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.