Blog Template Musings about Geocaching: 2006-07-16

Musings about Geocaching

Friday, July 21, 2006

The coins I dropped off were stolen!

When I went into San Diego Tuesday to beat the heat out here, I dropped off two coins, one of which I had been carrying for two weeks and dropping in and out of some interesting caches I found.



This was a "Golden Octopus" coin and it had traveled more than 11,000 miles.

Last Saturday, I took a picture of it taking in the view of Mission Bay and the ocean since its goal was to be near water.



The other coin was a Volunteer coin Flagman put in a puzzle cache of his.

Since the two coins disappeared less than 12 hours after I put them in the Puzzle cache, what I don't know is how the person who stole the coins knew where I put them. Does that person have hundreds of coins on a watchlist? If so, they still had to figure out the puzzle and drive to the location . . . unless they had already been to that cache.

If that is the case, and they logged their previous find, it is very disturbing, because I know nearly all the people who have logged finds on that cache. Perhaps the thief of these coins is that same person Habu! wrote about in this log.

Three coins I have been entrusted with, three coins I have tried to put in "safe" locations when I returned them "to the wild," have been stolen. What is the fun of having a coin you can look at but not share with anyone, because the coin cannot be logged or "discovered?"

The real fun in having a coin is watching its travels, or sharing it with others at Events, neither of which this thief can do with these two coins.

I hope the new "owner" of the coins is happy . . . because I am not. I feel very bad about what happened. I will keep both coins on my watchlist. Maybe someday the person will have a change of heart and release the coins back out in the wild so they can continue their travels.


posted by Miragee at 3:18:00 PM | 0 comments

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

With the Forums down, I took off for San Diego yesterday

Last Saturday, I had so much fun in San Diego, I decided to go into town yesterday to do some grocery shopping, and revisit the locations where I wasn't able to take as many pictures as I should have to create additional Waymarks.

The first place I went back to was the Balboa Park Carousel where I took some more pictures and got more accurate coordinates.



Then I went to the reflecting pool where I took a picture of a Travel Bug I had been carrying around for a while.



I took several other pictures as I walked around the park and thoroughly enjoyed the cooler, 85° temperature, in contrast to the 100° temperatures at my house.

I also got a picture of Karen_in_Coronado's mural she used in her "Mystery Train" Unknown cache, as well as the building to the west of it. I used those pictures to update my blog entry for last Saturday.

From there I went to the canyon to photograph the odd poetry and quotes on copper plates wrapped around the posts.



When I saw the quotes the other day, I thought it was the work of an inspired, possibly obsessive-compulsive, and very odd Mission Hills resident, but I saw an inscription on these posts that leads me to believe it is part of a "public art" series in the area.



Somehow that fact disappointed me . . .

After getting some groceries, and stopping in a couple of Thrift Stores to take advantage of thr air conditioning, I drove over to Fiesta Island.

One of my goals for this trip to town was to release a coin I had been carrying for two weeks. It wanted to be near water. I parked my car and walked over to "Don't Fear the Reaper" thinking the well-hidden ammo can would be a safe place for the coin, and the frog T.B. Well . . . bummer, bummer, bummer! The cache had been muggled. The bottom part of the cache holder was still there, but the ammo can was missing, as well as the lid for the container. I was glad the Jeep that had been dropped off a few days ago had been retrieved before this happened, but another TB had been in the cache. I was sorry to be the one to deliver this news to the cache owner and all the people watching that cache . . .


So, back home today, to pass the time, I've been submitting Waymarks and so far my Carousel Waymark has been approved, as well as the Waymark for this spectacular Equestrian statue.



It is interesting how I have almost no interest in logging Waymarks, but I'm having fun creating the Waymark pages, which means I now "own" several Waymarks.


posted by Miragee at 12:07:00 PM | 0 comments

Monday, July 17, 2006

Poor Signal has been sick for several hours now

This afternoon, the Forums stopped responding . . .

As a near-addict, I was at a loss as to what to do, but the news was coming on, so I retreated to a cooler part of my house to watch the terrible news: bombings in Lebanon and Israel, earthquakes and deadly tsunamis in Indonesia, and volcanic eruptions in Ecuador . . .

Sure puts everything in perspective.

After a few hours of watching TV, I got back on the computer to see how things were with the site and I got to see the "Signal is Sick" image:




It will be interesting to find out what happened because to have both the main site, and the Forums down at the same time, when they are on different servers, seems to be very odd.

Jeremy and the crew must be tearing their hair out about now . . .


posted by Miragee at 9:57:00 PM | 0 comments

Beating the heat by heading closer to the coast

Saturday morning I drove down to La Mesa to meet duganrm. I left my car at the Trader Joe's parking lot and put my cooler and pack in his new-to-him Mercury Mountaineer. I appreciated his generosity to meet me there and do the rest of the driving as we went to Old Town, Balboa Park, and finally Coronado.

