'s page and read his blog and also check out some of photos of others who wrote about this challenge in their blogs. As always, please feel free to comment here.  I won't bite, I promise.

On to Red Bluff - Day 2 of the August 2024 road trip

Two weeks ago, I started catching you up in greater detail about my road trip up to Oregon and beyond. This is the second installment of that road trip I took last August.

I started out the day in Stockton and the original plan was to head up into Gold Country north of northeast of Sacramento. Many years ago, I'd heard about a challenge cache that wants you to find a cache hidden in every county seat in the state. While at the time, I thought that challenge was well beyond my scope, I've slowly chipped away at it over the course of the last 12 years or so and am now down to the last two county seats (Downieville in Sierra County and Quincy in Plumas County) to fulfill that particular challenge.

The problem with that plan was a major wildfire burning about 100 miles north of Sacramento. The plan was to drive into Downieville, then head to Quincy and eventually head out to Red Bluff where I would stay the night. The fire wouldn't be a problem until I wanted to head out from Quincy as it had shut down roads leading back out to the Central Valley, which would mean that I would have to completely backtrack back south to Downieville.

As I've gotten older, I've found my driving stamina isn't what it used to be. I used to think nothing of hopping into the car and heading off to college in Humboldt County, usually around a 12 or 13 hour drive with minimal stops. Yeah, that doesn't happen any longer and I've found that 6 hours of driving is usually enough for me before I'm exhausted. This side trip to get those two county seats would have been too much driving, so I opted to change my route and just head up to Red Bluff, stopping here and there along the way to grab some of the Adventure Labs that had been placed in the small towns along Interstate 5. The first Adventure took me around the campus of the University of the Pacific which is where my daughter and son-in-law went to school. I sent them this photo just to show them where I was.

Once I got to Red Bluff, I checked into my motel, then explored around the downtown area finding several geocaches.  While exploring, I found a great Mexican restaurant that had a great atmosphere and equally great food. Nothing like enjoying some local cuisine as opposed to eating at a chain restaurant.

After dinner I worked on a letterbox hybrid geocache that looked interesting just east of the restaurant. Letterbox hybrids are an offshoot of the hobby letterboxing. In letterboxing, a person is given a starting point and then follows clues in order to find the letterbox, which is similar to a geocache. There's usually a homemade stamp inside that you can use to stamp your letterboxing book. In geocaching, sometimes letterbox hybrids can be at the posted coordinates, or they can give you starting geographic position and you have to follow clues to find the cache. The only real requirement for letterbox hybrids in geocaching is that they must include a stamp in the cache container. This one was one where I had to walk down the street following the clues that had me examining the various murals that were on the sides of buildings as I walked. Eventually, it led me to the cache that I found in a back alleyway. Maybe not the best "scenic" spot in the world, but it was an enjoyable way to end my day.

Warmer weather means road trips

We've had a lot of rain the past couple of weeks, which has really helped our local mountains and the California Sierra Nevada mountains get that snowpack up to where it's supposed to be, but it's starting to feel like Spring is upon us and with that, warmer weather and with warmer weather comes road trips. As I look back over this blog I realized that I covered my two big road trips last year with just one blog entry each, so I'm going back to last summer and posting more detailed versions of each trip.

This first post covers the first day of my trip north to Oregon last August. Most of the day was heading north to Stockton where I would spend the night. Since most of the day was driving up the Central Valley of California and if you're at all familiar with the Central Valley, you know it can get quite boring, so I don't have many photos taken on that first day. This photo is me at a virtual geocache that I visited and logged in Bakersfield that first day.

One of the highlights of the first day was a challenge cache that I found in Atwater as I worked my way toward Stockton. It was entitled the Numbers Challenge - find 50 caches with the geocaching code (GC number) all in numbers. This isn't too spectacular, but what this cache lacked as far as a real challenge, as anyone who has over 10,000 finds probably has at least 50 caches of that requirement, it more than made up for it with its D/T rating, 3.5/4/5. 

All geocaches have a rating on them, placed by the owner and it's called a D/T rating. It can range from a 1/1 (the easiest to find) all the way up to a 5/5 (the most difficult). There are 81 D/T spots to fill and filling all the spots is called filling the Fizzy grid. That particular challenge D/T rating allowed me to quadruple up on my Fizzy grid. It was just something else to get excited about on a rather dull day of driving through the Central Valley.

I'll be posting other days of this trip in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned for more wanderings.

In the dark for a long time

Most of my geocaching friends have already seen this on several of the geocaching Facebook pages, but I thought I'd share this with the rest of you since I think you'll get a kick out of this. Then again, maybe you won't and you'll just roll your eyes and that's OK too.

A couple of weeks ago, I went geocaching with some friends in the Redlands area, east of where I live. We were looking for a newly published geocache and were kind of perplexed when we couldn't find it right away since there was only one obvious spot for it to be. Reading through the past logs of previous finders didn't help either, so we decided to expand our search radius out to see if the coordinates were a little off.

I wasn't sure this would help since not any of the other previous finders had mentioned the coordinates being off, but we decided to check out the other spots anyway. At one of the spots we checked, we found a small container, totally encrusted with spider webs. Hey, there's the cache.

Upon opening the cache, we knew that we hadn't found the cache we were looking for, but a different cache. From the photo you can see dates from 2007.  What the heck? We signed our names on the log sheet and replaced the cache.

I went home and started investigating. Yes, I'm guilty of this as much has everyone else is, but we were fortunate that we had some distinct signatures as well as dates when they found the cache. It didn't take too much sleuthing to figure out that this was an old archived cache that the owner had never picked up after archiving it. 

