Rats

The third day of our camping trip was devoted to breaking camp and moving northward. Our plan was to spend two days in the Point Reyes area, then move north to Redwoods National Park where we'd camp for the rest of the week, so Thursday morning, we had a quick breakfast, broke camp and moved out.

This particular trip really was the first trip where the Tadpole and I had made geocaching the primary focus. In other times, we'd spent time geocaching, but it wasn't primary like it was this trip. That created a little bit of a problem on this particular day. With another goal being to get caches in each county we passed through, we had to find at four or five caches spread out over several hundred miles. We had thoughts of looking for one of the oldest caches hidden in California, but that didn't pan out either due to muggle activity in close proximity to the cache.

We had one side trip to Lake County along Hwy 20, but for the most part, we just headed up Hwy 101. Every time we crossed a county boundary line, we started looking for caches to find. Once we got into Humboldt County, I knew we were good since we were going to end up spending a lot of time in Humboldt and Del Norte Counties over the next couple of days, so those two weren't as critical on this driving day.

I ended up taking pictures at two different caches. One was a tribute virtual cache to Charles Schulz the author of the Peanuts comic strip. As a boy, Peanuts was one of the first strips I'd always look for in the Sunday comics as well as the daily strips. The Tadpole reads the re-runs found in our paper, so he's well versed in the mannerisms of the different characters.

Santa Rosa, California, in Sonoma County is where Schulz made his home. There is a museum celebrating his life and legacy and several monuments including a small sculpture near the city's information center. Unfortunately, there wasn't any free parking in the surrounding area, so we felt rushed as we walked through this small park to the sculpture. The meter was running syndrome caught up to us with this one, but we still had a good time getting the answers for the virtual.

The other cache that stood out in our minds was the last cache we found in Mendocino County. This particular cache we had decided that we were going to bypass to save some time. We'd already found another cache in Mendocino County, so we didn't need another, but as we came around the bend, I happened to look at the GPSr, saw the name of the cache and made a quick stop. The Tadpole, obviously wanted to know why we were stopping so I told him the name of the cache and he blurted out, "Are you serious?!?" We used teamwork to make the grab on this one, had a good chuckle while we signed the log and then used teamwork again to replace the cache.

It's these kinds of caches that usually strike my fancy and end up on my 5% best cache list. They might not be really great in many ways, but they made me laugh or bring back fond memories. Both of these caches certainly did.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:
Oh Nuts! - by Bryce and Laura Powers
Pit Stop - by Huntnlady...Adopted by 007BigD