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.