Happy Trails

And away we go. The van is packed and except for a few incidentals that we need to pack in the morning, we're set to go on our week long camping trip up the coast of California. After looking at the GeoDashing site and the GeoVexilla site we have the possibility of getting upwards of 16 flags and dashpoints on this trip. Although the flags are a one time shot for this trip, I will be heading back up to the Stockton area about a week after I get home from this camping trip, so if I miss a couple of those dashpoints due to time factors, I can always get them when I take my daughter back up to school.

For Geocaching, I ran the PQ on Saturday. After looking over the puzzles I solved 6 of them very quickly. There are three others that will have to be solved in the field because they depend upon signs and plaques to get information from to solve them. As you can see by the map, the route is a little convoluted, but it's pretty much the way we'll be traveling, heading up the coast on Monday, then further north on Wednesday after a stop near Point Reyes National Seashore. I have a geocoin that commemorates the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse and it wants to visit other lighthouses, so I have a good opportunity to help it toward its goal. There's also another lighthouse up near Crescent City where we'll be camping that I could take it to as well. After visiting the Point Reyes area, it's on to Redwood National Park. All in all, it looks to be a fun trip for the two of us.

One of the caches that we definitely want to find is Rabbit Eye View. If you look at the graphic, I have it highlighted. You can also see it highlighted on the map in a semi-pink color just north of the San Francisco area. It's one of the four caches with only a two digit GC number, meaning it's a very old cache, one of the few caches that have been around longer than I've been caching. The other reason for us to get that one is there is a special cache inside that cache. The Fly....Mars Rover moving cache is inside the Rabbit Eye View cache. Moving caches aren't allowed anymore by Geocaching, but there are a couple that are grandfathered into the system, this one being one of them. I've had this particular one on my watchlist for a very long time. It's been all over the place, then found its way to California, then back east and then was brought back out here to the GeoWoodstock Event in May where it's been seen in many caches around the Bay Area in California. Now it's up in Bodega Bay, where we'll be on Tuesday. I posted a note on the Mars Rover page that hopefully will keep it there long enough for us to grab it, or at least find it and log it. That would be a really cool find.

One last goal that we have on this trip is try and find at least one cache in each county along that mapped route. If that happens, we'll add 16 or 17 new counties cached in for California. That will put us that much closer to reaching the goal of having cached in all 58 counties in California, which will help us also find the California County Challenge cache. That won't happen this year, but we might finish that goal by next summer.

I don't expect to be able to post any followups while on the road. I am taking my mini lap top with me, but I'm not going out of my way to find a WiFi hot spot so I can log caches or post to the blog, etc. What happens is what happens on this trip. We're expecting to commune with nature, find some ammo cans and tupperware in the woods and go on some nice hikes. Until the 11th or so, I'll see you later.