A rose by any other name...

This past week, I went on a short road trip to Northern California.  I know short is a relative term, but it was short for me in time, as opposed to distance since I put slightly over 1000 miles on the van, plus added two new front tires during the trip.

I drove up to Stockton, mainly to deliver extra "stuff" to my daughter, including a couch that she'd gotten from her grandmother, but couldn't fit in her car.  There would be a side trip to Santa Cruz to pick up my son as well.  Since he wanted to visit with his sister for a little bit, I picked him up, then drove back over to Stockton.  This should have been a 4 hour round trip, but it ended up being over 8 hours because a problem developed on one of the front tires and I had to get that fixed before we could head back.  Things happen and there's not much I could do about that.

Each time I drive up there, I try to take different routes.  I look at the different virtual flags that can be captured, as well as any possible dashpoints, plus geocaches and then I plan my route accordingly.  Waymarks and benchmarks are side possibilities, but for those, I just let them happen as opposed to me actively search for them.

If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you know that my most active waymark category is water towers.  I love driving into small towns and seeing their town advertised for miles by the large water tower in the center of town.  We have few water towers in Southern California, as most municipalities build large storage tanks in the hills above town which provides the same purpose of creating water pressure for the town's water supply.

Towns in the Central Valley of California and elsewhere where no hills are present create their town's water pressure by building water towers.  Usually, these water towers promote the city, but some support advertisements for local businesses.  The main water tower in Merced, California promotes the newest university in the UC system, UC Merced.

As I drove through the Central Valley this week, I happened to drive through the town of Wasco, CA.  I've seen signs pointing to Wasco while driving both Hwy 99 and I-5, but have never gotten off, mainly because the town is out of the way.  I've actually wanted to either stop in the town, or at least, stop and take a picture of a sign with Wasco on it, mainly because a geocacher, whom I consider a good friend and have met, goes by the name WascoZooKeeper.

Had I known a little bit about the town, I might have been tempted to stop there sooner.  Wasco bills itself as the Rose Capital of the World.  Every year it has a rose festival the weekend after Labor Day weekend and the water tower in the middle of town is plastered with a large red rose.  After getting home, I discovered that 55% of all roses grown in the United States are grown in and around Wasco by nine major rose companies.  It was a pleasant experience to drive through the fields around town and see rows and rows of red roses, then rows of yellow roses.  I know I've never seen so many roses in one place before.

If not for the GPS games that I play, I probably would have never passed through this quaint little town.  I feel, I'm richer in spirit because of this hobby.  If you happen to be in the area on the weekend after Labor Day some year, I think you could do worse than to make a stop in Wasco and take in their Rose Festival.

Pictures taken at the Wasco Water Tower:

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

Wallace, Idaho

As noted in the previous log, we did some geocaching in Montana, then headed back to Couer d'Alene. Interstate 90 has some very scenic locations along it in the panhandle of Idaho, so we had ample opportunity to enjoy the outdoors as we looked for caches. One of our stops along the way, was in Wallace, ID, a small town, that obviously has become a tourist stop for vacationers to visit as they travel on the interstate.

Similar to the movie CARS, Wallace was bypassed by the interstate when it was created several decades ago. Unlike Radiator Springs in the movie, the town wasn't bypassed by miles, but rather by feet in elevation. Wallace is located in a narrow river gorge, with no way for the freeway to go anywhere except up, which is what happened. The interstate was built along the side of the canyon over the less populated part of the town. With several exits, tourists can get off with ease, visit the town for lunch or dinner, or perhaps the night, then quickly get back on the freeway to continue their travels.

The cache we found in Wallace was near the old train depot. Most of the tracks are now gone from this section of town. Looking at old photographs in the nearby museum, this particular train depot was a bustling building, serving both freight and passenger trains. Those days are now long gone as evidenced by the lack of track around the train depot.

The cache was an easy find with the name of the cache pretty much giving away its location, but it was still fun to find. After finding it, we noticed the depot was now a train museum, so we decided to pay the entrance fee and tour the facility. We also noticed a beautiful benchmark on the side of the building. Before touring the museum, I had to go back to the van and get the camera so I could document our visit to the benchmark. I took a couple of pictures and then we went inside to tour the museum.

