Another planet?

I like to joke with people that I live in the state of confusion, otherwise known as California. A friend of mine suggested that California really is another planet. In some ways, I think he's right. Most of the country is locked up with snow, and while parts of California has had a lot of snow, I went caching in shirt sleeves yesterday. Not too many places in North America when one can go geocaching for an extended period of time on December 30th and not come back without a case of frostbite.

While most of the country tends to get four distinct seasons, here in California, we tend to get three - dry season, fall and wet season. The dry season runs from late March until mid November. It can also be called the fire season. Then we get fall from then until early January, then it's the wet season. Your mileage may vary depending upon where you happen to live in California, but for the most part, that's the way it goes here. I only have to look in my back yard where my silver maple tree is still shedding leaves.

While out caching, we came upon a cache site that led us to some beautiful fall color.

The leaves were a beautiful golden color and anywhere else, one would assume that it was mid September. Cool crisp nights followed by mild days are typical for this time of year. That's us right now, only it's the last day of the year. And yet at the same time we had views of the local mountains covered in snow, indicating that it really is winter up there.

I have to say I'm lucky. Because of where I live, I can get out and cache on a fairly

regular basis without having to worry about the weather. The days of rainy weather are few and far between, while the really cold stuff happens infrequently and isn't much of a bother either. I could just as easily be in Minnesota or Wisconsin as out here had my dad found a teaching job there instead of here back in 1961.

Since the new year is upon us, I want to take part of this time and make my geocaching resolutions for the upcoming year.

1. Continue to hide at a rate of 1 to 100 finds. I have 22 hides, with 2306 finds after yesterday's excursion. I'm working on three caches right now that will keep that resolution going up through 2500 finds.
2. Continue to hide, in my opinion, high quality caches. Nothing teaches more than a good example. If I hide quality caches, then hopefully, it will encourage others to hide quality caches and we won't have as many parking lot lamp post cache hides.
3. Don't let the hobby interfere with what is really important in life. I have a wife who depends upon me to cook most of our meals in the non-summer months and I have three children who depend upon me to "bring home the bacon" so they can do things, like attend the college of their choice, etc. This hobby is not more important than that.
4. Keep reminding myself, that it's not about the numbers, although we attach numbers to just about everything we do. Yeah, it's fun to look at how many caches I've found, but it shouldn't be the reason I go out and cache.
5. Have fun with the hobby. If it becomes a chore, then is it really a hobby anymore? This should be fun and I intend to keep it that way.
   

Those are my caching resolution for the upcoming 2009 caching year. Happy New Year everyone.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:
Bison Chips - by TheDeviousMaxPower

View of the Canyon - by jerrytcher

Oddities

Every now and then, I encounter things while caching that defy an explanation. It’s either something that is really out of place, or I can’t get a handle on why it’s there in the first place, or it’s just something that seems really different. I’m used to the occasional rusted out car that can be found in a ravine somewhere. Those seem to be rather ubiquitous and not nearly as surprising as they should be if you considered how they got the car up there in the first place to then push it over the side and down into the ravine. Nor am I talking about the odd dinosaur or giant spider that sometimes can be found near cache hides. With names like Dinosaur Droppings, Arachnophobia, or Out of Africa, you’d probably expect something like that at those caches. What I’m talking about are those things that just make you scratch your head and think, Huh?

Like the time we were caching in the hills overlooking Whittier. It had been a good day of caching, with a nice hike involved. This particular cache we were headed towards was on top of a small hill. As we continued up to get this cache, we came upon one of those enclosures that the electric company seems to have on various hills around here, or perhaps it was the water company or a cell phone tower this time. No matter, the enclosure was in our way, so half our party went one way around it and the other half of the party went the other way, and encountered the bathtub – filled with water.

At first, you just stand and stare trying to comprehend what you’re seeing. Sometimes it’s hard, other times it’s not. Now since this was May and we hadn’t had any kind of substantial rain in a good long while, it was kind of odd to see the tub filled with water, until, upon closer inspection, we noticed that it had a spigot that was keeping it filled. The only thing we can think of was that someone had hauled a bathtub up here and was using it as a modified horse trough. Still, I can honestly say that I’ve only encountered a tub one other time while caching and I was actually expecting that one.

My daughter goes to school in the big valley of central California and I’ve had numerous chances to drive up there, either taking her for visits when we were first looking at colleges, or visiting her, now that she’s firmly ensconced up there. It goes without saying that I get my fair share of caching in on the drive up and back. One cache outside of Visalia, California called The Muirman had me intrigued. I could never figure out how to get to the cache, because by the time I was near the cache, it seemed like I was already by the cache. I think it was the third time that I knew I was going to be heading by this cache, I decided to look at a Google map closely to see if I could figure out how to get there. The cache page even gives it a difficulty of 2 for figuring out how to get there. Once there, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was still blown away. It’s not really odd, just different, something that you would normally expect to be up on the northern coast of California as opposed to in the central valley, even if it is close to the giant Sequoia forests.

Several times I’ve cached in Griffith Park in Los Angeles. There are an abundant amount of caches here in the park. The park has quite a few scenic overlooks with strategically placed benches that afford a good view of the city, probably even more beautiful at night with all the twinkling city lights below. When we got to one particular cache, we found a bench, that didn’t have that same kind of knockout view as most of the others. Why the park hadn’t cleared the bushes and trees away, is beyond me, but there was several yeas of growth accumulated in front of that bench. It made for quite a sight gag to say the least.

