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.