The museum was small, befitting a small town that it was in, but it had a bunch of historical remnants from the lines that went through this area of the country. There was even a small model railroad exhibit that people could run free of charge, a very nice touch.  I found a picture upstairs in the museum of a train wreck that had been caused by a snow avalanche.  Snow had taken out a trestle, causing several railroad passenger cars to drop down into the gulch.   Amazingly, no one was killed in this avalanche and eventually after 11 hours, everyone of the passengers had been rescued.  I took a picture of that wreck and posted it as part of my log for that cache, since the picture was from a different angle than the cacher had posted on his cache page.

Upon arrival home, the fun began.  Well, I'm not sure it's fun, but it was interesting.  When I looked up closest benchmarks to the cache we'd found,  I found two that by all indications were supposed to be right on top of the cache.  That probably meant that there was a good chance that at least one of them was the correct benchmark for the one we'd found.  That, was not to be the case however.

Of the two benchmarks listed, this one appeared to be the most promising based upon the description on the benchmark page.   The description of the benchmark on the page states that this benchmark is set vertically in the south face of a brick  building (the train depot) 4.5 feet higher than the sidewalk. The benchmark was monumented in 1935.  That's where the confusion steps in, because the benchmark in the side of the depot is dated 1986.

There have been four cachers that have logged this benchmark as the one monumented in 1935.  None of them posted pictures.  Had they posted pictures, or at least looked at the benchmark page before logging, they would have realized that this benchmark is not the one in the description.  We already had our answer to the puzzle, because we'd toured the museum previously.  When the interstate came through, it was either destroy the train depot because it was going to be in the way of the bridge the freeway was going to be on, or move it.  Civic leaders decided on the latter and moved the building 200 feet west from its original position.  Whether the USGS decided to put a new benchmark in place at that time is unknown, but the original placement and description don't match.  You can actually see the new benchmark in the last photo on the right hand side of the building near the entrance to the museum.

There is also some geographic confusion.  Since both benchmarks are fairly close, there really isn't a way to designate how many feet they are apart from each other if they are less than a tenth of a mile away.  That means the database can say there's a benchmark right here, but it could be up to 528 feet away.  This means that cachers should be extra careful when logging benchmarks, otherwise they're posting bogus logs for benchmarks they're not really finding.  The benchmark information FAQ page indicates that one should try to take pictures of the benchmark, both a close up and one that places the benchmark in its surroundings.

For this reason, I don't log benchmarks that I find unless I've taken a picture of them at the time.  I've been on caching outings where we've stumbled across benchmarks, documented them and when we got home, found there were two and three others in the same area.  I know for sure that we probably walked right over one of them.  But, we didn't take a picture, nor even see it, so I won't log it.  And to be honest, I'm not sure why the logging of this particular benchmark, clearly the wrong one bugs me, but it does.  I guess I need to get this out of my system since it's just a game and everybody plays the game a little differently.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocache:
The Cow Catcher - by thehobbler

Montana

After getting to Couer d'Alene, Idaho, we spent most of the day just resting.  We'd literally been on the road for nine straight days and caching all of those days.  I slept in a little, then spent the better part of the day just watching the water lap up on shore.  It was very peaceful.  Then my dad's realtor came by with his boat wondering if the boys wanted to go boating.  I came along and enjoyed the ride watching 11 pre-teen and teenagers get towed behind the boat for the rest of the afternoon.  It was a relaxing day to say the least.

The next day, the Tadpole and I had decided that we wanted to do some caching along Interstate 90.  We figured we'd spend most of the day, grabbing caches here and there and would eventually make our way into Montana, which would be our 5th and last state we would cache in on this trip.  I had placed three caches inside Montana into the PQ I ran for the trip.

Just inside the border there were dueling rest areas on both side of the interstate, with caches hidden at each one, so those two made obvious choices.  Since we were driving east, we had to get off the freeway and make our way to the westbound side, so the first exit into Montana past the rest areas, I noticed another cache, so I put that one in there as well.

