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.