Spoilers

This really isn't a story about spoilers in geocaching, but more about the name of the cache that I found yesterday.  It's actually one of several I found yesterday, but I'll be writing about this particular one, since it has special meaning.

My friend Chaosmanor pointed out a series of caches just north of where the Smiley series was which we attempted and completed last year at the end of February.  This new series, is larger than the Smiley series, with about 40 caches as opposed to the 26 involved in the other series.  It creates an overlarge Groundspeak symbol on the desert floor and surrounding foothills.  Each cache was named after a different part, or aspect of Geocaching, things like GC Codes and Archive.  One of the ones I found with Chaosmanor yesterday was the Spoilers cache.

With a planned geocaching trip out to the desert yesterday, we both knew I would cross over a major milestone of cache finds on Saturday (3000).  It really didn't matter which cache ended up being the 3000th, more that I was out with a friend enjoying the game and having a good time.  As luck would have it, the 3000th also happened to be a larger sized cache.  This ended up being very fortuitous, since I had a Donald Duck travel bug in my possession that I had acquired in Northern California over Presidents Day weekend.  Both of us couldn't think of a better way to celebrate than to drop a web-footed travel bug in Webfoot's 3000th cache find.  Here's to Spoilers and other caches that I will find in the future.

Picture was taken near the following geocache:
Groundspeak Series - Spoilers - by HDGC

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.

Out of this world and other things

I thought I'd seen everything, but this has to be the hardest cache ever to find, especially since it's several hundred miles above the Earth's surface.  Richard Garriott, one of the astronauts that have been on the International Space Station (ISS), hid a geocache in one of the lockers on the ISS.  Not that I have enough money to buy my way on to one of the space tourism rockets planning on heading there probably in the next decade, but that would be a very cool cache to find.

In other news, Jeremy, the founder of Groundspeak, which runs geocaching.com tweeted about a travel bug rescue site that has started up recently.  Here's the video posted to the front page of the travel bug rescue site.



I checked out the map on the site and discovered two travel bugs that are in need of rescuing near me.  Near me is relative since they are both about 100 miles away from me. I've bookmarked the page for future reference.  The likelihood that we could get close to rescue a travel bug would probably go up during the summer months when we're planning our camping trips.

The one cache near San Diego looks like it either got muggled or washed away.  Reading the logs on that particular cache page indicates that the travel bug in question (Hoofy) isn't in the cache anymore.  It's still an interesting concept that could work as the site grows.

Travel Bug Pictures

A year and a half ago, I made a confession that I haven't been very good about maintaining even to this day.  I feel I've done a much better job about taking pictures of the different travel bugs that I've had in my possession, but I'm still not at 100%.  At this point, I'm not sure that's possible.  In my opinion, some travelers don't lend themselves well to photographs.  I think this is especially true with geocoins.  Geocoins area small and difficult to get into focus with the other aspects of an area that the coin is going to be placed.

Many travel bugs are the same way, however, I've found some larger ones are much easier to photograph than others.  I found Arthur up in the high desert this summer and took him up to Santa Cruz with me last month.  I got a good picture of him holding another travel bug when I first found him in the desert and also got a nice photo of him standing in the leaves of the World's Largest Artichoke.

I'd seen this particular virtual on our drive up, so I made it a point to stop on the way down. I got there too early in the morning to partake in some of the nearby restaurant's finer artichoke cuisine, but I was able to stop at a local farmer's market and buy some artichokes to bring home.  10 for a dollar was a bargain price, even for some on the small side.  I think back now and I should have purchased 20 at that price.  Although I suspect the season will be over by the time I get up to Santa Cruz again, probably in late November, but if they have them available then, I'll buy some more.

Getting back to travel bugs.  During that desert run, I also took, what I thought, was a rather whimsical picture of the R2D2 travel bug that I found near Point Reyes National Seashore in July.  The spot where we found a nice travel bug hotel had some rock formations similar to what one might find on the fictional planet of Tatooine in the STAR WARS movies.  Those kinds of pictures are the kind that trigger musical responses in my head.  When I look at that picture, I can hear John Williams theme of the robots walking through the desert on their way to capture by the Jawas.

