Musings about Geocaching: 2005-08-07

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Number 500 cache was found . . . and I'm already at #517

After my day of caching in Santee, my total ballooned up to 491. It seems like just a short time ago I was all excited about find #100.

So, when P.T. and I took off Tuesday, I was certain #500 would be had that day. We found a cache up on the hill overlooking Interstate 5, then drove around to a new trail head to walk .6 of a mile to another cache. We had great fun taking pictures of the travel bugs in our possession, many of which P.T. was getting ready to release "into the wild."

This was one of the Travel Bugs I picked up in Santee on Sunday. He was glad to get out of the small container I found him in.

On our way to another cache, we saw this:

Interesting . . .

So, after finding a couple of caches, we looked at the map on her laptop and figured out how we could get a few more caches and return to do one of the DAK girls caches, Power House Park - Hobbit Holes.

Parking was at a premium in the area of the first waypoint, and it was expensive--$2.00 per hour meters--taking quarters only. We got all our stuff together and then I put the only three quarters I had in the parking meter. That gave us 24 minutes. We started off towards the tunnel under the railroad tracks. There were some kids sitting down in there smoking cigarettes. P.T. ran past them first, then I ran past them. We found the hobbit hole on the other side and climbed in. We found the cache with the waypoint numbers for the second segment of the multi in it.

I wrote the numbers on my hand, we exited the hobbit hole and ran past the kids again.

There wasn't much time on the meter and we asked a woman nearby if she had change. "No. My husband is trying to get change for us right now." she responded. So, off we ran in the direction of the second waypoint.

This entailed going through a little gate and then up a very steep hill covered with iceplant. P.T. jumped down into the concrete-lined drainage spillway very easily. When I got to that point, I was surprised how far down it was, but I jumped down also.

We ran inside the hobbit hole and grabbed the container with the coordinates. This time I quickly put them in my GPSr, so we were ready to head to the final cache location.

Then we looked at the concrete wall in front of us. It was nearly four feet high. How were we going to get out? I tried to jump up the way I did when I had my horses years ago, but my arms weren't strong enough to get all the way up the first time. I gave it another try and made it. But, P.T. couldn't make it up. In fact, she thought she cracked a rib when she made the first leap. So, with the clock ticking away on the parking meter, I jumped back down and gave her a leg up.

Then I jumped up again. Emerging nearly-unscathed from the almost trap, we ran down the hill, across the Private Property parking lot (a man asked us what we were up to after we got ourselves out of the spillway and informed us that we were on private property), and back to the car and the expired meter.

Once released from the clutches of the parking meter clock, we took a more leisurely pace getting to the location of the cache. The view from the cache site was limited and overcast. In fact, even the ocean was cloudy that day with a bloom of red tide.

Signing the log as a train passed in the background was quite exciting.

It was great fun and a very memorable adventure for my #500 cache.

Monday, August 08, 2005

A day of caching without my Palm

So I had been sitting at home for three days nursing a very swollen foot that got that way after I was stung by a bee.

By Saturday, I was starting to really get down, so I decided to prepare for a caching trip to Santee so I could bump up my numbers a bit and find some caches Nancy had already found. I needed to do some shopping, so once I've driven all the way down the hill, what's a few more miles?

So, I finally get down the hill and to the first cache location in the GPSr and look for my Palm to read about the cache. Oh no! I left it home. Well, this was going to be interesting!

Actually, it was interesting. I did log more DNFs than I would have if I had had the hint, and the Past Logs to review, but I still looked for lots of caches, and I found 13, which is a good indication of how cache dense the Santee area is.

One of the caches I found was this teeny one. It was attached to the aluminum railing of a bridge, however the cache owner had attached a piece of steel to the aluminum so the cache would stick, and would be replaced in exactly the same place.

The cache was about 3/8" across by 5/8" deep. The only problem was the log. It was full. If I had known that, I could have brought some paper to put in the cache. However, all I had was a gel pen and the color of the ink was almost the same orange color of the rust-stained paper in the cache.

There was a nice view from this cache, but I cannot say that for some of the other micro caches I found.

There is an acronym some locals made up for the proliferation of micros in Santee. S.C.U.M. (Santee Cammoed Urban Micro). Several of these micros live up to that because they were in really-icky locations where there was a lot of trash, but some of the others introduced me to some walking/biking trails I wouldn't have otherwise known about.

One of these micros was near this tree with huge juniper-berry-like fruits.

If you look really, really close, you can see the micro cache in the picture.

By the end of the day, I had bumped my numbers up to only nine away from the coveted 500.