3 caches in Los Banos

     Well, we though we might get another FTF this weekend.  Stuck on the 33 posted earlier this week and no one posted a find, but by the time we got there on Saturday, someone else had found it earlier in the day.  Oh well, second to find.  Another TINY nano.

     Second cache of the day was probably our favorite of the day.  Neighborhood cache is located on private property (with permission).  We had the right idea from the start, but the cache container was VERY nicely camoed.   We took a cute little duck token and left polished stones and stickers.


     Come fly with me was another nano in a bison tube over by the airport.  Close to a FTF on this one, too, but a little late.  Whenever I see a cache like this one, I wonder how many caches I pass right by every day, in plain sight.

Deb and Bernie's Excellent Geocaching Adventure

      Last week I decided to take the plunge and fork out the $30 for a premium membership on geocaching.com.  That does two things I thought would be useful and/or fun.  The first is the ability to run pocket queries (more on that in a later post).  The second thing a premium membership offers is the chance at notifications.  You can set up lots of parameters, but the thing I was most interested in was being notified when new caches are published in the area. That's really the only way you have a chance at getting a FTF.
     So all of a sudden last week I started getting emails about recently published caches.  The first two cane too late, but then on Saturday there was a notice about a new cache called March Hare on Shell Ridge, about 5 miles from the house.  The cache posted late at night, so I didn't imagine anyone would be after it on Saturday, so we decided to try for a FTF on Sunday.  
     I googled the directions to the cache, and Sunday morning we headed out about 8:30 or so.  It turned out that the cache was about a mile from where we needed to park the car.  We headed up one of the northern trailheads, but got worried about where we had to leave the car, so we looked for another way in.  Bernie drove us up by the Borges Ranch entrance and we decided to give it a try.
     Now for most people, I'm sure this hike would be just a lovely Sunday walk, but for two middle-aged, overweight, out of shape women, this was only slightly easier than an iron-man triathlon.  We hiked up the hills, and down the hills, stopping at every available patch of shade.
     About an hour into our marathon, since I hadn't been tracking every step on the iphone to conserve the battery, I managed to miss our trail by 100 feet or so.  Of course they were 100 incredibly steep feet.  So we stopped to rest on a lovely bench and I decided to see if there were any other caches in the area.  One popped up at 0.0  miles.  So we looked around while we took our break and found Ridge Trail,  a tiny magnetic nano.  At least we had one find.

      Back on the trail again we took a little side trip to look for Mad Hatter, but found ourselves below it and decided not to try to find another trail up.  Another 45 minutes of walking and we were finally zeroing in on March Hare. Now every time someone had passed us going the other way on the hike in, we said to ourselves, "I wonder if they found the cache," so we didn't have much hope of being FTF.  The cache was about 20 feet off the trail down a fairly steep hill for those of us with bad knees and no walking sticks.  We carefully made our way down and Bernie spotted the cache.  When she opened it I saw FTF on the log and thought someone had found it, but it was just the cache owner making a specific place for FTF to be recorded.  After our two hour hike and several dozen rest stops, we actually had our FTF. 

     We left the Galactus travel bug and took the Rabbit with Mrkeff travel bug (which started in the Czech Republic and is on his way to Machu Pichu.  We will send him on his way soon.  We headed back and got to the car about 4 hours after we started (which we realize is about 5 times as long as the real Shell Ridge Hikers would take.)
     We were very happy to get our first FTF, and we learned some important things.  First, we need to be in better shape before we attempt any more hikes of this magnitude.  Second, one bottle of water is not enough. Third, if you use an Iphone as your main GPS device, you must have an external battery (we stopped at the Apple Store in Walnut Creek where I bought the Mophie Air external battery case, which seems to be working well.).  
      We definitely felt a sense of accomplishment with this one, and we'll be looking for newly published caches with a little lower terrain rating in the coming months. 
  

After Margot's retirement...

      Tried for a few caches this evening after Margot's retirement party.  As indicated in some of the logs for this cache, there were actually two almost identical caches that were literally inches from each other.  I am not sure which is the right one, but we signed both logs, and I'm sure one of them is the right one.  We took a little clothespin with a snowman face from one, and a little orange frog from the other.  I wonder how these two caches got so close to each other since geocaching.com doesn't allow caches closer than 1/10 of a mile.  


    We wanted to try for the BART North Concord cache, but I lost my cell phone connection totally, and when you are using an iphone for your caches, that doesn't work well.  I finally found a spot with reception and downloaded the map in case I lost connection again.  We'll have to try the BART cache later.  Instead we tried a few along Arnold Industrial North of Concord.  


     We found Cachin' Connection near the County Connection bus station.  Nice little hide.  Quick find.


     Next on the list was another in the model solar system caches, but I made another check on the Iphone, and saw a cache called Dad's New Toy Store , and we decided to give it a try. Previous logs indicated there were 2 caches together here.  We found a cache and decided to check the hint to make sure it was the right one, because the container was shorter than described.  After reading the hint, we were still confused, but the FTF name was right, so we think we have the right one.  I'm going to contact the cache owner to make sure.