At the moment, I have three travel bugs sitting on my desk.  I have a geocoin in the shape of a head of lettuce.  "Lettuce go caching."  There's also a Triceratops and a bison tube that I thought was a traveling cache when I first picked it up, since it had a log sheet in it. It's particular goal is to travel to different countries and have the person who placed it in a cache write the name of the country on the log sheet inside.  I'm not sure where this one is going to end up, cache-wise, but at least it's closer to another country here than where it used to be farther north along the 101.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:
The World's Largest Artichoke - by ynots4
Mojave Green Travel Bug Motel - by The Dananator

Back from the dead

Yesterday, after a very enjoyable day caching with my friend Chaosmanor, I received an email.  Actually, I received a lot of emails, but there were three that were extremely intriguing.  All three were from Geocaching and all three dealt with a travel bug of mine called Carleen's Dirty Golf Ball.  I'd pretty much given up on Carleen's Dirty Golf Ball, mainly because it hadn't seen the light of day in over five years, so I was intrigued by the fact that I'm getting emails stating that geocacher bennet had grabbed the golf ball.

Bennet had found the golf ball in a cache, but not the cache the travel bug was listed to be in.  Bennet then virtually dropped the travel bug into the correct cache, then grabbed it again, so it would have the correct mileage on it.  Then bennet placed it into another cache yesterday.

Originally, the golf ball was supposed to go to a cache in Nebraska where Carleen would hopefully find it.  The golf ball had been silent for so long that I had to re-do the travel bug page since Carleen has since moved to Illinois.  I guess this means that you should never give up on your travel bugs.  You never know when they might just show up again.

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

Roll Call

Hungry Hungry Hippo? Road Warrior? Pink Dog? Roger Raccoon? chaosmanor's Idaho 2008: Goose Creek Falls - bronze? Not another micro! Geocoin?

Here!

Six travelers are coming with us when we begin our caching/camping trip next Tuesday. Unless I get out in the next couple of days to a travel bug hotel, that looks to be about it. Not like that's a bad thing, it just represents a small amount of travelers that I'll be able to move along on this trip. I've moved upwards of 18 bugs and coins on other trips. That was fun, but I'm not sure I'd want to repeat it in the short time frame of 3 days that I had. With 14+ days in which to travel and cache, I have plenty of time to drop travels off at my leisure. I actually wish I had some more.

We encountered several caches while down in San Diego this week where there should have been travel bugs. I think of the 7 caches we found, 4 had listed travel bugs in them, yet all of the caches were empty. Unfortunately, this seems to be a common theme. Either people just don't understand the concept of logging the travel bug onto the geocaching site, or there are a lot more thieves out there then I'd like to believe. I'm hoping it's the former as opposed to the latter.

Most of the goals of the ones that I have are pretty modest. A couple just want to travel from cache to cache. I can do that. One wants to get to the east coast and another wants to get to Delaware. Well, I can get them a little closer, especially if I end up putting them in the eastbound rest area in Montana. That should get them closer. Chaosmanor's geocoin just wants to stay in states that surround Idaho. I'll find a cache in Idaho and leave it there. The Pygmy Hungry Hippo I really like. It wants to share your meals with you. I can think of some great photo ops for this one on our camping trip. That one should be fun to play around with before I drop it off somewhere.

If I get the chance, I'll try to get out to our local travel bug hotel to see if there's any bugs in it. I've found that I like to move travel bugs over geocoins mainly because the photo opportunities can be a little bit more varied with the travel bugs. With a geocoin, you have to zoom in tight so you can see the geocoin, to the detriment of the rest of the background. Travel bugs you can do all sorts of things with and have some pretty humorous images to post later on. If I do get out again, I'll probably just grab the travel bugs. Any that I find on the way, will probably come back home with me for deposit around here.

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.

