Red Letter Day

This story is not about geocaching.  It's a story that has taken 21 years to tell and is not finished even today.  Twenty one years ago today, my wife and I were clueless.  I don't believe anyone is totally prepared for parenthood, no matter how many books they've read, no matter how many pieces of advice they've received.  We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, yet we had no choice, because that path had been chosen earlier.  At 8:52 PM, on March 29th, 1989, our first born made her appearance into the world.  My wife's OB let me deliver my baby girl.

I have a bundle of thoughts running through my head today, too many to keep straight, so excuse me if this rambles a little bit.  She did the normal things.  If I could find her baby book, which is buried in a hall closet, I could probably tell you the exact date she showed her first tooth.  I know it was sometime around her first birthday.  I watched her crawl for the first time on Christmas Day that year.  I got lucky enough to videotape it, but was still unprepared for it, because I can remember thinking, "Wow, she just crawled over here, and I didn't even note it in the video."

Her favorite book to be read was Moo, Baa, LaLaLa, a silly little book describing animal sounds.  Did you know that three singing pigs say "La La La La?"  Well, that's what the book says.  Later we graduated to Dr. Seuss's ABC book.  It lends itself well to singing, so I ended up doing that a lot.  "Big A, Little A, what begins with A?  Aunt Annie's Alligator........A...a.....A."  A third favorite was Love You Forever.  This was probably my favorite, more than hers, but she liked me to read it to her at bedtime nonetheless.

As she grew, she developed new tastes.  I introduced her to camping, taking her up for a night in the mountains near Lake Arrowhead.  The following spring, we went camping at Joshua Tree National Monument.  Every spring and summer after that until she reached the age of 13, we would go camping somewhere.  One summer, Daddy forgot the tent poles, so we ended up buying a backpacking tent to sleep in for a week.  Have you ever slept in a backpacking tent with a 6 year old who thrashes around in her sleep a lot?

She also developed a passion for music and started taking violin lessons when she was in kindergarten.  Several years later, she joined the Claremont Young Musicians Orchestra and played with that group for a total of 10 years.  She is now playing in her college orchestra.  Because of this love of music, she toured Europe after her senior year in high school and was fortunate enough to play in several cities in Austria and Italy.  She attended Interlochen Center for the Arts one summer and also Tanglewood during another summer.  She's gone back as a camp counselor twice at Interlochen.

Braces, proms, homecoming dances, high school graduation, college applications were all a part of her life.  We went on road trips to different colleges, scouting them out.  She fell in love with one college on one of the worst days the campus was having, with torrential rain and wind and bitter cold.  I told her that if she liked it at its worst, she definitely would love it on other days.  Today, she is in her third year at the University of the Pacific, located in Stockton, CA, over 300 miles from home, too far away to give her a hug in person today on her 21st birthday.

21 years seems like a long time, yet it goes by so quickly.  Where once was a giggly little girl, now is a confident grown woman, less dependent upon her Daddy now to soothe skinned knees and other assorted aches and pains.  And although I can no longer hold her in my arms and carry her around cradled in the crook of my elbow, she is still my baby girl, one who I love very much.  As any parent would say, I have enjoyed watching her grow up, helping her to explore my world, and will now enjoy watching as she spreads her wings and explores her world.  I'll end this with a quote from my favorite book that I got to read to her when she was younger.

I love you forever,

I'll like you for always.

As long as I'm living,

My baby you'll be.

Happy Birthday Sweetheart.
Love,
Daddy

Brotherly Love

Every now and then, my older son surprises me.  This past weekend, I took the Tadpole north to visit his sister in Stockton and his brother in Santa Cruz.  I had a four day weekend, so it was easy to pull him out of school for a day so we could do this in a leisurely sort of way.  We spent one of the days in Santa Cruz, enjoying the lovely weather and touring the campus, as well as restocking my son's dorm pantry with goodies purchased at the local Costco.