The eastbound rest area, our first cache find in Montana ended up being the most enjoyable and also the most difficult find of the three we found in Big Sky Country.  The rest area was a bit of a geographical curiosity for these two Southern California boys.  At first, I assumed that the state of Montana was just putting a lot of effort into their rest areas.  The bathrooms were all single stalls found inside a common room area.  The entire building was very nicely done with historical displays along the inner panel separating the men's side from the women's side.  It wasn't until after we'd gotten home that I realized that this was built more because of the weather in the area as opposed to extra tax money being available.  I would expect with lots of snow in an area, people would appreciate indoor areas to wait for a bathroom.

Eventually, we headed over the cache area.  The cache was well hidden away from the main rest area along a service road.  We didn't have to worry about muggles trying to figure out what we were doing.  Behind the rest area we found a stream, with a multitude of plants and trees growing beside it.  Wildflowers were blooming everywhere.  I noticed Indian Paintbrush, Lupine and some sort of daisy alongside the service road.

We also spotted snakes.  At least the Tadpole spotted snakes.  I just spotted one garter snake, but it was a nice two footer who seemed to tolerate me getting close enough to get a decent picture of it.  While I was stalking that one, the Tadpole spotted two others in an area he had been searching.

At first, I thought we might strike out on this one, but I've found with perseverance, we are usually successful.  The key was taking my camera back to the van.  I know I don't tend to search as vigorously when I have my camera strapped around my neck, so the act of putting it back in the car, I believe, liberated me enough that I wasn't as afraid to put my hand into bushes in search of the cache.  In this case, it wasn't bushes that I needed to be parting, but rather rocks that needed to be moved.  We had the cache in short order after that.  Because of the scenic beauty of the area, I put this cache on my top five percent list.  It was a worthy addition to the list.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocache:
Rockhound - by RockhoundMT

Underground wonders

While camping in Redwoods National Park, we made a day trip into Oregon to tour Oregon Caves National Monument. The caves here are some of the five percent of the caves around the world that are marble caves. Most are created from limestone. Those that are near major plate boundaries tend to be marble, because of added heat and pressure from below which metamorphoses the limestone into marble. Sequoia National Park has a marble cave tour that we've gone on several times and have enjoyed. This one would be no exception.

We were fortunate to get as our tour guide one of the park rangers whose specialty is geology, so we got a very informative tour. We got to experience a cave blackout, which is pretty standard on most cave tours, but it's always kind of creepy to experience that total darkness, where no light penetrates. I can't imagine getting lost in something like that, yet it seems that most of the early discoverers of caves seemed to have done just that: went in with minimal light, then had to grope their way out. I guess they all make good stories to tell on the tour.

When touring a cave, the number one rule is always, DON'T TOUCH THE FORMATIONS! I can't stress that enough. Oils from your hands can get on the formations, which will alter the water flow of the formations, usually causing them to stop growing. I've toured several different caves during my lifetime, including Wind Cave in South Dakota, Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Crystal Cave in California (Sequoia), Lehman Caves in Nevada, and now Oregon Caves. To a greater or lesser extent, all of these caves have had some damage from humans. It's pretty much inevitable.

I can't remember much of Wind Cave, since I was there almost 40 years ago. Carlsbad seemed to have the least, although it does have an elevator shaft built in it, complete with stalactites growing in the roof of the elevator shaft. The worst damage that I can recall was in Lehman Caves. This was primarily because the caves were an entrepreneurial adventure for Absalom Lehman back in the 1920s. He let people literally go into the caves with sledgehammers so they could leave the caves with souvenirs. The damage was pretty evident in those caves.