We're going to Disneyland!

In January, I found a travel bug (Pluto's Dog Tag) that started in Washington and wanted to visit the different Disney Theme parks. Since I live about forty minutes away from Disneyland in Southern California, I figured I'd be able to give it a shot to complete one of its goals. At about the same time a friend of mine found a geocoin (Vacation Coin 2008) in Washington that had a goal of getting to Anaheim, CA by March 2009. He contacted me and agreed to mail the geocoin down to me, so I could get it to its goal by this month.

Today, we were able to accomplish the goals for these two bugs. Tadpole held the coin and the bug up while I did the honors of taking the pictures of them in front of the park sign. There's a nice drop off spot where you can park for fifteen minutes to drop off people on the east side of the park which we took advantage of in order to take our two pictures.

After we took the pictures, I took us south to try and find a couple of geocaches that were large enough and close enough to the park. We got lucky there was a small Altoids tin type of container cache about a mile south of Disneyland where we were able to drop the geocoin. As we sat in the parking lot near that cache, I started looking through the PDA to try and find a regular sized cache that would fit the bill for the Pluto Dog Tag. Since it was a larger travel bug, I needed a coffee can sized container or larger for this one and we were rewarded with a cache only half a mile away to the east of where we were sitting in our car.

It was located near a medical center parking lot, which was virtually empty today since it was Saturday. We made the grab, trading a Boy Scout travel bug for Pluto. Hopefully, both of these travelers will enjoy the insides of many more geocaches.

Pictures were taken near the following geocaches:
Downtown Disney Virtual (NO Admission Required!) - by TeddyBearMama & Klemmer
WD's Original - by sbell111

Discoveries?

The first time I saw the mass hysteria over geocoin icons, was at an event several years ago. People had books of geocoins and there were other cachers just scrambling to write down the geocoin numbers on them. This is all done so that people can get another cool looking "Icon" on their geocacing profile page. And you don't have to look, because I'll freely admit that I have many icons on my page as well. This has all been precipitated by Geocaching.com's use of the "Discovery" feature, where cachers don't have to virtually grab a geocoin, then virtually drop it back into the same cache to get credit for the icon. All they have to do is discover the coin.

I'm pretty sure I know why they did it. It reduces the number by half of emails that get sent out to owners following a discovery. Previously, the owner of a geocoin would get an email from GC.com when a cacher grabbed a geocoin or travel bug, then would get another email when it was virtually placed back into the cache. With the discovery method, less computer resources are used.

However, as an owner of many geocoins and travel bugs, I find the discovery option to be very frustrating. I've been getting a lot of emails lately on several of my coins that are just discovery emails. I place geocoins and travel bugs in caches so they'll travel around. The problem is the discovery option allows cachers to leave the coins in the cache, get another icon and not have to bother with moving it along. Or, I'll see a comment where the cacher didn't have a trade item so just decided to discover the coin instead.

Geocoins and travel bugs are meant to travel and are not considered swag, or treasure in a cache. Therefore, you don't have to trade something for a travel bug or geocoin. It's very frustrating to see discovery after discovery on some of my geocoins, yet not see any movement. That's one of the reasons I've stopped using the discovery option unless I'm discovering a friend's coin from their personal collection. I'd much rather see my geocoin or travel bug on the move as opposed to sit in a cache for months while people look at it, discover it, and then basically ignore it. I wish GC.com never had thought up the discovery option. I think it would encourage more movement of travelers if they hadn't.

Photos were taken at or near the following geocaches:
Freeway Photo-op - by Zenophile
Mary E. J. Colter built it - by Yrium and Whistlestick

Mission Accomplished!

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to distribute 18 travel bugs and/or geocoins in geocaches in the next three days. This tape will self destruct in 5 seconds."

That's sort of what it felt like after getting a corn dog box filled with travel bugs and geocoins. I was up to the task and made sure I had plenty of large geocaches with which to choose to make sure I was going to be able to leave them all on the road and not bring any home. It should also be noted that several caches that were labeled "regular" wouldn't even hold a geocoin. There should be some kind of truth in advertising law on caches.

