A missing 1000 words

There are times when I could just kick myself. Today was one of those days. My daughter had an early morning flight out of LAX this morning for her summer camp counselor job at Interlochen Arts Camp. She’s majoring in music performance and music education, so the experience will be invaluable for her since she will be a counselor for a bunch of hormonally schizophrenic girls, otherwise known as junior high girls. At least she’ll get a ton of experience, since the price of her plane ticket will be eating up most of her salary. She’ll come out slightly in the black and be better for the job, so that’s a good thing.

After getting to the airport and helping her check her bags, not that I did anything except lift them on the scale, we said our goodbyes. Gone are the days when she’d go away to camp and my wife and I would get temporary boarding passes so we could wait with her before her plane boarded. Those days are long gone. She gave me a hug, turned around and was gone. Is Father’s Day tomorrow?

Anyway, before I really start waxing nostalgic, I should get to the overall point of this. I walked back out to the car and got back on the freeway, but I took an alternate route home. There was a Cayman Island virtual flag over in Garden Grove that I wanted to pick up and as long as I was in that area, I might as well get some geocaches as well. On Thursday, I ran the PQ for this expedition, filtering out all of the micros in the process. I just wanted to find some larger caches today and perhaps a virtual or two. I hit the jackpot.

The center point for the flag was only 400+ feet away from a large cache which was also a travel bug hospital. This particular cache has to be the second largest ammo can I’ve ever seen since I began geocaching and the largest ever placed in a suburban setting. I picked up a very cool postcard travel bug at this cache whose goal is for the owner to receive postcards from cachers who find this travel bug. Once he receives 50 postcards, he’ll start a postcard cache in Durango, Colorado. It’s a very novel and cool idea in my opinion. I’ll probably send him a postcard from my local area and then another one when we’re on our camping trip this summer.

I then made my way over to a Vietnam War Memorial virtual cache in Westminster, California. This is where I could kick myself. In our haste to get out of the house this morning, I grabbed my GPSr and my PDA, but neglected to take my camera along with me. The memorial has an eternal flame inside a large urn, with a half circle of fountain/waterfall surrounding it. On top of this fountain are two larger than life statues, one of an American soldier and one of a Vietnamese soldier looking off in the distance. Behind them were two flag poles, one with the flag of the USA and a POW/MIA flag below it. The other flag had the South Vietnam flag flying on it. It was a very moving experience and I don’t think I conveyed in my log what could have been stated with a couple of well thought out photographs. Check out the gallery of photos. There are some really moving and interesting images.

After that, I ended up finding five other caches including one nano cache. Apparently, when I filtered out the micros, I didn’t filter out the “other” category and that’s where this one fell. I learned a little history about early public transportation in the Los Angeles area at this cache and I found another cache that had been very brazenly hidden. I’m not sure I’d attempt such a hide and I won’t give away its secret other than to post a link to the cache page. Needless to say, it was rather audacious. My last cache of the day was to a travel bug/geocoin hotel. The cache page states that you can only take a travel bug if you leave one, but that prevents the travel bugs from moving in my opinion.

These type of caches become prisons as opposed to hotels. New cachers, if they don’t have a travel bug will find the cache, but more than likely not take a travel bug because they might not have any to drop in. I figure if a person is going to create a travel bug hotel, they should keep it stocked because the purpose of a travel bug hotel is to facilitate the movement of travel bugs easily. This “take one if you leave one” philosophy goes against that. I didn’t have a travel but to leave, but I liberated two turtles in the cache that were attached to a travel bug tag.

All in all, it was a good little caching trip. Seven caches were found, and I was able to pick up three travel bugs as well. Unfortunately, because I forgot to bring the camera, this blog entry is going to look rather barren. I hope I don’t make that mistake again.