Dreadnaught Memorial

About a month ago, I was at a Dreadnaught Memorial, a "memorial dedicated to the soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 34th Armor, who served in Viet Nam from 1966 to 1970." The cache page notes that the memorial (seen below) lists the men who served during this period. Some who served didn't come home.

Obviously, there is a cache hidden near the memorial. I'd been out there last year and couldn't find the cache and wasn't able to find it the second time I looked this September. Both times I'd been by myself. The next time I went out on October 11th, the day Chaosmanor, the Tadpole and I went on our 5 and a half mile hike near San Juan Capistrano, we made it a point to stop by there again and find the cache.

This memorial is placed in a very weird spot. It's located in an industrial are of warehouses and workshops. You can see it from the frontage road alongside Interstate 5, but if you're traveling north, you've already missed it. If you're traveling south, you need to drive almost a mile to finally get access to the memorial over some railroad tracks. Then it's up to your geosenses to lead you back to the memorial. Were there not a cache there, it would be very difficult to navigate the streets and back alleys that we had to negotiate in order to get to the memorial and the cache. To give you an indication as to how difficult it is to find a correct route back in there, the cache owner puts four different waypoints on the cache page to help get back to it. Since this was the third time I'd been back there, I really wasn't worried about getting back there this time.

Once we got back to the memorial, I knew we'd eventually find the cache with three pairs of eyes and we did, but it took us way longer than any of us figured. How can a coffee can elude three experienced caches the way this one did? I really don't know, considering that three of us, at various times in the search, all put our head into the bushes and literally had the cache right beside our left temple. I still can't believe that I missed it the other two times. Chaosmanor spotted it about three seconds before I noticed it from the opposite side from where it was hidden. We both just looked at each other with these incredulous looks that said, "How in the hell could we have missed that one?" Well, we did.

I made it a point to take some pictures at this one. I didn't take my camera with me on a trip down to Orange County a couple of months ago and missed getting some really nice and moving pictures of a Vietnam Memorial Virtual there. I vowed that I wouldn't make that mistake again when I'm near a memorial.

Pictures were taken at or near the following cache:
Dreadnaught Memorial - by Dave_W6DPS