1. Oops. I cheated and left a geocoin before going on the trip at Behind the Bullseye.
2. Left a geocoin in Fly Me Away.
3. Left a Mardi Gras beads travel bug in Notta Ammo Dump.
4. Left a Key travel bug in No Pallets Here.
5, 6, & 7. Left a travel bug, a white Jeep, and a geocoin in Delhi Delight.
8 & 9. On our way into Yosemite National Park, we left two travel bugs in Yosemite Junction Geocoin and Travel Bug Hotel.
10. Left a geocoin in Monkey Hear.
11 & 12. Left two travel bugs in Reading Rocks!
13. Left another geocoin in Monkey Do. I didn't get a chance to find Monkey See.
14 & 15. Left a geocoin and a geocoin replica in Don't Peek On Me!
16. Left the largest key ring add on that I've personally seen in Erling in the Morning. I also left the Pushawalla Traveling Cache (Traveler Tag #TEDA8).
17 & 18. In an appropriately named cache, Zenobia's End, I left the last two travel bugs in the last cache that I found on this trip.

Mission Accomplished, cue the music.

A Great Excuse for Caching

As previously noted below, I'm heading out on the road this weekend. I plan on leaving Saturday morning which will get me up to Stockton in plenty of time to hear my daughter play in her college orchestra Saturday night at 7:30. I don't plan to set an alarm, but I'll probably get an early start. At one time, I thought about hitting the Flash Mob Event that's happening in Covina at 10:00 in the morning, but I'm pretty sure that I'm going to miss it this time. The Tadpole and I went to a Flash Mob Event last year out in the Coachella Valley and then went caching in and around Joshua Tree National Park. It was a fun day, but we didn't have any kind of agenda except to make sure we were at the Flash Mob Event at 9:00 in the morning. This year's Flash Mob in Covina isn't starting until 10:00 in the morning, so that could cramp my caching later on since we don't have a lot of daylight to work with this time of the year plus I need to be in Stockton around earlier than 7 so as to not miss the concert. Unless I get a really late start out on Saturday, I'll probably bypass the Flash Mob this year.

As you can see by the screenshot I took of my bookmarked PQ, I'm taking a roundabout way when leaving Stockton. Getting there will be pretty straightforward, heading out the 210 from my place, then connecting up with the 5 and then taking the 99 to Stockton. The 99 is a little bit longer, but it's a lot more scenic and has many more caching opportunities along it as well. Almost all the caches along this route are listed as small or larger. I'm going to go through the list and make sure I know exactly where the really large ones are so I don't miss those. I have a lot of travel bugs and geocoins to deposit and I want to make sure they all get distributed this weekend.

Sunday will be devoted to a day trip to Yosemite National Park. There are quite a few virtuals there and we'll get many of them on this trip. We're hoping the snow level is still high enough that the road to Glacier Point hasn't been closed yet. As of last Friday it was still open, but that could change on a daily basis. There's a hike there up to the top of Sentinel Dome that we'd like to take, not to mention the view from Glacier Point should be spectacular this time of year with all the snow in the high country. The Yosemite Sentinel Dome Virtual Cache plus this benchmark are obviously at the top of Sentinel Dome. There used to be a gnarled Jeffrey Pine tree growing at the top of Sentinel Dome, but it died during the drought years of the late 70s. A couple of years ago, the dead tree finally came tumbling down. On my wall in my bedroom, I have a black and white picture of this tree that I took in 1975 when it was still alive. I went back with my three children in 2000 to pay a visit to it and it was a very sad reunion, since only the trunk and a few branches were all that was left of the tree. Now those remnants aren't there anymore, so the view should be a little different this time if we get up there.

