A Poem, and other stuff

Lights,
Spreading handsome GPSr icons,
Wandering anywhere,
To travel the world,
Collecting postcards,
Visiting military bases,
Maybe remote backcountry airstrips.

This is a poem that I wrote using the goals of the various travel bugs that I have in my possession. I just looked at my inventory list and all of a sudden, I have 11 different travel bugs and geocoins to take with me on our camping trip north at the beginning of next month. I knew I was near that number, but hadn't really thought about it that much until I looked today.

I'm pretty sure I can meet many of their goals and if not, I can get them closer to their goals. This should be an interesting trip. The bookmark list of caches is pretty much set in stone. 365 caches. I should be so lucky if we find all of them on this trip. I know we won't, but I'd rather have too many, than not enough down the road. I'll probably tweak it about it a week before, just to make sure none of the caches have been archived since I put them on the list.

I've also received permission to set up an Earthcache while up in Oregon, so that will take a little bit of our time while we're up there. I had asked for some advice from another cacher about setting up an Earthcache and he gave me some suggestions on who to write within the National Park Service where I want to create the Earthcache. He also said to not to expect any response for at least a couple of weeks. So I sent an email off and waited.......a half a day before I got a response back from the Natural Resource Specialist of the park basically saying that he was very excited about the prospect of me setting up an Earthcache in their park. So it looks like I'm good to go on that front as well.

Now all I have to do make sure I get some decent pictures of the different bugs and coins before I let them go. I think I got a couple of good ones of Dude and Dudett already. That's Fred in the top photo and Ethel in the bottom picture. They are two California Desert Tortoises that live in my backyard. I've had them since they were hatched in August of 1999. Desert Tortoises are an endangered species and you have to have a permit (which I do) to possess them. It is illegal to release captive bred tortoises back into the wild because of the possibility of spreading illnesses to the native population. So they live in my backyard and will probably outlive my children. It's my way of helping a species survive.