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.

Yuma

This is a geocaching article, so if you're not interested in that silly hobby of mine, you can stop reading now. I won't be offended in the least. It's been almost a month since the Yuma Mega Event at the beginning of last month and I really need to write about it.

The Yuma Mega Event is hosted each year by the South Western Arizona Geocachers (S*W*A*G). This was the 17th annual and the first one I've been able to attend. It's never fallen on a good weekend to go and half the fun is getting there and driving home and all of the caching that you do on the three or four or five days, depending upon how long you stay. This time, we left early Friday morning and got home late in the afternoon on Sunday.

A synopsis of the weekend would be as follows:  We did a lot of caching, and I do mean, a lot. There are events happening all weekend and because the S*W*A*G group has been doing this for awhile, it's a pretty well oiled machine with regards to organization. New caches popped up all weekend, giving many people opportunities for first to finds, if they wanted to go that route.

We opted to just cache in the desert on the way to Yuma, stopping here and there on the east side of the Salton Sea. Once we got into Yuma, we checked out the park where the Mega Event was going to happen and also found a couple of caches that had been placed earlier in the day. There was a flash mob event later in the evening that was a lot of fun and then we started working on some of the Adventure Labs that had been placed in and around the city.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Adventure Labs, they are a new cache type that can best be described as virtual multi-caches. You need to visit an area and get information that you input into the Adventure Lab app which will score you a cache find. Because there's nothing to find, it's more like a virtual cache, but it comes in groups of five or ten places to visit, so you literally get credit for 10 cache finds if you find all of the locations from a particular Adventure Lab. In the second photo, we were looking for a particular Adventure Lab Location. The Adventure Labs kept us busy until nightfall and then we found a great Mexican restaurant and had dinner.

The next day was devoted to the Discover Yuma series where we raced around on a scavenger hunt, finding clues and new caches all in the pursuit of Discover Yuma Geocoins. We finished the Discover Yuma series around 1:30 in the afternoon, then hit the power trails out in the desert. Power trails are just that, usually dirt roads where there are caches hidden approximately every 528 feet, the minimum distance needed between geocaches. It's a great way to bump your numbers up while having fun with a group of people. And we did both. 

Another event that evening, followed by some more caching, more eating of Mexican food, finishing up the Adventure Labs which we didn't get the day before. and finally crashing for the night.

Sunday morning, it was time to head out to the Mega Event. A Mega event is one where there are at least 500 cachers attending. Lots of people, but the park was big enough and they had one more Adventure Lab in the park that it didn't appear to be that crowded, because everyone was spread out. We participated in the Poker Run. I got two pair, but nothing worth writing home about since the winning hand as a full house I believe. Geocaching venders were there, Signal the frog, the mascot for the Geocaching website was there, so I scored a location less cache for the trip as well. 

Locationless caches were all the rage back in the early days of geocaching, but they were shuttered. Locationless caches had you find something of interest that no other geocacher had already found. For example, one location less cache I found was about Presidential Statues. I "found" the statue of William McKinley in downtown Arcata, California. Once I found it, that meant that no one else could find that particular Presidential statue. Other geocachers would have to find their own. I liked location less caches because it made me more aware of my environment. I kept a half a dozen location less caches in the back of my mind. Once I found one, I'd add another one to the mix. All in all, I found 25 before they were shuttered. Because geocaching is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, they brought back the location less for this year. Signal was going to be at several Mega Events all around the world and all you had to do was get a photo of you with him to get credit for a find. And so I did. As of this moment, Signal has been logged 3724 times. I'm sure that by the time I publish this article, that number might be larger.

The event went on all morning and afternoon, but once we'd accomplished what we came to do, we decided that we wanted to beat the traffic out of town and headed for home, caching obviously on the way home. 

I'd heard stories of what a good time everyone had and I definitely wasn't disappointed with great expectations. It lived up to everything it had been billed by some of my friends and it's something I'm looking forward to going to again next year. There's literally so much to do out here that you could spend a week participating in everything and just scratch the surface. I think I actually need to go back there at a different time, perhaps in November when it cools down after summer and just cache in the some of the areas to the east of town. I've signed a challenge cache that wants me to find 1000 caches in two different states. Most of my 16,000+ finds are in California. This area could get me up to 1000 finds in Arizona very quickly.