The benchmark is also interesting because the tree is one of the main reference points for the benchmark. The benchmark also refers to a road that leads you to the base of the dome. That road hasn't been there in decades. Every time I've been to the Sentinel Dome, I've had to hike about a mile and a half to get to the dome's summit. There are still areas on that hike where you can encounter the old road, but I have to assume the road was taken out for environmental reasons, probably to reduce the strain on the Jeffrey Pine living up there as well as the other plants living around the base of the dome. Either way, I'll be taking some good notes for this particular benchmark so I can post a log with the National Geodetic Society.

On Monday, I plan on making my way north to Sacramento, getting a dashpoint southeast of the city. Since I'm going to be up there, I figured that I might be able to get some caching done in some counties that I've never cached in before, like Yolo, Solano, Napa, Sonoma, Marin and Alamede Counties. The route I plan to take is the circular route around the top of San Pablo Bay northeast of San Francisco. Some of the caches there are ones that I'd planned to find this summer but wasn't able to so that will be kind of nice. Once I get back to the 5, I'll probably take it quickly home since I figure that detour around the bay might take up most of my morning.

Over the past couple of years, I've been taking more of these kinds of road trips, mainly because the kids are getting older and they've wanted to start looking at colleges, but also it's been a great excuse to visit my daughter now that she's away at school. Next year, my son starts his road to college, so I'll probably get to go on more of these kinds of trips. Visiting my children is always topmost on my mind on these trips, but they're also a great excuse to get some caching in as well.

Bevy of Baubles

Dictionary.com defines a bevy as a large group or collection and baubles as a small, showy ornament of little value or a trinket. Last Monday after a physical therapy appointment in the area, I stopped by Losel2's Trackables WayStation Cache in order to pick up a couple of travel bugs to take with me on my road trip up to Stockton next weekend. He'd read on this blog that I was making the trip and no one had been by the cache since October 6th, so he asked if I could help him out with some movement of a couple of bugs. I said no problem.

I got to the waystation and he was there waiting for me, with a big box of corn dogs. Well, it really wasn't corn dogs, but the outside of the box said it was corn dogs. Inside were travel bugs. Let me say, inside were a lot of travel bugs and geocoins, exactly 15 in all. Yep, I have quite a bevy of baubles to deposit in caches along the way next weekend. Since most of the caches that I have on my PQ at the moment are small to large sized caches, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. I know of at least four travel bug hotels that I can deposit bugs in, plus a couple of other caches that should be large enough to handle at least a geocoin. There is also a traveling cache, but it's not associated with geocaching, but I've logged it at travelertags.com.

As you can see by the photos, there are all sizes of travel bugs. Two are rather large beanie baby type of animals, one a bear and the other a penguin. Those will have to go in ammo cans, so they'll be the first to leave the box once I encounter an ammo can on the road. One other large travel bug is a key chain travel bug that has been collecting key chains along its travels. It has to weigh at least 2 pounds and has traveled over 15,000 miles since being released in August 2005. There's a white Jeep that I already had in my possesion, plus a small tech deck bicycle. The rest of the travel bugs are Hot Wheels types or smaller which should be easy to drop into caches that I find. If you look closely, there is a Smurf sitting on top of the ammo can. That one wants to visit the Pacific Crest Trail. I won't be able to get it to the PCT, but since we're headed to Yosemite National Park, we can get it close to the John Muir Trail, at least for picture possibilities. With this many different travel bugs, I should have some interesting possibilities for pictures on this trip. Hopefully, I'll be able to drop them all over the course of the three day weekend.

It can be done

Yesterday, my friend 3blackcats and I went hiking near Big Bear, California. We did a loop hike near Moonridge which is close to the Snow Summit Ski resort located in the same general area. The hike was 3+ miles or so. I forgot to zero out my odometer on the GPSr, so I'm estimating. The overall hike was probably longer than that because most of the caches along this loop were several hundred feet off trail. We found 16 caches along this loop plus 8 more alongside the road going to and from this trail. The amazing thing about yesterday was that every single cache wasn't a micro.