In San Diego, we met Team Adelos and his two kids. They also piled into the Mountaineer and we took off towards Old Town to find a clever Multi/Puzzle cache. The waypoints take you around the town to interesting buildings and the Seeley Stables museum. As we found the locations for that cache, which was created to honor the creativity of the DAK Girls and their caches, we also found the waypoints for two other Multi-caches, one by Pathfinder & Snoopy and another by Duncan!

One of the waypoints for the Duncan! cache was at the old cemetery.




Amazingly, when they put in the road, and the sidewalk, they paved right over many gravesites. Instead of relocating the remains, they marked the location with a brass medallion.



There is a Waymark category for "Out of Place Graves," so I created a Waymark called "Beneath the road?."

After finding all the waypoints we needed, we headed to the final cache location for the Multi/Puzzle. At that vantage point high on a hill above Old Town, we found ourselves close two other cache containers near the beautiful Victorian Homes on Privet drive. That happened since, until recently, GC.com wasn't keeping track of all the waypoint coordinates. That is how I ended up having a Traditional cache only 37 feet away from a Puzzle cache . . .

So, during our walk to the Finals for the Multi/Puzzle, and the final cache for the Pathfinder & Snoopy cache, it turned out to be a "three-fer" for Team Adelos.

I took a few pictures of the beautiful homes as we walked back down the hill. This old home was saved from the wrecking ball thirty years ago and moved to this location where it has a new life as a Bed and Breakfast.



Back in the 70's, a friend of mine tried to save a wonderful old home like this that had been built in 1876. However, the organization in charge of the Restoration Park wouldn't accept his home . . . until after he had stripped it of all the woodwork and Victorian artifacts in the days prior to the wrecking ball's arrival . . .

After finding those caches, and another small one of Duncan!s, we headed off to Balboa Park to do the PodCache. Both duganrm and Team Adelos had the means to listen to the 20 meg MP3 file. With my terribly-slow 24K dialup connection, I couldn't have downloaded that huge file without leaving my computer on all night long and downloading it then . . .

While we walked around listening to the directions given in the PodCast, I got some information for another Waymark, the The Reuben H. Fleet Space Center and we found a few other caches as well, including a couple more cute containers that are Cookie and Bruiser's trademark.

We also saw this benchmark . . . however I haven't been able to figure out how to log it yet.



Whoops . . . I wish I had realized how dirty the screen was on my GPSr before I took that picture . . .

The PodCache took us past the Botanical Gardens pool.



We also walked past this impressive statue.



And then we had to get some numbers from this whimsical guy.



The amazing detail of this sculpture, which was the creation of the same artist who did the amazing childrens playground in Kit Carson Park in Escondido, can be seen in this closeup of the eye detail.



When we finally found the obviously-correct hiding spot for the cache, we couldn't find the container. Although we normally wouldn't have done this, we signed a spare log duganrm had and put that in a "container" and hid that.

As we walked around the Park, we tried to stay in the shade as much as possible, because it was so unusually hot for San Diego at this time of the year. There wasn't much shade at the hidden cactus garden where Team Adelos had the task of locating a well-hidden Pathfinder & Snoopy cache.





After he made the find there, we had one more Cookie and Bruiser cache to find before making our way back to the car, which was parked in the Zoo parking lot. Before we left the area, we found two more caches I had already found, and then duganrm drove to a Virtual cache I tried to find more than a year ago. After taking a very roundabout way to get to the freeway, via a Puzzle cache, we drove over the Coronado bridge to the exclusive community of Coronado to find a new cache placed by Neptune's Daughter and some puzzle caches by Karen_in_Coronado.

When we got to the park where that Traditional cache is located, there was no place to park. The place was jammed with cars and people. It seemed that everyone else in San Diego decided to head for the island to beat the heat. We got out of that area as quickly as we could and found some caches in the quieter areas away from the water. One was near three schools, another was in a tiny "pocket park" in a nice residential area, and a couple more were along a quiet section of the main street.

One cache we found was one that was missing the night I was caching with GoBolts!, duganrm, and DocDiTTo when he was in town visiting from back east. It was another in Yeshua's Girls' "Tranquility" series at this beautiful fountain:



Late in the day, we tried to go to another cache near the Ferry landing, but there were still way too many muggles to attempt the cache, so we drove back over the beautiful, high arch of the Coronado bridge just when fireworks were bursting in the sky above Sea World.

After dropping Team Adelos at his car, duganrm and I visited the "Mystery Train" cache which was at this amazingly-painted building:



A building to the west of this looked like an Andrew Wyeth painting in the odd, one-dimension light reflecting off its weathered surface.

Even during the daytime, the building looks odd . . .




It was a great day and I am so thankful to have other cachers like Team Adelos, TrailGators, duganrm, and others to go caching with. It is so much more fun with others, and some of the caches are a lot easier to retrieve when the group can pretend to be doing something else. I took pictures of Team Adelos and his kids, when he was actually retrieving a container hidden behind a statue.

It is going to be another very hot week here, so I doubt if I'll get out to do any caching until the group heads for the cooler coast again this weekend.

posted by Miragee at 10:29:00 AM | 0 comments

 

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