Monday, August 24, 2009

A slow caching day is better then no caching!

FINALLY!!!! Time to get back to caching. After what seems like months of doing this and that and no time for caching we made some time. I think we both needed it.
We hopped in the car to head out for our first cache of the day and arrived at this cute little park in the middle of no where. There was this little pathway of fruit trees running alongside a community garden. We decided to make a game of what kind of fruit tree am I as we walked by them. We suck at figuring out fruit trees by the way.
At the last tree (which was a apple tree) we stopped and I picked a likely looking apple to munch on as we walked to the cache. No sooner had I picked that apple then a woman in the community garden started yapping to us about apple abusers. To prove that I was not a apple abuser I took a bite of the apple. Which happened to be one of the nastiest apples I have ever eaten in my life. I looked at Saz and tried to smile as we walked away from the woman. She kept telling me to throw the apple away but I was damn determined to eat that apple from hell.... well just in case apple abuse lady was watching me LMAO!
We walked around the community garden and followed a little pathway by some lakes until we found the spot where the cache was suppose to be. We started our search and I was frightened out of my mind by a cat in the bushes. Saz was having a fit about a nest of wasps and to top it all off the darn thing was inside blackberry bushes. Yup GREAT CACHE!. No it wasn't to bad. We actually did have fun.

We hopped back in the car and headed out to the next one. It was kind of strange since it said it was on public property but the gps led us directly to the front of someone's house. Who was having a open house. We did find the cache but it was not our favorite of the day.

The next cache had us driving a ways. The description said we would get to a combo of old and new houses. It wasn't until we were almost at the cache that we understood what they meant by that. It was interesting to see old farm style homes mixed in with cookie cutter style homes. We parked and started searching along this fence line. Sazy with her eagle eye found this one fairly quickly.

Off for the next one. We had to park in this little out of the way parking lot and walk down a trail to a creek that we have actually spent a lot of time at caching. We walked on the bridge and walked on the path and finally zeroed in on where we needed to be. There were muggles everywhere. In fact as we were looking a half naked muggle man comes right to where we were, bends down on a log next to us and starts doing.... ummmm can't exactly call them push ups....ummmm let's just say he looked like he was getting happy with the ground.
After the ground humper left we found the cache which turned out to be the first leg of a multi cache. Now we didn't know it was a multi cache when we went to find it but we decided why not. So off we went with our new destination.
It was hot by the way. And we were walking along side a lovely creek. A incredibly large should probably be called a river creek. Yup you guessed it. That cache was on the other side of that stupid creek. We walked a bit farther to see if we would come to a bridge but no dice. So we decided to heck with it we will look for this second leg later.

The next cache had us driving through a very fancy neighborhood. VERY FANCY. We stopped the car and found this little tiny side trail. We started walking and you know what it was beautiful. There was a tiny creek filled with fish and water plants. There were big giant houses tucked away. It was shady and sunny at the same time. It was just a perfect little path to follow. Sazy made the find and I had a few moments of "oh please don't drop that in the creek" but we made it out all right. I really enjoyed that path.

The last cache of the day (man we are totally slipping on cache counts here) was to be a giant cache. Sazy and I love those monster filled up with goodies caches. So we were pretty darn excited about this find.
It was hot and sticky and we had to walk through dried grass and bamboo. We found the cache inside a old rotted tree. After rifling through it we decided to walk to the creek that I knew was nearby. The first spot was kind of icky so we walked a little farter and found a wonderful spot under a bridge. I took off my shoes and put my feet in the water. Oh sweet bliss!
I told Sazy to do the same. About now is where I realize I am forever making her do things. Go to the American idol concert with me. Go to Green Day with me. Eat this Dim sum. Eat this sushi. Let's do this. Let's do that. TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES and put your feet in the water. Poor Saz.
But she did it because she is a darn trooper. I hope she enjoyed it.
On the way home I picked up a free bookcase lol. Gotta love free!