When we first got there, he offered to give us a tour of the campus, primarily for his brother's benefit, since I've been to the campus several times.  Santa Cruz's campus is located on the side of a hill, so there's several bridges that cross ravines and in general, it's a pretty hilly campus, but a very beautiful one.  We saw 18 deer on campus that day, way more than my son said was usual.  Apparently, the deer were enjoying the good weather just like we were.

About half way through our walk, my son turned to me and asked me whether we wanted to find any geocaches.  Uh, sure son, but you're the one who calls geocaching, that "dorky thing Dad does" with my younger brother.  But this time he was honestly sincere that we have a good time and he knew we liked to geocache.  I hadn't brought the GPSr with me because I hadn't expected to geocache much that day, but I had brought along the iTouch which has all of my geocaching notes.  Because of the WiFi on campus, I was able to pull up the Geocaching site and I noticed a cache called Thimann Tribulation.

My son then pointed and said that the building we were standing next to was Thimann Hall. So we looked up the description and the hint and figured out where the cache was hidden, finding it in what I call "Commando Style," that is, without the use of the GPS.  Not a bad way to make geocaching a little bit more challenging.  I think this was about the 6th or 7th cache that I've found without using the GPSr.

My son even consented to several pictures.  It's very hard to get a good picture of him since he doesn't seem to like his picture being taken, but this day was also an exception, as I got several good ones of him around campus.  The Tadpole commented after we left for the day that he had really enjoyed himself and really enjoyed spending time with his brother.  That's a good thing, in my opinion.  For those of you who don't have teenagers yet, this is what is in store for you.  The Tadpole was shorter than his brother when his brother left for school last September.  The kid is a bottomless pit right now.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocache:
WUPH4_Best Soccer view in the world - by Mayela Mingi

It's that time of year again

February rolls around every year and because of the holidays attached to that month, I usually get to do a nice long road trip north to visit my children.  My district this year decided that we would take one long 4 day weekend as opposed to two 3 day weekends as we have in other years.  This Friday, I'm going to be taking the youngest out of school a little bit early and we'll head north to visit both of his siblings who are matriculating in college.

Our first stop will be Stockton where my daughter has been attending school at the University of the Pacific, majoring in violin performance and music education.  We'll probably have lots of time to geocache on Saturday, since my daughter is working most of the day helping out the music department, but we'll get to spend some time with her both Friday and Saturday nights.  The Tadpole will get a chance to look around campus as well.  He's had several opportunities to tour college campuses in the past year and even though he's still three years away from that step, he's enjoying the process.

Following our visit to the Stockton area, we'll head over late Saturday night to Santa Cruz.  My older son is in his first year at University of California at Santa Cruz.  He hasn't declared his major yet, but as noted above, he's still a freshman so he has some time to make that decision.  Right now, he's just enjoying the experience.  Most of Sunday will be spent visiting with him and touring the campus for the Tadpole.

Monday, we'll head home, geocaching along the way.  We have 9 travel bugs in our possession that we've picked up over the last couple of weeks, so we'll be distributing them freely across the trek we plan to take as well.  For those who are interested, I've created a bookmark of the cache route we might take.  The bookmark list has just about 300 caches in it, so I'll probably do two spot PQs for this trip, one centered on Stockton and the other centered on Santa Cruz.

It will definitely be a whirlwind trip, but it should be fun.  This will be the first road trip that I'll be taking the Tadpole on that doesn't involve camping.  We'll see how he adjusts to motel life.

Christmas musings

Tomorrow, my family will be at our house to celebrate Christmas.  I'm looking forward to seeing my sister who's been living either out of state (South Carolina) or out of the country (Hungary) for the past several years.  She keeps saying that we need to visit her in Hungary.  Yeah, with two kids in college right now, that's not financially possible, but maybe sometime in the future if she and her husband are still there.

Today, I went caching for the first time since December 5th.  As I've noted before, those two weeks of vacation is rather deceiving since the first week is all dealing with the prep work leading up to the "Big Day."  Afterwards, there's lots of down time, time for caching.  I've been caching for almost 9 years now and I have never been caching on any December 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th or 25th, until today.