Today, the Tadpole and I went caching in a nice park in Riverside. While walking alongside the lake in the park, we came across, what I initially thought were willow trees along the bank, although they didn’t look quite right, not having the right kind of droopiness to their branches. But what were these trees? After closer inspection, I realized that I was looking at a row of coast redwood trees. Obviously, these hadn’t started here and they looked very odd, not the typical type of coast redwood you would normally expect, with the tall slender trunk and symmetrical branches. The only explanation I have for the strange shapes of these trees would be that they were over watered. I know that sounds strange, since they naturally live in a temperate rain forest, but these trees were right on the bank of the lake, not where you’d normally find them in their natural setting. It’s the only thing I can think of to explain it.

It's those strange things that you encounter from time to time that make up life stories, things that you can tell your friends about. Some of them are funny, some can be downright weird, and some are just plain interesting. And if I find other oddities in the future, I’ll probably get a chuckle out of it, or one of those huh? moments and then it will either dawn on me, or I’ll remain clueless. Knowing me, it will probably be the latter.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:

OUT OF AFRICA - by RANTAN & NineSix
Sunset at 17-A REVIVED - by The Cable Car Clan
The Muirman - by redwoodcanoe
Debs Park - by GPSKitty
Water Buffalo - by Bigmouth

Chaz the Spaz

I’m probably going to jinx this guy as soon as this one is posted, but I have to write about Chaz the Spaz. Chaz was a fuzzy little guy that was given to me by one of my students almost 6 years ago. I told this student that I was going to make him into a travel bug and send him out in the world, perhaps never to be seen again. As anyone who has ever released a travel bug or a geocoin into a cache can attest, those words are aptly spoken. There are probably a million different ways travel bugs can disappear, so expecting them to live long and prosper can be a crap shoot. Getting them to their destination? That can be even harder to achieve in most instances. Unless the travel bug is huge and unmistakable like Cindy (the Cinderblock), or Spare Tire, eventually, it’s probably going to disappear. But every now and then, you get a travel bug that takes a life unto its own, like Chaz the Spaz.

I released Chaz July 5, 2002. In the 5 and a half years he's been traveling, Chaz has been to some very interesting places. He started out in a rather nondescript cache off a mountain road in Los Angeles County in California. From there, he went several other places and then suddenly zoomed to Texas 1185.3 miles away.

Chaz was now racking up the miles, but I figured since he was in the urban area of Austin, he’d probably jump around from cache to cache in the city and not really get much mileage. OK. I could live with that. Actually, I really didn’t have much of a choice unless I changed his page saying that Chaz wanted to come back home. I think that would defeat the purpose anyway, so I decided to enjoy his travels. He bounced around, traveling 7 miles here, 20 miles there. One time he was placed in a cache and when he was retrieved from the same cache he had moved 53 feet. Go figure that one out, but it shows up on his cache page.

Chaz stayed in Texas from August 2002, until September 2003. Then he needed to get a passport. His next stop was 5654.3 miles away in Italy. Immediately after that he was in Germany and then three months after that, he was in the Netherlands. Once in the Netherlands, he started to do the Texas Two-Step, not straying very far from the first location he had been placed. Chaz spent 10 months touring the Netherlands and then he got on another plane.

His next stop, 9369.6 miles away was in Queensland, Australia. From October 2004 until October 2005, Chaz toured around the outback and along the coast of Australia. He was removed from a travel bug hotel in October and promptly disappeared. 8 months later he resurfaced again, this time back in Europe in Germany. The last cacher to find him in Australia apparently never logged him back into the cache that he was placed in, so the only reference we have of him is a log by a cacher in Germany stating, “Don't know how it came back to Germany...but today I found it in this cache (Auf dem Polle (visit link) )” This German jump added another 9928.5 miles to Chaz’s trip total.

Within two months, Chaz was back in the Netherlands and stayed there for over a year, 8 months of which were in another cacher’s possession. By August 2007, I started getting discovery notes for Chaz. That was good because it told me he was still out there, but it was also bad because he wasn’t moving. I should have known better. On August 19, 2007 Chaz was picked up. Two weeks later he was placed in a cache in Japan. Ten days later, he was picked up from Japan and is now resting comfortably in A Silly Story in the United Kingdom. Total mileage for Chaz as of this writing is 41310.8 miles.

Other interesting stats for Chaz.

He’s disappeared twice and resurfaced twice.

The oldest cache he’s been in is Bull Creek Overlook GCFE9 – yep only three digits in that GC number and it’s still active.

Chaz has seen the insides of 38 geocaches, half of which have since been archived. He’s also been posted to one virtual cache for mileage purposes.

For comparison purposes:

Cindy (the Cinderblock) has been out for 4 and a half years and has traveled 11851 miles.

Spare Tire has been out for almost the same length of time as Cindy and has traveled 1891 miles.

I guess the point I’m trying to make here is don’t give up on travel bugs. Yes, they disappear and many are shortlived, but every now and then you get a jewel of a travel bug like Chaz the Spaz and it all becomes worthwhile.