The human damage was much less here in Oregon Caves although it was evident. We came across a rock where past visitors, from the 1809s felt it necessary to write their names on the stone in pencil. We walked right by the rock formation. It seemed obvious to many of us on the tour, that if the graffiti had been written in pencil, it should be fairly easy to erase it. Not as easy as it was thought however, because the cave is still a growing cave the pencil marks have since been covered over by a thin patina of flowstone. In other words, the graffiti has become one with the rock. The only other damage I noticed was a formation that reminded me of a painting by Edvard Munch entitled, "The Scream." At the bottom of the scream, there appears to be a piece that has been broken off.

This particular cave has gotten me to think about creating an earthcache. I found a nice spot where geocachers can observe some different cave formations. In the next week or so, depending upon my schedule, I'll be working to create this earthcache. I already have permission from the chief geologist of the park, so it's now just a matter of writing it all up and submitting it. That's the kicker though is finding the time.

The past week has seen me start back to school. We keep starting earlier and earlier. 14 years ago, my wife was pregnant with our third child, the Tadpole. His due date was September 12th, which was problematic at the time because that was my scheduled first day of school. Fortunately, I worried about this needlessly, because the Tadpole decided to make an entrance into the world 11 days early, so it didn't impinge upon my schedule. Look again though. September 12th was the first day of school in my district in 1995. My first day of classes this year was August 10th. Sigh. My apologies for not writing much this week. It was a busy first week.

Pictures were taken at or near the following future (hopefully) earthcache:
Oregon's Hall of Marble - by Webfoot

Highway Character

For most of the week we were camping, we traveled along Hwy 101 in Northern California. The 101 is a very interesting road. Now depending upon your perspective, the 101 either starts or ends in Southern California. From my point of view, that's where it starts, so that's where this tale starts.

The 101 starts in Los Angeles as an 8 lane superhighway at one of the worst congested intersections of two freeways in the entire world. It is labeled an odd numbered freeway or highway. Usually, but not always, odd numbered roads run north/south while even numbered roads run east/west. There are always exceptions as we found out later on our trip when we were traveling almost due north on the southbound side of Interstate 5 in Oregon, but that's another story.

Anyway, the 101 is a north/south highway/freeway and starts in Los Angeles. For the next fifty miles it runs east/west along the coast, then veers into a northwesterly direction until it gets up into San Luis Obispo County before it starts on a more northerly route. Suffice to say, it seemingly goes every way. And it also seems to have a life of its own with regard to how many lanes it's going to have. On our trip, just on the northern section of the road north of San Francisco to the Oregon border, this road had 8 lanes, 6 lanes, 5 lanes, 4 lanes, 3 lanes and 2 lanes. You gotta admit, this road has some character to it, perhaps to the point of schizophrenia. I'm not sure it knows what it wants to be, but that's the fun of the road. You never know what's going to be around the next bend or over the next hill.

On our trip along the 101, we noticed all sorts of interesting things, most of which you don't normally see in your daily travels. How often do you recall seeing a sign along one of your highways indicating that you were in a Tsunami hazard zone, or that this was a Tsunami Evacuation Route? We noticed these signs every time the 101 came down close to the ocean, or was close to sea level even though it could be inland for quite a ways. This stems from the 1964 earthquake in Alaska which caused tsunamis to strike along the coast of Northern California, killing several people.

When was the last time you drove along your nearby highway and saw a statue of Paul Bunyan with a fifty two foot waist who stood next to a just as large big blue ox named Babe who also happened to be anatomically correct? This was all part of a local tourist trap known as Trees of Mystery. I'm not sure which is more disturbing, the fact that people were getting their pictures taken near Babe's anatomy, or that if you stood in front of Paul Bunyan, he'd talk with you and answer some of your questions. Roadside kitsch like this is becoming few and far between, but the 101 still has it.

Wildlife seems to be common along many freeways and the 101 is no exception. The fact that it winds its way through a national park also increases the chances that when driving along the highway, you'll see wildlife. Having driving along the highway many times when I was going to college, I was prepared for the large herd of Roosevelt Elk we saw right along the road. I'm not sure the Tadpole was the first day, but by the third day, he was pretty much used to it. You just learn to drive slowly, so that one of those big creatures doesn't end up becoming part of your car's exterior paint job and everything will be OK.

