The Answer My Friend.....

This past weekend, I did a quick turnaround trip up to Stockton to pick up my daughter from college. I'm just recovering from the trip, but then again, most of us who are slightly older know what a 1000 mile round trip can do to the body, especially if it's done in only two days. I definitely know that I'm not as young as I used to be and can't just hop in the car and drive 12 hours or so without feeling the side effects.

Driving up, I decided to take the back roads, although they weren't necessarily the most scenic. There were several virtual flags just off the Interstate that it appeared that I could get close enough to, so I routed to those and also did some caching. Consequently the trip up took about four hours longer than usual, but it was an enjoyable extra time. Driving, then getting out and caching for a little bit tends to help keep me refreshed for the drive to come.

The side trips took me through the oil fields in the southern central valley around the town of Taft. Nothing really spectacular about this area, although I did get a little bit of a jolt at one cache. It's definitely heating up in the central valley and summer is upon us. The drive home, I noticed a time and temperature sign in Bakersfield that read 106°. Granted those you always take with a grain of salt, but even at 10 degrees off, that's plenty hot for May.

The cache that I found near Taft hadn't been found in over a month. Apparently, the seal on this particular ammo can was a really good seal. With the heat of the sun beating down on it, the insides were very warm and I have to theorize that the air pressure inside it was slightly higher than the outside. When I popped the handle on the ammo can, the cache hissed at me giving me a little bit of a start. This was one of those moments that I was glad that I had been caching by myself, because I know I jumped, which would have probably caused some laughter from any caching buddies that would have been along for the hunt.

Later on in the day, after getting back over to the Interstate, I took my second side trip, this time into the San Jose area, which is near the southern part of San Francisco Bay. Once again, I was looking for a couple of virtual flags and a couple of caches. The one cache that stood out in this area was a kinetic sculpture. While waiting at the light to turn into a business complex, I noticed the sculpture from a couple hundred feet away.

A quick glance gave me one of those, Oh, OK. That's kind of interesting. When I looked again, I noticed the sculpture had changed. Now this was interesting. Once I got up close to it and had parked the car, I realized the sculpture was two large panels that swiveled at their midpoints. They would wave back and forth with the wind, not a lot, but enough to get a different look every time you looked at sculpture. I took a couple of pictures, one while flat on my back so I could get it and the buildings behind it in the same shot. The metal had an interesting texture to it as well.

There wasn't any explanation, except who created it and what the name of it was, but I would have liked to know how much the panels actually fluctuated in the breeze. There was a gentle breeze blowing that day, but I wonder what the panels would do in a brisker breeze. We get gale force winds down in Southern California from time to time and I would imagine that can happen in the Bay Area as well. I guess, I'll just have to come back up here some time when the winds are really blowing to find out.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:
California's Other Gold - by feedle
Silver Gyrations - by N2Books2

Desert California

I would be curious to know what people outside of California think about first, when they here the word, California. Is it one gigantic metropolis, similar to New York City, only stretching all the way from San Diego up to San Francisco? Hollywood? The Golden Gate Bridge? I've written in the past about back roads of California, but I think any state has back roads. Over a week ago, I had, once again, a chance to take some back roads. As always, the experience is great, the caching usually better than average, and the scenery breathtaking.

The road that we took for that excursion last week, HWY 138, connects up Gorman, CA which is along Interstate 5 over to Lancaster, CA which is in the middle of the Antelope Valley in what is commonly called the high desert. Here in California, we have both high desert and low desert, with 4000 feet elevation being the cutoff between the two, approximately.

It's really interesting when you look at desert. Recently, I got to see some pictures of Qatar and the desert there. That's probably what most people have in mind when they think of desert. There's not much in the way of plant life and lots of rocks and sand. I think people think about sand dunes also when they think about the desert. California desert, particularly the high desert is surprisingly lush with vegetation. From a distance, many times this desert looks like typical farmland and sometimes it is as evidenced by the sheep we saw near one of the caches we found that day.

We also noted the typical sage brush that is rather ubiquitous to the region, but there were also strands of joshua trees and other typical desert vegetation here. At the high elevations, there were scrub oak forests and an ocassional pine tree. One particular pine tree that we encountered was almost 90 years old. That doesn't sound like a very old tree, but when you consider the harsh living conditions, you have to think that this particular tree is actually pretty remarkable.

Growing up, I never fully appreciated the desert, probably because my father really didn't appreciate it himself. He was a mountain lover, so our vacations consisted of traveling through the desert, usually in the dead of night, so we could get to the higher up places where there were trees and water. I can think of one time when we camped in the desert for anything over a one night stand and that was when I was in 5th grade when we spent our entire spring break at Death Valley. Other than that, I never spent any other time out in the desert for very long.

When my daughter was old enough, one of the first places I took her was Joshua Tree National Monument. I hauled my dad long with us, because he'd never been there either. I've been back to Joshua Tree a number of times since then. It's a beautiful place, full of all the things that make the high desert wonderful. I was there last November with my youngest son for his first excursion there. He loved it as well and wants to go back again in the future.

