First Day

The first day of most trips is usually a lot of driving. That was the case on our first day as well, but we tried to break it up into some shorter chunks with some geocaching here and there. We ended up finding five caches on the first day, which was actually more than I expected to find. We found three in the central valley of California as we drove up Interstate 5. We found two others later in the day, a virtual in Oakland and one near our campsite which would be our first find in Marin County.

When driving in California, you have to plan accordingly. If you're ending up traveling through either the Bay Area or the LA Basin during rush hour, you're going to be sitting in traffic for awhile. We'd left our house at 8:45 in the morning which allowed us to miss the Los Angeles traffic. The problem was as we approached the Bay Area, we were entering that during the afternoon rush hour. Fortunately, some peripheral freeways allowed us to miss most of the traffic, so it really wasn't bad, except we missed part of our caching route. Well, as noted above, we'd already found three for the first day, so it was a good start.

As we got through Oakland, I noticed a cache showing up just off the freeway near the marina in Oakland. I pulled it up and realized it was a virtual. The Tadpole enjoys virtuals because he finds them very educational, so we stopped and learned about Rosie the Riveter's important role during World War II at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Homefront National Historic Park. This was a self guided park through a mock up of a ship under construction. Along the ship's lines were historical pictures telling the reader about the role women played in the war effort. We followed the partial skeleton of the ship all the way down to the water's edge. Most of the information was not new to me, but the Tadpole was fascinated with the exhibit and I think we stayed longer because of that. After getting the necessary information for the virtual cache, we got back in the van and headed toward the Richmond/San Rafael Bridge and to our campground.

After setting up camp and eating dinner, we walked through the campground. We attempted to find a couple of caches that had eluded us last year, but were defeated again. So we satisfied ourselves with one more cache attached to a gate on a Rails to Trails trail. After that, we pretty much went back to our campsite and hit the hay. It had been a long first day, yet also rewarding at the same time. We would have many more over the next two weeks.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocache:
Bay Area History - Rosie - by Jean&Jim