All of these encounters happened when the 101 was in two lane mode, in other words, in the more rural parts the highway wound through. The larger part of the road tended to be in the urban area. But that's what was really enjoyable about the road. No matter how big it got, it always seemed to go back to its roots, a two lane road, connecting point A with point B. A lot of these roads seem to be disappearing. I hope this road never loses its character.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:
Code by the Coast - by Phobos+Demos
Babe - by ChrissySkyking + Blaze
Big Critters With Antlers - by NCFLYERS - The Double J's of Fortuna, CA

Camping Trip

Planning has begun for our annual summer camping trip. This year there is a little bit of a twist to the entire trip, which is going to elongate it by about a week. Because of that, this will be the longest camping trip we've ever taken. Originally, the trip was going to be our basic one week trip. I actuallychronicled where we would be staying last year at about this time. Unfortunately, last year, the Tadpole got sick on the first night while camping in Marin County and we had to return home. We now believe that his illness was probably the precursor for his appendicitis which flared up in a major way last month.

After missing out on camping in the Pacific Northwest last year, we just decided that we would re-create our trip this summer. It looked like a pretty good deal, until two weeks ago when my dad asked his fateful question, "Would you like to come up to Idaho and help me at the lake this summer?" My parents are in the process of selling their cabin near Couer d'Alene, Idaho and he needed help moving some furniture. Well, I couldn't refuse that, but we had reservations and other things that were in the way, so this trip has become interesting from a planning standpoint.

Originally, the Tadpole and I had planned on leaving on the 14th of July for our trip, coming home on the 21st. Then we thought that my dad could come along with us. Well, he doesn't really camp anymore due to his age, so he though he might spend the nights we were camping in nearby motels. That might have worked except he wanted to spend more than just a week up at the lake.

The pressing engagement on the far side of the camping trip was my older son's freshman orientation at UC Santa Cruz, scheduled for the 28. No matter what, if my dad came with us, we'd have to turn around about five days after getting up to Idaho.

Well, we've worked out a solution that seems to be ideal for everyone. My dad is taking off sometime next week with my older son. They'll head straight to Idaho. My older son stopped camping about four year ago when he hit high school and has expressed no interest in returning to it. I did what I could in exposing him to it; whether it takes or not is up to him.

Anyway, the two of them, with a possible addition of my nephew will be in Idaho for almost two weeks when the Tadpole and I show up. Our plan now is to start our camping trip at the scheduled time, then instead of heading home on the 20th, head to Idaho instead.

We'll take a day trip through Crater Lake National Park and probably spend the night in Bend, OR.

I have some friends that have offered a warm bed and shower and

I took them up on it.

We'll make Idaho on the 21st and have four or five days in which to enjoy the climes there, plus help my dad move what needs to be moved into his truck unless my older son and nephew haven't already done all of the heavy lifting. On the 25th, I'll take the older son and head to Santa Cruz, getting there just in time for his orientation on the 28th, while leaving the Tadpole with my dad. The Tadpole will come home with him later that week. He's very excited about this trip as is everyone else.

The maps show some of the caching possibilities that we have planned over the course of the two weeks. I'm planning on creating a couple of spot

queries around Couer d'Alene, possibly one around Spokane, WA, and definitely one around Crescent City, CA. Last year when I first set this query up, I literally used the geocaching road maps and handpicked caches as they appeared on the map. As long as we're going to be that far from home, I wanted to make sure the

majority of the caches were at least small in size. There aren't many micros in that entire bunch of 390 caches that show up on that map.

Last year, we had ambitions of getting caches in northern California as well as Oregon. This year, the plan is for that, plus more in Oregon, caches also in Washington and Idaho. We even have a day trip planned that will take us east along Interstate 90 over the mountain range into Montana. The rest stops just over the border in Montana, both eastbound and westbound each have caches located there. The cool thing about those rest areas however, is the caches are ammo cans. I'm used to California rest stop caches which are almost always micros, hidden near a phone booth or under a newspaper rack. Two years ago when we went camping in Arizona, we encountered a rest area cache which was an ammo can, so I know

they can be done.

