This weekend, I put over 1000 miles on my van driving up to Stockton to pick up the Musicmaker from her
first year of college. I made it a little bit of a road trip and took a more scenic route going up to try and bag a few more counties that I hadn't cached in before. The route I'd planned was going to net me three more counties, which would have put me over the halfway point for Discovering & Logging California's 58 Counties.
As anyone knows who caches on a regular basis, things happen. And actually, this was a good thing. The first new county that I encountered on this trip was San Benito County. It's a smallish county located on the eastern side of the coastal ranges in California. The biggest town I believe is Hollister, which is probably fairly well known these days because of a brand of clothing. Anyway, the scenery in San Benito County was spectacular and I ended up spending way more time caching and taking pictures there than I had intended to, so I didn't get the other two counties. Except, the next day I had more time to kill, so I started caching from the other end of my Route PQ and found myself in Contra Costa County. I found two caches there, bringing my total of counties cached in to 29, exactly halfway to the 58 County Challenge. Now I just need to get to Northern California.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Halfway there...
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This is by no means an attempt to one-up you, Webfoot, but we thought you might like a bit of an update on our own attempt to complete the CA County Challenge. For those who might have this site on "e-mail alert" status, or who check in now and then to see if there are updates, I should mention that we and Webfoot have been comparing notes on this challenge cache for over a year. Because our youngest was attending Humboldt State (she graduated two years ago, with honors :-), we have taken a number of trips to Northern California, and so have picked up many of the counties north of Sacramento. Webbie will likely get several of these this summer, if his camping trip plans hold :-)
Anyway, we attended GeoWoodstock 6 this past Memorial Day weekend, and then spent a week camping at Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. As a result, we added several new counties to the list. In most cases, we got more than one cache in each county. I think Sutter is the only County in which we only got one cache, and that was the venerable Yuba City: GC5F.
So here's the list: Placer, Nevada, Sutter, Yuba and San Mateo. Had I thought to run a small Route PQ along I-550 and I-680, we could have picked up Solano, Santa Clara and Contra Costa; we already had Alameda and Santa Cruz. Barring any revisions, this will leave us with 16 counties to go :-) Of course, most of the remaining are things such as Alpine (under snow for 8 months of the year), San Francisco (I don't think they know what Tupperware is there, let alone an ammo can! And where would they hide one of those, anyway ;-), Imperial (what possible reason can I come up with to justify driving to Holtville or Brawley?) and Modoc, Lassen and Plumas, which are undoubtedly scenic wonderlands, but still more than a little ways off our travel radar. Well, that's the fun of things like this, I guess :-) Were it not for GW6, we wouldn't have picked up three of the five that we just got. If we *do* make it to Yellowstone next year, we'll just have to take the "scenic route" ;-)
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