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Ahhh another day of hunting! We missed this.

It’s been awhile since we had a full day of caching, and it was a good one. All my favorite things about caching happened.

The first we found at the entrance to a park on the edge of the valley that we didn’t know was there. It was a tiny historic ranch with a falling down barn that we very much wanted to sneak into. We figured we could easily get through the fence and stealthily sneak through the long golden grass and examine that barn, but just as we talked ourselves out of trespassing and risking our bodies to collapsing walls and ankles to sleeping rattlesnakes, a park ranger drove by. We would have been so busted before we got halfway. We eventually turned our attention to the cache, and found it neatly stuck under a sign and not in the thorny bushes the GPS sent us to at first. Ouchie.

There was another at this historic ranch that we tried to find but didn’t. We did try, walking along paths with small lizards to a natural spring with cute little fishes and a pair of ducks, hauled ass up a steep hill, just to come sliding back down again on our rear ends, because it wasn’t up there. We didn’t mind, because we found something better than what we were looking for. What we did get to see were 4H gardens and chickens and a better look at the ranch. I had a nice talk with those chickens. And we ate a couple loquats fresh off the tree. We went into the cow pen and saw some old machinery, and gazed longingly at the old falling down fenced off barn from another angle. We saw a cute deer who wasn’t a bit spooked by us. I half expected it to walk over for some petting. The buildings are unfortunately closed on Sundays, so we couldn’t go in the ranch house, but we made use of the rockers on the porch and imagined what the valley looked like 100 years ago. There were signs all over describing the duties and chores of a 10 year old back in the day, including hauling water from the spring we had visited earlier. We decided it sucked to be 10 years old back in the day.

Another on the edge of the valley was a nice walk down a path to the Mounted Ranger Station. I didn’t know we had Mounties. It was hidden at the base of a steep steep hill (thank goodness we didn’t have to haul ass up that). We watched a man on a bicycle tackled that steep path. It didn’t look like fun. I’ll stick to caching. The cache was hidden right next to the station. The GPS did not take us quite there and we needed the clue, but we found it, and we found another deer, too.

Then back into town for lunch and town caching.

We found a metal box that had been cleverly camo’ed to match the big metal box it was placed against. It needed to be unscrewed, so we used a pen knife for that and pawed through a shoebox sized cache. We filled it to the brim, which is another of our favorite things to do.

We found one in a large community park with baseball fields. No one was playing on such a pleasant afternoon.

We found one in a gate that also held a wasp’s nest. After prior near catastrophes, we’ve gotten a little better about looking in holes before sticking our hands in.

We looked for one on a large hill. We walked the base of the hill, we walked up the hill and down the other side, and along the base again. Didn’t find it. Just as we decided we’d had enough hills and weren’t going back up, a man walked by with a trombone. He walked right up that hill with his horn and, as we checked a few more bushes, he began to play Taps. It was a lovely, mournful sound that must have echoed for miles and miles. It was touching. It was Memorial Day. We heard a man somewhere shout “thank you”.

We found one poor muggled cache at the base of a giant oak tree. The tree has a badge on it that says “Historic Tree”. Curious. It’s huge, gorgeous, standing all by itself in a huge field. The lid had been torn off the cache and the contents strewn all around. The log was in good shape, fortunately, so we put the box back together with plenty of swag and hid it in a way that it will hopefully be safe. When I got home I looked up the tree on the city website and saw all the other trees that have the historic designation. I hope I find some more of them.

We went after one named Geek Heaven. “We’re going to Fry’s, aren’t we”. “Yep”. So we follow the GPS and end up at Fry’s Electronics. The GPS just would not settle down, however, and we spent a lot of time wandering the parking lot, navigating the geeks and their geek cars. Eventually we find it.

We found one in the cutest little green bird house, hanging on a tree behind some bushes.