We weren't trying to not find micros, but every cache on the loop was labeled either a small or regular sized cache. Granted, since this was out in the forest, one would expect the caches to be on the larger size, but I've been on hikes where you could walk 2 miles just to find a hide-a-key hidden on a tree somewhere. Even the small caches were large on this hike. There were several times we were looking for something small only to laugh when we finally found the "small" cache that was a very large cookie tin, just slightly smaller than a regular ammo can. Our only thought was they just grew caches larger up in the mountains.

Initially, we'd decided to go up to a cache that I'd already found back in July 2001 the year I started caching, just to see if it was still there or at least in the same condition. We found it and 3blackcats signed the third log book. We looked through and found the original logbook from 2001 and found my entry from July 11, 2001, my anniversary. I can remember because when we went up there, I lost track of the time, so I called home to let my wife know we were running late only to get my daughter on the phone. Now this was surprising, since I knew my wife should have been home. Even more surprising was my daughter's response that my wife was out because she was interviewing for a job that afternoon, a job that she still has today. That was an interesting day to say the least. My only regret about retracing my steps on Saturday was that I didn't take a picture of the old log page for posterity.

After getting three caches in that area, well two for me, since I'd already found one of them, we headed over to the loop and walked that, taking a good three hours to traverse the entire loop. The trail had a lot of variety in the types of caches. There were several nice spots for pictures and I didn't have to worry about waiting until I found a good sized cache to place a couple of travel bugs that I had in my possession. Even the larger travel bug would have fit in almost every cache we found. One of the caches also had a White Jeep travel bug. I haven't seen one of those in a couple of years.

Evidently, we were pleased with the size of the caches we found. Even on the ride home, the caches were large. There were several turnouts on the way home, many that had caches hidden near them. The thing that stood out was that the cachers in the area appeared to have taken the time, not to just slap a hide-a-key inside a guardrail at the turnout, but to walk 40 feet away from the turnout so they could hide an ammo can, or a large cookie tin or something of similar size. The quality of the caches we found on Saturday made us start to make plans to come up to the area again. There are many off-roading experiences up in the area that had caches along them. It appeared like we could make several caching runs into the Big Bear area and find a great deal of quality caches. It's something to look forward to in the future.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:
Hawk Hill - by Badgerdawg
Bristlecone Trail - by Badgerdawg
Rocky Raccoon - by Team Geo-Rangers

Bits & Pieces, Odds & Ends

I was looking over some of the travel bug pictures I've taken recently and I've noticed I've fallen into a similar trap about which I've previously written. It's either I don't have the energy, or don't have the imagination to come up with a good picture for every traveler that I grab. I have noticed that it's easier to take pictures of travel bugs as opposed to geocoins. So I'll do what I can, when I can.

Of the recent pictures, I particularly like the one I took of two similar travel bugs, Sgt. Ducky and Frankenduck. Both ducks/travel bugs were found this summer while caching and both went north on our aborted camping trip. I was able this past week to deposit Sgt. Ducky in my latest cache, 360. Frankenduck will end up in a cache, hopefully, this weekend. The ammo can they're sitting on is planned to be a hybrid letterbox cache in the near future.

The second picture in this article is of Nurtz. I picked up Nurtz down in San Diego County in late July and put slightly more than 700 miles on it, but really didn't get it much closer to its goal. That's sometimes the way it is with travel bugs. He also came with me north on the camping trip, but I wasn't able to drop him off in a cache up there, so back he came and I ended up placing him in a fairly large cache out in the Antelope Valley just north of me. It looks like the cacher who just picked him up will be taking him closer to his goal, so that's a good thing.

I need to order some more decon containers. I have plans to set up my second multi-cache near 360. Cachers will have to "explore their technology" a little bit, utilizing various features of their GPSr they might not have tried in the past. I think it will be a fun little cache to solve and find.

Last, but certainly not least, the plans are to go caching this weekend on two of the three days. Chaosmanor and I will be caching up in the local mountains, hopefully to escape some of the heat that we've been getting as summer does its typical heat up in late August and early September in Southern California. It shouldn't be as hot at altitude as it is down in the semi-desert which will be a good thing.