I had everything on my "to do" list done and I decided that I needed a little walk, so I walked up the street for about a mile and found a cache just on the other side of the freeway from my house.  I met a student of mine who's grandfather owned the strawberry patch on the corner near where the cache was hidden.  We had a pleasant chat and then I continued on to find the cache.  I passed several houses that were decorated in lights for the season.  The one pictured has a TV situated alongside their driveway and they play the movie It's a Wonderful Life about three times a night.  I watched it this afternoon in the comfort of my family room with my daughter and son.  To each his own I guess.  I think, if I get up early tomorrow morning before everyone else, I might try to find a cache tomorrow as well.

Merry Christmas everyone.  Happy Birthday Dad.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocache:
Trick or Treat - Smell my Foot - by Maddmaxxawr

Dead Prophet

I went caching today with my good friend Chaosmanor out in the high desert north of my house.  We had a good day caching, spending many hours finding caches in several different quadrangles in pursuit of the Los Angeles County Quadrangle Challenge.  I'm not sure yet, as I haven't taken a real close look, but I think I was able to knock off 11 more quads towards the ultimate goal of that challenge.

I also hid another cache today, Dead Prophet.  It's a short hike into the desert to the base of a dead Joshua Tree to find a cammoed decon container.  I thought I'd found, a better spot for it about 200 feet south of where I ended up putting it.  While looking around that particular Joshua Tree, I noticed a large raptor's nest up in the crown of the plant.  I figured that it would be better to not disturb the nest, so the cache went where it is.  Maybe cachers will get lucky and see the raptor's when they're actually using the nest during mating season.

Today, being Veteran's Day, we honor all those who have served for our country in the armed forces.  My grandfather was a veteran of World War I fighting in Germany.  He also taught for a time at Annapolis, the Naval Academy.  I have a nephew serving on an aircraft carrier in the western Pacific.  Last I heard, he was in Singapore, but he's normally based out of Japan.  I would like to honor these two men today, and all other men and women who have served nobly for our country.  Thank you for our freedom.

Picture was taken at the following geocache:

Dead Prophet - by Webfoot

Cache Partners

I haven't been caching as much lately. Work has kept me busy, and with the Tadpole now in high school and running cross country there have been fewer opportunities to go out on a regular basis.  I had an opportunity to get some caching in this afternoon, since it's a Friday and I was without students today.  Teacher inservices tend to allow you out a little bit earlier than usual.  I didn't, mainly because I enjoy caching with other people a lot more than caching alone.

Tomorrow, the Tadpole and I will be doing some local caching.  It's the first time he and I have been out caching together since summer vacation I think.  It will be nice to get out and enjoy the outdoors a little with one of my caching partners.

My first caching partner was my other son.  When we first discovered caching, he was 10 years old.  He's now away at UC Santa Cruz enjoying his first year of college.  I have to assume he's enjoying it, since we've not heard much from him.  I rather would like to think that no news is good news, because he's the kind of kid who would be letting us know if things weren't going so well.

When we started geocaching, back in 2001, caches were hidden along trails away from civilization.  Hikes of 2 miles or more for one cache were common at the time.  I believe that's what appealed to him.  When we'd go camping, he was always the first one who suggested going on a hike somewhere.  Geocaching was a way to get us out on the trail around here.  We hiked in Chino Hills State Park and up into a canyon behind Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena.  We climbed to the top of a smallish hill in San Dimas to find a cache as well as in Schabarum Regional Park to the southwest of our house.

He enjoyed trading things at the caches.  Squirt guns, slime, whoopie cushions and anything else that you can imagine a boy would like, he'd want to take, so I made sure that I always had trade items with me that we could replace these treasures that we'd find in the cache.

Somewhere down the road, however, he grew up and put away those childish things.  His last camping trip was after his 7th grade year.  At the end of his 8th grade year, he decided that he wanted to go out for the cross country team in high school.  They practiced all summer and although the coach made allowances for family vacations, my son didn't want to miss any practice.  Running became his focus and so camping and geocaching were pushed to the wayside.