     Last cache of the day was VGR2-Earth, which I believe is our fourth find in the solar system series.  We thought you needed to approach from inside the fence, but after taking a look and reading the hint, we determined you needed to be outside the fence.  We originally looked there, but the terrain was more than 1.5 in my opinion.  I wish we had a real, official guide for terrain ratings.  Most guides consider flat ground as a 1 and rough dirt with some minor changes in elevation a 2.  This was rated 1.5, but it was quite difficult to get to with bad knees like I have.  I would implore cache hiders to check the guides and take their advice.

A few older caches ...

 

     Thought I'd post a few of the caches I missed recording in the blog.  This isn't all of them, and they are in no particular order.  While out with mom one weekend we found a cache near Hilmar called Gone Golfin' There was a beautiful view out to the links and we took one of the little cars from the cache. 
I hope the cache owner replaces the container soon because it was pretty badly cracked. 

      This one was a pretty standard parking lot cache.  It's called Where's Windy?, but the spelling may throw you off.  We've had a lot of rain this winter and there was a lot of construction near GZ (Ground Zero), which made it a little more challenging terrain than it should have been.  Nice easy cache on the way home from drinks with friends.

     I grew up in Gustine, CA and this beautiful place wasn't here when I was a kid.  This is a virtual cache, which geocaching.com doesn't list anymore.  Virtual caches have been replaced by waymarking, which is pretty much the same thing.  The idea is to find a place, but no actual physical cache.  Heroes One and All recognizes a little known national cemetery between Gustine and Santa Nella.  It's worth the drive if you are in the area.  The grounds are beautifully maintained and there is a touching monument to Korean War vets.  Drive up the road behind the big hill at the top of the hour,  and you'll hear bells playing various patriotic songs.

      Picked up Bridge Over Romero on the way back from Heroes One and All.  Nice little walk down the canal bank and a pretty easy find.  Had a little bit of excitement putting the cache back.  Seems a black widow was making a home behind the cache and wasn't very happy with us disturbing it.  We encouraged it to go away long enough for us to replace the cache, very carefully.

Got to clear up a DNF on this one.  Well it wasn't actually an official DNF, as we couldn't actually look for the cache the first time.  As we drove up to the area, we noticed the farmer spraying weed killer on the rather large weeds on the side of the road.  We came back a couple of weeks later and everything looked good. The description told us that Holiday Kiss was in a tree with mistletoe.  We narrowed it down to one tree and spent about 10 minutes getting completely covered in foxtails before reading more carefully and realizing the cache was actually IN the mistletoe.  "Carefully read did you not, so covered in foxtails you are," as Yoda would say.  Very nice hide.  In plain sight, but you need the right angle.  

      Found CCCT-Not in the Tunnel on the same day as Where's Windy?  Apparently there are a bunch of caches along the Contra Costa Canal Trail.  It seems like a pretty nice level walk, so maybe we will venture farther down the trail after a few more of these.  Took the cute gorilla.

After tech support.

Haven't been keeping up well with my posts at all.  Today we spent the day at Anne and John's house doing some tech support on their Mac, and we decided to check out a couple of caches on the way home.  Our first one was called VGR-2 Ceres.  It is the third of this series we've found.  It is a scale representation of the solar system, with the sun at Sun Valley Mall in Concord.  This one represents a dwarf planet, Ceres. At first we thought the 1.5 terrain rating should be higher, but it ended up correct.  Nice cammo and nice hide.  Took a small baseball player.

Second hide was called View of the Wind Farms.  We couldn't figure out what wind farms when we finally looked down the hill and saw the far-off windmills.  Unfortunately, you can't see the windmills in this pic.  It was a surprisingly busy street and cars just whizzed by.  Clever cammo and hide.

My students and I got a nice surprise before we left on our field trip this morning. Our first cache, Panda Express was published this morning.

A Little Experience Goes a Long Way

We won't be breaking any land-speed records anytime soon, but we are getting better at this.  We started the day going after three caches that were DNFs (Did Not Find) for us on our first day of geocaching.  The first one was Watt's the Connection?  This was a very clever hide.  It's a 3 difficulty, which is the hardest we've found so far.  If you are just starting geocaching, look at some of the custom cache containers that are out there so you'll have a clue what to look for.  We were excited to find this one, but the next was even tougher.

On the way to look for The Rocky Fountain, I noticed a cache called Strata which was also in Heather Farms Park.  We found the spot easily enough, near a sculpture commissioned by the city of Walnut Creek.  I can't say the sculpture spoke to me.  We spent more than half an hour on this one before finding it in a place both of us had looked before.  We had planned to try again for The Rocky Fountain, but there was a wedding in the area and we though it best not to be part of the ceremony.


Next on our list was Bullseye.  This one drove us crazy when we tried it before, because we had no idea of the kinds of places one might find caches.  This time, we agreed cache hider who said it was a pretty standard parking lot hide.  After you start geocaching you can never look at a light pole the same way again.


Sam's House of Torture is a creepy name, but a pretty quick find.  This one reminded us that we need to buy mirror that telescopes to help us see over, under, behind, etc.  We headed back toward home and stopped at REI hoping to find some camo tape, but no luck.  Salesman said to try Home Depot.  No camo tape, but they had the telescoping mirror :)  


Last cache of the day had our first travel bug!  On the way out of the Home Depot parking lot I noticed a cache in the next lot over.  We found VGR-1 which is part of a model solar system.  I'm embarrassed that we used the hint for this one but it was getting late.  Nice camo.  Hope we can find the other "planets."