We later got confirmation from the owner of the newly published cache that her cache was missing, so we knew this one was the old one. We found the cache page on line and all three of us logged the old archived cache. This might seem like much, but it's pretty cool to think that the container has been sitting there for 17+ years just waiting for someone else to find it.  

Free For All!

I keep getting these notifications every month for P.J.'s Photo Blog challenge and when I took at my photos, I never seem to have anything that fit the theme. And thus I've been sitting on this blog for well over 6 months now, having not written a thing. However, the theme for this month is Free for All! Yeah, not only can I do that, I have quite a selection of photos to choose from so I may be hard pressed to get photos down to just five, but I will try my best. So here we go with my five photos falling into the category of Free for All.

1. Block Party

2025 is the 25th anniversary since Geocaching became a thing and so headquarters has come up with several ways to celebrate it, extending a rare type of cache known as a Block Party to all of the Mega Events happening this year. I've previously written about Mega Events several different times, but this post regarding the Mega Event that happens every February in Yuma, Arizona probably gives the best description of it.

This year's Yuma event was the first Block Party I've ever attended and it lived up to its billing. We drove out to Yuma on the Thursday before the event and basically for the next five days geocached. For the most part, it was a week long party with 600+ of my closest geocaching friends. I averaged finding close to 50 geocaches per day.  Needless to say, it was a lot of fun.

2. 25

Every now and then, Geocaching will introduce a limited edition Locationless Cache. These used to be quite popular when Geocaching first got started, but eventually, headquarters did away with them because they didn't feel like they fit in with the direction the hobby was headed. Now, they come back occasionally. The principle is simple; find something or do something that fits the theme of the locationless cache. In this case, this year's locationless theme is the number 25. What they want us to do is find a permanent number 25 somewhere out there, while we're geocaching and take a photo of it. Then we can log that particular cache. 

Originally, I had intended to head up in the central coast of California and get my photo with one of Hwy 25's highway markers. But I was exploring a cemetery in Quartzite, Arizona at the end of the Yuma Block Party and I came across Duane Bindewald, a sailor, born in 1925 and who probably was involved with World War II since he would have been the right age at the time. Once I saw his gravesite, I could think of no greater tribute than to memorialize him as my 25. Thank you for your service Mr. Bindewald.

3. Community Celebration Events

The third thing geocaching has brought back this year are the Community Celebration events. These are events put on by regular geocachers that bring our geocaching community together. You had to have hidden a geocache and also hosted a regular event last year and then you were qualified to host a Community Celebration event sometime over the course of this year.

I was awarded mine early on, mainly because I host events every month in our local community and I decided to host myself a birthday party, and so 67 on Route 66 was conceived. The event was held in a local Shakey's Pizza Parlor about 5 miles east of where I live and when I approached the manager back in January about reserving the place, he didn't hesitate. We blocked out the time and he asked an estimate of how many people were going to be there and at that time I had about 25 "Will Attends." Geocaching headquarters says when you're hosting an event to multiply the Will Attends by 1.6 and that will give you a fairly accurate head count. So I told the manager 40. 

Well, the will attends kept coming in and by the time of the party, I had 49 will attends, which if you're keeping up with your math skills translates out to about 75 actual bodies. And that's about how many showed up. We pretty much took over the place and Shakey's didn't even bat an eye. They were busy, but they were also getting a lot of business that they might not have gotten if I'd held the event in a nearby park instead. So it was a win/win situation all the way around.

There was lots of spirited geocaching conversations to go around and I don't believe I sat down at all as I moved from table to table. The photo is one of my geocaching friends and I. I chose this particular photo because we share the same birthday, so it seemed appropriate to have this photo of my birthday buddy.

4. The Tiny Human

While I'm having my birthday party, my daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter drove down to visit me for my birthday too. That weekend we ended up doing a lot of different things. I haven't written about this here on this blog, but I have posted things on Facebook, but my mom passed away last September and so this birthday was the first one I celebrated without her.  My daughter knows when I'm going to get "the feels" and she also knows that the best thing to get me over my big feelings is a visit from my tiny human.

We went down and visited my dad for one afternoon. We walked through the neighborhood and played on the nearby playgrounds. We picked oranges from the backyard trees and then enjoyed the fruits of our labor by drinking freshly squeezed orange juice. It was a very enjoyable visit and altogether too short, but I know I'm going to see them again later on this month, so I have that going for me. I always dismissed people who said that being a grandparent was the best. I understand thoroughly now and look forward to our nightly FaceTime videos as well as our visits north and their visits south. Being a Papa is the absolute best.

5. Spring is starting to spring

Even though it's only early March, you can start to feel spring in the air. I went for several hikes in the nearby hills this past week and the latest hike on the last day of the month I was rewarded by seeing a variety of wildlife. I saw my first two snakes of the season, both small gopher snakes and while out on a walk just in the neighborhood the day before I came across this beautiful Cooper's hawk taking a drink from the fountain in the front yard of this house.

It didn't take too kindly to me being right on the sidewalk, so it flew up to a branch of the nearby tree and just perched there. I admired it from the distance and then remembered to take a couple of photos of it, this one being one of the better ones.

And there you have it, my take on the Free for All theme for this month. Please feel free to stop by P.J.'s page and check out the other bloggers who post to this particular photo challenge. Please, also feel free to comment here. I won't bite.

On a side note, I'm hoping this will spur my interest in doing this again. I found another travel blog app that I've tried out that allows me to do travelogues in real time, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable allowing everyone on the planet seeing what I do in real time. Most of what goes on on those is a lot of geocaching and I know all of my audience here doesn't necessarily go for all the geocaching, so I'll probably continue to do that, but then synthesize those down into a feature here. I have several trips I have written about that I can post here, plus a couple of geocaching stories that I can throw into the mix as well.

Thank you for you patience during this long absence.