Musings about Geocaching: Heading back, very slowly, to San Diego County

After taking my sister to the airport, it was time to go caching.

I found a cache in which I could leave a couple of Travel Bugs, on of which was very cute. I thought it was appropriate to leave "The Original Donald" lakeside where other ducks congregated.

From there I followed the arrow on my GPSr to a Virtual cache. As I turned the corner in that old, somewhat rundown section of Denver, I was astonished at the view of this enormous, domed structure. I think I said outloud, to myself, "What is THAT?" It turned out to be the old Carousel building from the famous Elitch Gardens amusement park that has succumbed to progress through redeveloping to high-density housing and condos. It sure didn't look like progress to me, but I'm glad they didn't tear down this amazing structure, nor the nearby theater building, which is being restored.

From there, I found a cache in Lakewood where I finally released Toby's Gang's Maui coin T.B. I hope it has safe travels and doesn't get stalled again. The cache I put it in was near this section of Clear Creek, the creek that is the source for that "pure Rocky Mountain
Spring water" that is the basis for Coors beer.

I tried again to find the "Cool Tooth Fairy" cache, and after poking around where the coordinates led me to someone's backyard, I gave up. Other people find it and say they "get" the name reference, but I've tried to find it three times now. Nothing new, I had several DNFs while in the Lakewood area.

Finally, it was time to hit the road if I was going to make it to Salida by nightfall. But, I had to find a few more caches along the way. I still had some Travel Bugs with me and I wanted to drop them off before I started heading west again.

This cute guy went into "Mother Nature's Wardrobe Malfunction."

This was the "malfunction."

At another cache along Highway 287, I took pictures of nscaler's CA Poppy Geocoin with a beautiful Rocky Mountain backdrop. The coin had been traveling with me all along the way. I was hesitant to drop it since the last three Geocoins I had in my possession were stolen as soon as I released them . . .

Just up the road I found a cache near this amazing, relocated Hot Dog stand. Since the object of interest for the cache was such a cool find I wouldn't have noticed if the cache had not been there, I impulsively decided to leave the GJTB that had been traveling with me since the first day.

Near the end of the day, I stopped to take in the view across a wide valley.

When I got to Salida, it was after dark, but still early. I pulled into the Days Inn parking lot, opened the laptop, and logged onto GC.com. I logged the caches I found that day and logged the Trackables. I browsed around the Internet a bit and checked into the San Diego Thread of the Groundspeak Forums before finally heading back to my "campsite" at the Salida Wal-Mart parking lot.

I didn't realize how comfortable my car could be, and how secure I would feel, "camped" like that. However, if you ever need to camp like that, don't forget to bring earplugs. That night, a diesel truck had the engine running all night long . . .