I'm hoping the Tadpole wants to go caching on Monday. There are some caches that I'd like to look for down near the beach in Orange County. Monday also happens to be his 13th birthday, so I'll play a wait and see game on that. If he wants to do other things, then that's what will happen that day. It's his day after all. I can remember when he was born thinking that when he became a teenager, I would be the father of three teenagers all at the same time and shuddered to think about what that might entail. It was easy to brush off at that time, since it was so far in the future. Well, the future is here. It's amazing how quickly the time passes.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:
360 - by Webfoot
Christmas Cookies? - by Searching Gentiles
Spirit In The Sky (AKA Grievous Angel) - by FunHog

A Poem, and other stuff

Lights,
Spreading handsome GPSr icons,
Wandering anywhere,
To travel the world,
Collecting postcards,
Visiting military bases,
Maybe remote backcountry airstrips.

This is a poem that I wrote using the goals of the various travel bugs that I have in my possession. I just looked at my inventory list and all of a sudden, I have 11 different travel bugs and geocoins to take with me on our camping trip north at the beginning of next month. I knew I was near that number, but hadn't really thought about it that much until I looked today.

I'm pretty sure I can meet many of their goals and if not, I can get them closer to their goals. This should be an interesting trip. The bookmark list of caches is pretty much set in stone. 365 caches. I should be so lucky if we find all of them on this trip. I know we won't, but I'd rather have too many, than not enough down the road. I'll probably tweak it about it a week before, just to make sure none of the caches have been archived since I put them on the list.

I've also received permission to set up an Earthcache while up in Oregon, so that will take a little bit of our time while we're up there. I had asked for some advice from another cacher about setting up an Earthcache and he gave me some suggestions on who to write within the National Park Service where I want to create the Earthcache. He also said to not to expect any response for at least a couple of weeks. So I sent an email off and waited.......a half a day before I got a response back from the Natural Resource Specialist of the park basically saying that he was very excited about the prospect of me setting up an Earthcache in their park. So it looks like I'm good to go on that front as well.

Now all I have to do make sure I get some decent pictures of the different bugs and coins before I let them go. I think I got a couple of good ones of Dude and Dudett already. That's Fred in the top photo and Ethel in the bottom picture. They are two California Desert Tortoises that live in my backyard. I've had them since they were hatched in August of 1999. Desert Tortoises are an endangered species and you have to have a permit (which I do) to possess them. It is illegal to release captive bred tortoises back into the wild because of the possibility of spreading illnesses to the native population. So they live in my backyard and will probably outlive my children. It's my way of helping a species survive.

Bug collections

I'm probably going out caching again tomorrow. As I was looking over some of the possible cache locations that I wanted to hit tomorrow, I noted another travel bug hotel in the local area that I haven't gotten around to checking out yet. I looked at the cache page tonight because it's a puzzle cache, so I needed to figure that part out, but won't be going there tomorrow because it's been muggled. Apparently it can be repaired, but it looks like four travel bugs and a couple of geocoins are in the great beyond.

As noted in the last log, I went out caching last Saturday as well. I picked up quite a few travel bugs and coins on this run. I also deposited five coins and bugs that I've had. And yes, I kept my promise, taking a photo of each one before they were placed in caches. Admittedly, some of the pictures were pretty lame and uninspired, but I like the round gear on top of the round tire. Can you figure out where the cache is? I also like the car perched on the overpass of the freeway. I'll get better as I keep remembering to take the pictures.

The day started out nice and hot. I believe it was over 85 by the time Chaosmanor and I met up in the San Fernando Valley at 8 o'clock in the morning. We drove up the I-5 toward Gorman where we started our caching run. I think we found 12 caches in and around Gorman, dropping some bugs and picking up some bugs as well. In the cache where I dropped the little car, we hadn't really looked at the cache page that closely and I thought we were looking for a guardrail type of hide until I spotted a larger container about five feet away from the guardrail, hidden in plain site. Doh.

