Travel bugs

We took with us several travel bugs, some of which I was able to get decent pictures of before dropping them off and others where I wasn't. I'm still having a hard time taking pictures of each travel bug that filters through my hands, but I try to get most of them. I guess that's a step in the right direction. Two of the bugs we had on our trip this summer were Road Warrior and Hungry Hungry Hippo. Both of which were travel bugs that were fairly photogenic.

Our first caching foray took us into Oregon. We'd been camping along the coast of California, just south of Crescent City, CA, so we took the highway inland up to Cave Junction, Oregon. Our primary reason for going this way was to visit Oregon Caves National Monument to tour the caves there. I also wanted to set up an earthcache there. I'm slowly working on that. The caves were very interesting and we spent several hours there exploring the area, which also included the guided tour. On the way back down into Cave Junction we found our first caches in Oregon.

We stopped at a particular cache that we discovered on private property. The cache page stated that it was on the cache owner's property, so we went ahead and walked into their field and found the cache at the base of a large oak tree. This was a really large oak tree, with a rather large ammo can hidden in the base of the tree which had been hollowed out sometime in the past due to a fire. The hole was big enough to stick my head in, and after clearing out the cobwebs (the last find had been in May), I stuck my head in and eventually found the cache. We decided to leave Road Warrior there, since it was a nice 500+ mile bump to the travel bug's travels.

I wasn't too worried about getting a picture of that travel bug. I was, however, more concerned about the Hungry Hungry Hippo. Every time we'd make dinner, I'd forget to take a picture of the hippo with our dinner and I thought for sure we'd get all the way to the end of our camping trip and I wouldn't have a good picture to show for it. Well, I actually ended up with two decent photos.

In our camping site at Mill Creek Campground, we noticed several banana slugs. Our family likes banana slugs since my older son will be attending the University of California at Santa Cruz come this fall. Their mascot is the banana slug. So what's a banana slug? It's just what you think it is. It's a rather large slug that is yellow, sometimes has black spots on it and resembles a small banana. They move slowly and have a decent relationship with the redwood trees. One ranger stated that a banana slug will eat just about anything in the redwood forest except a redwood tree. They're interesting to watch, so we figured why not get a picture of the hippo attempting to eat the slug.

Afterwards we did get a picture of the hippo poised on the edge of my plate of ravioli, peaches and corn that we had that night. Canned ravioli could only mean one thing. We were either running out of things to eat or more likely, near the end of our camping trip. In fact, I believe we broke camp the next day to head to Bend, Oregon to start the visiting portion of our camping trip.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:
Back to My Roots - by Boxerlovers and the Boxer too!!
334 - by Arse&Hemi&Dante