The big difference is most of the rest areas in California don't tend to have a whole lot of tree cover around them in which to hide ammo cans.

At the moment, I have four travel bugs and two geocoins that I've collected for this trip. With two weeks available for

caching, I would like to collect some more before we leave in about 10 days. There are travel bug hotels in the local area, so I'll probably be paying them a visit in the next couple of days. I'm leaning toward mostly travel bugs since it's easier to photograph them in an interesting situation. I'm not quite there with my promise to photograph every travel bug that passes through my hands, but I'm working on it.

As always, I'll try to keep updating this, but don't be surprised if there aren't any posts here in late July. There is spotty Internet connection at the cabin in Couer d'Alene, so I'll be lucky if I can do any kind of blogging and in reality, my first order of business would be to make sure that travel bugs get dropped virtually into caches so they can get proper mileage credit. And besides, if I don't blog, that's OK. I'm on vacation.

Billboard Jungle

The holiday season is over, yet my Christmas tree is still up and will probably be up for another week or so. This is not out of design. Usually, I take the tree down sometime between New Year's day and the first day I have to go back to work. That didn't happen this year, mainly because of timing. My daughter went back to school this weekend. I drove her up to Stockton on Friday and then drove back home on Saturday. The drive and the lack of sleep because I was sleeping in a different environment took its toll and I ended up watching much of the Eagles win over the Vikings through the inside of my eyelids today. I woke up just when Donovan McNabb threw a nifty little screen pas to Brian Westbrook who took it 70+ yards for the deciding touchdown. So the tree didn't get taken down.

The road trip was rather uneventful. I drove, mainly because there was Tule fog in the big valley. It wasn't noteworthy or dangerous, and my daughter could have driven, but I like to drive. The last couple of hours she ended up napping in the car. What I really should have done was let her drive the middle two hours. But that didn't happen, so I was tired when we got to Stockton. She was actually amazed that I didn't stop even once to geocache. I figured since I was coming back down by myself, that I would get some caching in at that time, which is what happened.

On the drive up, I started looking at all the billboards at the side of the highway. Most of the time, I usually just tune them out, preferring to look at other things, abut there was something about this billboard that stated in no uncertain terms that "FOG KILLS" peaked my interest and I started looking at the billboards with a little more interest, at least for this trip.

America seems to have a seemingly unboundless interest in food. There were more billboards advertising restaurants than I could probably count, most of which were of the fast food variety. It makes sense to post those along the freeway. It seems like when we're driving, we always seem to be looking for a caffeine stop or a burger place to eat lunch. Have you ever noticed how many Starbucks stores there are? The joke in the movie Shrek II where one Farbucks store gets destroyed, so all the patrons run across the street to another Farbucks store seems rather appropriate. Have you also noticed when you're actually looking for a Starbucks store that you never can seem to find one? Driving down the road at 70+ mph, it becomes more difficult sometimes to determine if there is a place like that at this particular off ramp or not. So it seems that billboards indicating where a particular food product is located, or what exit to take seems to be an appropriate message.

What seems less so, is the billboards that have websites attached to them. What was the designer of that advertisement thinking when they decided to put the website of their company on a billboard knowing that almost everyone that sees it will be driving by so quickly that the entire sign is almost a blur anyway? "Oh look Martha, there's a website address on that billboard!!! We should look it up right now and see what great information it has for us!" I can't even imagine a conversation like that ever happening, but there were several billboards that had the website addresses on them for everyone traveling on Highway 99 in the central valley of California.

Now there were just as many billboards that didn't have websites posted on them, some of which are pictured here. I actually think what got this whole thing started was the Weeds Stop Here billboard. My daughter mentioned something about posting a billboard about Marijuana along a highway as being possibly inappropriate, but then she realized that it was about stopping weeds in farm crops. I'm not sure why, but I particularly liked the Apple Annies signs, plus the FOG KILLS signs. Those just stuck out in my mind as we drove along the freeway.

