A Space Odyssey

Yesterday was an interesting day for me. After last Saturday's romp through the desert I was only 11 caches away from 2000. Chaosmanor and I couldn't get all 49 that I needed on Saturday, so I'll have to thank him for getting me close. I started surveying the local landscape for a fun cache to be my 2000th. At the same time, I wanted it fairly close to a dashpoint that was sitting out east of me. I found three caches that were of larger than micro sized and one that just looked kind of whimsical, so I decided that the whimsical cache would be the one.

I set up the PQ and emailed my friend 3blackcats who was available for the trip. 9:00 we were off. First we drove over to Riverside to rectify a DNF that both of us had posted last week in the 108° heat. I think it only hit 85° yesterday, so there was a big difference. The owner had updated the coordinates since our last visit, a change of only 11 feet, so we should have found it and the owner even stated that there were footprints about a foot away from the cache. Both of us were surprised when we found it right away this time around. How could we have missed it the last time? Chalk that one up to one of those imponderables.

The ten caches that preceded my milestone were your average garden variety of caches, a couple of smalls and a couple of micros. I was surprised to find one hidden in the parking lot of a school. I thought the powers that be frowned on that sort of thing. It was a really strange placement considering there was a very nice park right across the street from the school. One cache near that one does stand out however. We were walking down this abandoned road and noticed some movement by the side of the road. Next thing we knew there were two ground squirrels that scampered out and ran quickly across the road. The next thing we knew, a large bird swooped down over us, almost as if it were dive bombing us. I'm not sure whether we scared it and thus the squirrels, or we scared the squirrels and the bird took advantage of it, all I do know is it was one big bird. We watched it fly over to about where we estimated ground zero to be, so we slowly continued our short walk over there. We got the cache quickly and then checked out the bird which turned out to be a Great Horned Owl. I didn't have my camera with me, but I think it unlikely that I would have been able to get a decent shot of it.

One of the other caches that we also found was at the location of the original McDonald's restaurant in San Bernardino along Route 66, the Mother Road. The building is no longer a restaurant, in fact the original building isn't there anymore, but the new building houses a smallish Route 66 museum that has lots of McDonald's memorabilia. It was an interesting spot.

After that it was time to get the milestone cache. This was a large cache on private property, actually sort of in the back yard of another local cacher, which we discovered during the search. It was a very large ammo can and the hider requested no trade items. He did allow a "bonus" find if you posted a picture wearing the items in the cache. I chose to log it once, but wore the items for the photo anyway. It was just a fun cache. We found one more cache after that, giving me 2001 cache finds, thus the name of the blog for today.

In all the hoopla and excitement over this cache, I forgot the grab the travel bug that was in the cache. Perhaps I'll go back for it later. I never did get that dashpoint either. Oh well. You can't get them all. It's the hunt that matters anyway.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:
Route 66 Museum- Original McDonalds- McToy Museum - by Team GeoCan
Altigenman's Wedding - Anything for smiles! - by altegenman