We didn’t find one in a little boutique filled downtown area, and, too bad, all the stores were closed so we couldn’t even find something else to look at. This one kind of sucked.

We didn’t find one near a commuter station, but dammit we sure tried. We went over every bit of the area. The GPS eventually settled on one specific tree and there was nothing there. Hmmmm. It’s a difficulty four. It’s cleverly hidden or, you need special equipment? Could it be in the tree canopy up over our heads? It could be, probably not……….I’m going to look. So we back the pickup under the tree and stand in the bed on wobbling legs, reaching up into the branches. One of the branches had a curious bulge in it. It looked like a big fat almond grew inside the skinny limb. It sure looked like a cache, but it wasn’t a cache. It was just something very strange I had never seen before. Oh well, we had been as thorough as possible, and it turned out the cache wasn’t there anymore after all.

By now we were tired out and filthy, had found new parks, found a big one to fill up, found one who needed some fixing, and many clever ones as well. It was a good day.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Darn that was a painful hunt

Sazy and I decided to go hunting. We decided to start off with our newest nemesis. The cache at the bridge.



We have laid on our bellies and wandered onto a busy street looking for this thing. We were getting frustrated. However we now had a clue from the owner. It took us about 10 minutes and I have to admit we were a little pissed off! It was not a container at all. It was just one of those stick on magnets. We had been looking for a container the whole time UGH!!. We were disappointed.
But we were caching FINALLY!!
Due to the police blocking off a road we ended up on a little side trip. It was on this side trip that we got rear ended. One moment we are in stop and go traffic the next minute our heads are whipped back smashing into the seat rest. CRAP! This is so not what I needed.

I get out of the car to see what kind of damage is done to my Blazer. (Which I am now positive is a rear end magnent! This makes 6) After I check to make sure my buddy is ok I turn around and look at the car behind me. Holy freaking cow the thing was smashed. The front end was crumpled. Water was dripping. The light was crooked. It was a mess. I didn't even get a chance to look at my car when the woman got out of hers.

She looked terrified. I quickly asked her if she was ok. She started talking about being ok and that she couldn't believe it. She shouldn't have left the house. Since she seemed ok I turned and looked at my poor bumper.

Little thing here before we continue. I have been rear ended 6 times in this blazer. No damage except this time. All the other cars including the guy who hit me and drove away without stopping have had extensive damage. Good little bumper on that Blazer!

My bumper was pretty well scraped up. Enough that this time I needed to get it fixed. Around this time the lady who hit me starts begging me not to call the cops. A woman comes out of her house and tells me that I have to. I figured I did because there was so much damage. The woman who hit me Kimberly starts to freak out a bit. Please don't Please don't. Of course this makes me pretty damn sure that I have to. So I do.

It takes about 15 minutes for the cops to get there. The whole time she is freaking out. In between begging me to just leave right now and me trying to get her information I am beginning to get a little wierded out. Then she asks me if I can follow her home after the cops leave. Now I am a big old softy and I feel bad for her because her car is just plain screwed so I say yes. I have Saz with me so I am not alone.

Then the story starts. How she is on her way to meet a friend whose mother is in the hospital. Can we give her a ride there too? How her mother just died in her front room and her sister from Virginia is sueing her for half the house. How she just lost her job. All in all I am getting more and more uncomfortable. Finally the cop arrives.

He asks me if I want a report. I look at our cars and say ummm yes. So he takes our information and walks back to the car to fill out the report. This is when I find out that my stupid insurance card is at my house instead of in the car UGH so I get a ticket that he tells me will be easy to fix. It will cost me ten bucks. OK I can deal. But still.. grrrrr. My fault.. must remember it is my fault for not putting it in the stupid car when I got it. Sigh.

Anyway, she ended up getting a ticket too. What for I am not sure.

After much looking to see if her car was drivable for a few miles the cop says yes. She is so thrilled. I just kept looking at the car thinking there is no way in hell I would drive that!