The bonus came when we opened it up and out dropped Allison. Yep, Allison, a white jeep! I haven't seen a white jeep in ages, so I was thrilled. I actually had to go back to the car, pick up the travel bug, take a picture of the travel bug before making the trade for Allison. Allison has spent most of her time up in Washington state, but has made it to Utah and now is in Southern California. I'm probably going to take her to Oregon later this summer.

Later in the day, Chaosmanor found a rubber ducky travel bug, FrankenDuck that he was going to keep. I have a travel bug in my possession right now that's similar to it, so I was semi-coveting that duck. Hey, webbed feet should go together right? Anyway, we found another really bizaare travel bug a little bit later in the afternoon that was named after Chaosmanor's wife, so he gave me the duck and took that one. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with FrankenDuck, but it'll be gruesome.

I also found a Diabetes travel bug on Saturday, plus a geocoin. The diabetes travel bug was as surprise as well. I guess I need to read the cache pages more in depth, because it was listed on there so it really shouldn't have been a surprise, but it was. Go figure. That one is going to be a little bit tougher to photograph than the others. I've actually found that travel bugs, due to there larger size tend to be easier to photograph with respect to the background than do geocoins. I don't think the Belgium coin photographed in my hand next to a Joshua Tree is very inspiring at all, but I wanted to show the owner the different kind of plants that are native to California and that's what was at the cache site, so I went for it.

The Bug in a Ball travel bug ended up getting left in a nice cache under a 90 year old Coulter Pine tree. Coulter pines produce some of the largest pine cones and some of the heaviest pine cones in the world. Trust me when I say you do not want to get hit by one of these. There were these huge cones everywhere littering the ground near where the cache was and Chaosmanor even commented about needing a hard hat before going in for this cache. I looked up and saw several cones in the tree, but none that looked threatening. We're both out safe, so I guess that means we escaped unscathed.

Of all the pictures that I took on Saturday of travel bugs, the one that brought back memories was of the wine cork that I hung on a barbed wire fence near a pond up by Gorman. Back in 1991, the area in and around Gorman, CA was host to a temporary art exhibit by Christo. This was his umbrella project. Back in the 70s, he'd constructed a nylon 24 mile long fence in Northern California. I'd been in college at the time, but didn't take the time to go up and view Christo's Running fence and to this day I lament that decision. For whatever reason, Christo's art speaks to me. So when I heard about the Umbrella Project, I knew I had to go up and see it. I got up one Saturday at 4 in the morning and drove the two hours all the way over the Grapevine down into the central valley of California and then slowly worked my way back up and over taking pictures here and there of the umbrellas.

The pond was one of the locations where four of the umbrellas were placed in the water, so there were some really cool reflections. These were the only ones there were in water in California. In Japan, at the same time, the other half of the Umbrella Project was happening, only with blue umbrellas. Many of these umbrellas were placed in water over there. I can recall once I got home stating emphatically to my wife that I wanted to go to Japan to see the other umbrellas. Sadly, the day I was up there viewing the umbrellas, a storm blew through, lifting one of the umbrellas up and then bringing it back down on a woman viewer killing her. Christo closed the project down immediately. He has since done other temporary works of art similar to this including gates in Central Park in New York City.

I doubt that me making the attempt of photographing every travel bug that goes through my hands played a part in that particular photo because I remembered the pond and was telling Chaosmanor about it before we got to that particular cache. But it helped me make the decision to take a picture of that bug there. I'm having fun doing this and I hope the people who own the bugs are enjoying the work. I already have an inspired photo ready to be taken the next time my tortoises show their heads in the backyard. It's not going to involve a certain white jeep, but then again......

Pictures were taken at or near the following caches:
Tejon Pass - by Castlebrook
ERIC (Turning 48 by the 58) - by TheFisherman & TickBait
Joshua Parkland - by Team Perks
Just Ducky - by Searching Gentiles
Gorman Road - Pond - by fOtOmOm