There are other things that we have in the desert here that I won't go into here, but will save for another post. It was one of those unexpected things one finds while caching, that makes a caching experience truly wonderful. Suffice to say, the desert is a haunting place, but it can also be a cruel place. One needs to know one's limits and always make sure that one carries enough fluids, or knows of a place where one can get those fluids. One corner grocery store out in the middle of nowhere that day truly was a Godsend. Not that we were in trouble, but it really helped out to replenish some of the lost fluids we'd had during the course of our caching day. Sometimes it sneaks up on you.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:
Gorman Road - Wild Flowers - by fOtOmOm
Just Ducky - by Searching Gentiles
Quail Lake - by fOtOmOm
Desert Wind - by hoolegan & BIOB

Backroads

This past weekend I drove up to Stockton to pick up my daughter from college after a very successful first year of school. Hey, she held on to her scholarships, made new friends, grew musically and over all, had a great time this year, so it sounds pretty successful to me. I’m starting to have problems separating the trips up since I’ve made so many in the last couple of years, first when we were checking out the school and now either fetching her for holidays or just visiting.

I have noticed that whenever I’m with someone else in the car, I will take the most direct route up to Stockton, or the almost most direct route, since there are two routes, one which is about 20 minutes faster than the other. The slower route is more scenic, however. When I’m not with anyone, I’ll take my time and just enjoy the scenic route, or even get off either of the main routes I’m taking and take a back road, something that Robert Frost writes about in his poem, “The Road Not Taken.”

I did that in February on my planned three day roadtrip when I took several back roads, some that might not even be classified as back roads considering the amount of traffic that was on them. This weekend, I definitely took a back road to get to Stockton.

I started off from home Saturday morning early, figuring that I’d be making the normal 6 and a half hour drive in about 9 hours or so. I took I-5 north, getting a couple of caches in Kern County and depositing a couple of geocoins and travel bugs that I brought along for the ride. I left the Interstate near Coalinga, California for two reasons. The first reason was a dash point near Coalinga that I wanted to get and the other was I wanted to complete the run I’d planned in February to get San Benito County off of my “Counties that I haven’t cached in yet” list. It was a hot day out with temperatures approaching triple digits, which kept most people inside as I drove through Coalinga, but I stopped just to get gas and find one cache in a nice little park. I then headed out of town on HWY 198.

198 is a very winding two lane road with occasional places to pass other slow moving vehicles, but I wasn’t in a hurry, because the rolling hillsides of the area were enjoyable to look at and this was more of a pleasure cruise, than a “numbers run” for caches. I kept glancing at the GPSr screen from time to time and would stop when necessary to find a cache. I figured I’d get a couple of caches in San Benito County, then move further north and get a couple of caches in Alameda County and then Contra Costa County as well. As any cacher knows, things happened and plans were changed on the fly. The further I went along 198 and then HWY 25 into San Benito County, the further I became entranced by the beauty of the place.

San Benito County is located east of Monterey County in the central portion of the state. It’s very rural and has lots of rolling hills and farms that seem to have a lot of cattle grazing on the land there, as well as some flat valleys where the predominant crop seemed to be alfalfa. The contrast between the bright green fields, the amber hillsides and the dark green scrub oak trees was a photographer’s delight and this might sound sappy, but at one point on the drive, I actually found myself humming America the Beautiful. This seemed like where the author had been when the song or lyrics had been written. But enough of waxing poetically, since I’ll do that further down below.

As I continued to cache along the road, I kept thinking to myself, I was getting behind, but I kept justifying it by also thinking, but you’re getting some great pictures and you’re enjoying yourself. Fortunately, that part of me won out hands down. At every cache location, at every bend in the road, the scenery just improved. There was no way I was going to rush this little drive. Had the particular caches been in more rural settings, they most likely would have been rated substandard by most people, but that’s what caching is all about in my opinion. The journey is part of the adventure. There were micros, mixed in with larger containers that were big enough to hold travel bugs and other swag. It was a good mix of different sorts of caches, with the scenery helping everything along.

As I started entering back into suburbia, just south of Hollister, I looked at the clock on the dashboard of my car and realized that it was 3:30. Having left at 7 AM, I was already 8+ hours into my trip and still had a ways to go to get to Stockton. There was no way I was going to head up into Alameda County at this point in time, so I decided to forego those two other counties and head back over to the Interstate and get up to Stockton, because we still had to pack my daughter’s dorm room into the van for the journey home the next day.

My daughter had a music gig the following morning, which meant that I had some free time to myself and I had one of two options. Watch the hotel’s free cable TV, or go out and explore some more back roads and do some more caching. Well, that was a no brainer.

Because I’d originally created a Router PQ for this trip, the end of the route ended about a mile beyond my hotel room, so I decided to start caching at this end and work myself back along my original route and see how far I could go. This route took me through the delta region of central California, lush farmlands, narrow bridges and very flat vistas. There was one point where one of the bridges that I crossed had gates on either end and stop lights, because it was meant to rotate in the middle to allow boats to travel on the waterway it crossed. I can’t remember ever seeing another bridge like that before in California, yet here it was on the border of San Joaquin and Contra Costa County.

Yep, I’d driven far enough on this other back road, that I’d made it to Contra Costa County, where I found two more caches before deciding that I needed to get back to Stockton so I could await my daughter’s return from her gig. We came home via a more direct route, although we did do a side trip in the Fresno area to grab a couple of virtual flags and another dash point.

Overall, the trip was a wonderful excursion, although a bit exhausting. I wished I’d had one more day. It still feels like I’m behind on my sleep and as if I need a weekend to recover from my weekend. Still, it was worth taking those back roads. I’ll leave you today with Robert Frost’s poem

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost (1915)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Pictures were taken at or near the following caches:

A Green Valley View by Sloigo
Old School by Pal_Al
Stop Staring at Me! by Momaqna
Take a Sit by Scooterman
Are we there Yet III? by Sloigo