In fact, his thoughts on geocaching are, "that dorky thing that Dad does."  Perhaps in the the future, he'll change his mind about camping and caching.  Perhaps not, but I'll leave the door open anyway.  My daughter has expressed and interest in going camping with us again, so it's always possible he will too.  That would be nice.  This particular blog entry is dedicated to my middle son.

Pictures were taken at the following geocaches:
Old Mossy Cache - by OtisPug
THE LOST AMADEUS - by Lizard
ONT Travel Bug Ground Central - by Crims0ngh0st & AcjLady

Getting close

With a busy Mother's Day weekend, caching has been put on the back burner for awhile. The Tadpole and I were able to get out this morning for a little caching. This morning I needed 11 caches to get to 2500 found. The goal was to spend the morning and get to that number before lunch, then come home and spend the afternoon listening to my wife perform in her jazz band at our church fiesta.

Well, we fell four caches short, but we still had an excellent morning and the music in the afternoon was also very enjoyable and relaxing. After posting this, I plan on heading back there to eat dinner with my family.

This upcoming weekend, I'll be heading toward Stockton. My daughter is finished up her finals this week and completing her second year of college at the University of the Pacific. It will be good to have her home, if only for a month before she heads to Michigan for her summer counseling job at the Interlochen Institute for the Arts.

Urban Jungle Road Trip

The Tadpole and I went on a road trip Saturday, ostensibly to grab some virtual flags in the Los Angeles Basin. The flags were stretched all the way from Thousand Oaks to the west of us, down to San Clemente south of us. Six of them lay waiting for us to drive up and claim the flags, and thus, the points for the flags. We were successful in getting all six flags. The red dots on the map are the different locations we went to get the flags. We ended up getting only one geocache, one that happened to be near the flag in Thousand Oaks. We weren't sure if the Tadpole had found a cache in Ventura County yet, so we stopped there to get this cache to be sure. We remembered later that we had cached together in Ventura County, so in reality, the cache was just a bonus, not fulfilling any kind of challenge, but just there for the fun of finding it.

The thing I love about GeoVexilla is each flag can be worth different points to different people playing the game. For example, we "found" flags of Nigeria, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, St Vincent and the Grenadines (shown below), Nicaragua, Poland and the United States. When a flag is found, the website computer generates a five flag set. The first flag in the set is worth 1 point. Any other flag found for that set would be worth 2 points for the second flag, 4 points for the third, 8 points for the fourth and 16 points for the fifth. Each set is worth a possible 31 points. I could be finding a flag with a friend of mine which might open a new set up for him, but could be worth 8 points to me, because it's already in an existent set. When flags appear on the web site, you have to be ready, because they have a limited lifespan. Most tend to last about two weeks, but I've seen some come and go in just over a week.

It's also possible to move flags around. If you look at my flag sets and scroll down to the bottom, you'll find several sets that are empty. That's because I've moved some flags that could fill in other sets. I enjoy it, because I enjoy going to places where the possibility of getting the flag could be suspect. Not all flags can be grabbed, due to property laws, or terrain, whereas, technically, all geocaches should be able to be grabbed, since another human being has been there already to place the cache.

The GeoVexilla game site is another way to use my GPSr. My son likes finding virtual flags, if nothing more than he gets to see the flags up on my flag sets. I noticed a flag in the hills south of Thousand Oaks. I hadn't ever seen that particular flag design before, so I looked up the island of Niue. I learned it's one of the largest coral islands in the world.

The other thing the site allows me to do is expand my geocaching area. Yesterday wasn't a geocaching type of day for us, with each of us preferring to just grab the virtual flags. Other times, with fewer flags in an area, we might pinpoint a flag, grab it, then find some caches in the general location. I've discovered a couple of nice trails this way and have plans to go back into Riverside County, south of us this fall when it gets cooler to hike this trail that we found because of the virtual flags.