Just for fun, I started looking at some of the billboards and then asked my daughter to write down some of the websites for later. One of the first catch phrases I noticed, besides the FOG KILLS was one by the California Farm Water Coalition. They want the world to know that Food Grows Where Water Flows. I wonder who they paid and how much to someone to come up with that statement. Looking at their website, it's apparent they want everyone to be aware of possible water shortages in our state and how those shortages could affect food production in California. It even has a kids section complete with cartoons featuring Gigi Grapes, Kari Carrot, Callie Cotton and Randy Rice, not to mention Tommy Tomato and Jack Cheese.

Besides telling us all that FOG KILLS, the FOGUniversity billboards also had a website to get more information about fog. The site is still under construction so there's not really a whole lot of information there except links to places such as CalTrans and the California Highway Patrol. There is a media link that has a short video about driving in the fog. Once again, Father knows best and is driving too fast, much to the chagrin of his child who warns him that he's driving too fast. It ends with an implied collision caused because of excess speed and fog. Now if he'd just listened to his kid in the first place. Tule fog is a very dangerous thing in the central valley of California and according to Wikipedia it is the major cause of weather related accidents in California so I'm not trying to make light of this as much as I am trying to understand why an organization would go to the trouble of putting up a website and then say, "Oh come back, we're not ready for you yet." I think it would make more sense to get the website up and running, then post the information on the billboards.

Another catch phrase that had me wanting to know more about it was the Check before you Burn billboards that were placed by the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. It makes sense after looking at their websites what they were talking about since the San Joaquin Valley is a major agricultural area and there is a lot of burning that takes place after crops are harvested. I just found it a rather interesting message when first viewed.

Several other billboards that contained website addresses catered to our stomachs or our palates. Cacciatorre Fine Wines has an interesting website. It has two buttons on its splash page, one for those of us who are over 21 and one for the younger set. I checked both out. The over 21 set get to go right to the main page of the website, while the younger set get directed to Disney.com. I'm wondering if Cacciatore Wines gets a kickback from Disney for this arrangement?

The second billboard that I noticed a website on that was strictly food related was the Valley Pistachio Country Store. It has a nice looking website with a variety of information about what the country store sells. It also has a Recipe of the Month section, although that appears to have just started around the holidays since there is only two recipes and both require the use of cranberries either to make Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti or Pistachio Cranberry bark.

The last two billboards that I noticed website addresses on were the Three Crowns billboard and the Pixley RV Resort billboard. I have to admit when I was reading these websites to my daughter, I knew what most of them would be, but I wasn't sure about Three Crowns. It turns out that it's for an industrial complex located in Fresno, California. I wonder if 37 cents per square foot is a good rental price or not. The Pixley RV Resort is a recreational vehicle spot for travelers looking for a good place to park their RV for the night. Cost $29 per night, but there's a 10% discount if you come as a group and take at least 5 spots. I didn't notice how prominent the phone number was on the billboard, but in my mind, that would have made more sense to have in big numbers as opposed to the website address.

I guess the question I have for all these places is why. I realize that with all of our technology today websites are pretty much ubiquitous and a company that doesn't have a website is probably in the dark ages, but why post a website on a billboard? WiFi probably doesn't exist along the entire corridor however California does offer free WiFi at all of their rest stops. If the driver doesn't have a partner, it makes it unsafe for them to grab a pen and write down the website or even look it up on their Blackberry unless they pull over and that probably isn't the safest thing to do either along our highways as the shoulders of the road aren't always the widest.

The logical explanation to all of this is the billboards are generic, designed for areas where people can stop and write down the website addresses. It's probably cheaper overall to make one set of billboards as opposed to two different ones, one for city areas and one for highways corridors. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not, but I can visualize in the future where cars will have receivers to grab information off of billboards. Drivers will just have to push a button on their steering wheel and the car will automatically download the website address from the billboard. At the next rest stop, the driver will be able to plug his or her computer or Blackberry into the car's USB port and upload the information. Hmmmmm. I wonder if I can market this and make my first million in the next ten years?

Pictures were taken by my daughter along Highway 99 between Bakersfield, California and Stockton, California.