Now that we have our vacation plans formulated for this summer, he and I can start looking at our route to check on geocaching possibilities. Scouting for flags will have to wait until close to our camping trip since they have a limited lifespan on the site. Overall, finding the virtual flags has been a pleasant addition to our GPS using experience. Much, like geocaching, it gets us out and about, gets us to explore new territory and helps us enjoy the outdoors and each other. Try it, you might like it.

Journeys

Saturday, our family went to visit my in-laws in Lake Arrowhead, which is up in the San Bernardino Mountains. It’s about an hour's drive from our house, half an hour on the freeway and then another half an hour on windy mountain roads. I’d planned on capturing a virtual flag which was very close to their house. We left fairly early in the morning, earlier than most times and I attribute that to the fact that my daughter wasn’t with us. She’s the one who ends up sleeping in and not getting up early as the rest of us. My 16 year old son has learned the benefits of sleeping in, but he was up by 9 AM and we were on the road by 9:30. Let’s face it, guys can get ready more quickly than girls.

Once up there, we sat around acclimatizing ourselves to the mountain altitude and then started fixing lunch. Lunch is always an experience at my in-laws house. I think one of the reasons my mother in law fell in love with me was because I ate her food, and lots of it. Needless to say, she pulls out the stops whenever we eat, even if it’s just sandwiches, which is what we had for lunch. Blondie’s Dagwood would be hard pressed to beat me in a sandwich making contest.

After lunch we went for a drive, basically to find a place to do a small hike. At first we decided to go up to Strawberry Peak to take in the view. Strawberry Peak is a fire lookout station manned by volunteers. Four years ago when the devastating fires here burned through this area, the fires were beaten back within feet of this tower and the radio towers that are also atop this peak.

The lookout station is manned by volunteers and you can climb to the top of the tower when it is occupied to check out the view. On clear days, you can see out to Catalina Island, a distance of about 50 miles. If the trees weren’t in the way, there is a sight line all the way to Las Vegas. We could see down into the desert and see Victorville where I’d been just two days before, but we couldn’t see very far to the south or west due to a fire in the Yucaipa area to the east. The smoke was obscuring most of the hills across the valley and we couldn’t see parts of the valley either. We’ve been fortunate here. Other places in California have been hit far worse this year.

We pointed out some of the sights to my older son who climbed the tower with us. I tried to point out the mountain peak that I used to identify with when I was a youngster, having grown up on the opposite side of that mountain down in Orange County. Unfortunately, we couldn’t see “Saddleback Mountain” because of the smoke. My wife had the dog, so she stayed down below and my younger son, who doesn’t deal well with heights also stayed down below.

After coming back down, we drove over to capture the flag, worth 4 points for me in the game, and to do our hike. Getting over to the flag was easy, but capturing it wasn’t since the game dictates that you have to be a minimum of a 100 meters to capture it and we were stymied by a road closure that kept us a quarter mile from the flag. I knew there were other access points, but they would require bushwacking, which would be out of the question for my nearly 80 year old father in law and my 76 year old mother in law, so we found another trailhead on which to hike, with a nice level terrain along the waterfront.

Everyone had a good time. We got some pictures on our hike and we tired the dog out. He slept most of today and at this moment is sleeping near the feet of my wife in the other room. What I was most impressed with were my two sons. When their grandmother got tired near the end of the hike, one of them and then the other in turn assisted her back to the car, helping her along, just by being there for her to lean on for support. I know I probably didn’t have that kind of compassion at ages 12 and/or 16. I was pretty self indulgent as a kid and didn’t grow up for a long time. I was glad to see them taking care of other family members in need.

Each day I thank God that my kids have all four of their grandparents. By the time I was 13, I had none. I’m thankful we live close to them so we can visit. I grew up in California while my grandparents lived in Indiana. I’m glad my kids have a relationship with their grandparents and I hope it continues to grow for many more years. They won’t be around forever so the time we spend with them is always precious. Yesterday, I scored no points. I got no smiley for any caches found. And yet, it was a good day nonetheless. Sometimes it’s the journey taken, not the end point that’s important.