Whenthe cop was done she asked again if I would follow her home. I said yes. At this point the cop looks at me and asks me if I am actually going to follow her. He looked at me like I was crazy. I guess it seemed crazy that some random woman hits my car, gets me a ticket and I am going to follow her home. But I do. When she pulls up into her driveway Saz and I wave and begin to start to leave.

This woman starts running and begging us please stop. So I do. (seeing a pattern of idiot here for me?) Please take me to the hospital. I look at Saz and she looks at me and both of us give a giant sigh and say come on. She gets in the car and proceeds to talk our ear off. Seriously. As we got closer to the hospital she starts telling us another story about how someone rear ended her and she got out of her car to kick her ass. That is when she seemed to become agitated. Things got pretty blunt from her mouth then. Saz and I looked at each other like Oh Oh.

We pulled up in front of the hospital thanking God that this woman was finally going to leave the car. It took her a good ten minutes of talking, cussing and inviting us to a bbq where we could talk about old times before she got out. I swear we couldn't drive away fast enough.

We were silent until we got onto an actual street and then we started to laugh in relief I think.

Un freaking Real

We never did find the next cache. I think we were a little stunned.

Friday, May 22, 2009

YAY the rain is gone

After what seems like months and months the rain is gone. This means it is back to caching. We can't wait.
Look for posts soon

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Our first Winter hunt

We needed a new nemesis, one of those you lay in bed thinking about, so we went and got one. A four star blankety blank that apparently isn't anything I can touch or see, cause I swear I touched everything. One where you end up with filthy hands from probing every nook and cranny and dirty clothes from laying on the ground in a tantrum. Well, not a tantrum, not yet. It was only our first attempt. Laying on a dirty bridge, yes, reaching as far under the bridge as we could, hoping the trolls don't bite, fending off helpful passersby, hoping they don't call the cops to report escaped mental patients or druggies searching for their stash. This hide has been described as evil, mean, and dangerous. Perfect! I wonder how many tries this one will take?

We found several of the commonly seen types. Teeny magnets under park benches, keyholders stuck to this and that, under pole caps, hanging in trees, at the end of a "geotrail" that many caching shoes have pressed into the long green grasses. We need these as much as a nemesis. It's no fun if you don't find anything but new ways to curse your fellow geocachers. There was one really cute one stuffed into a large snail's shell. It was cold all day long, too. We had a frost advisory the night before so I wasn't surprised to have a chilly morning. I kept thinking it would warm up, but even though the sun was out all day, it never seemed to warm up a smidge. By the time we made each find and got back to the car my middle was chilly and my fingers were frigid. This was our first winter hunt. BRRR!

Hello finally got her dim sum lunch. I never had that so she made the choices and I tried them all. Most of them I really liked. Even the ones that didn't rock my world weren't icky. I'd like to try some of the other stuff I saw. There were so many different things, it might take 10 visits to try them all. However, I'm not eating a chicken foot, Hello, so just go ahead and take that into your heart. Nor the really slimey stuff, the stuff that would make slime go, "EW! SLIME!" I'll ask for a fork next time, too, since I sent some of the food flying and spasticly knocked over my Coke while wrangling my chopsticks. Despite that challenge, I was absolutely stuffed when we finished.
We took a leisurely looksee in an aquarium shop on the way back to the car. They had the most adorable little green turtles, no bigger than a half dollar. And a weird thing with a sucker on his head that I thought was icky and Hello wanted to pet. That's typical of us. Pretty little nemo fish, a cool stingray, some strange large silver fish with an indescribable expression on it's face that reminded me of an uncle. It was a pretty cool fish, like a shiny silver dinner plate with a loooooooooooong face.
We stopped for coffee and saw a rabbit-eared dog. We loitered outside a small playground, making parents nervous, waiting for them to take their children in out of the cold, which they didn't, so we just went ahead and dug through the bushes anyway and took the looks and questions. We loitered around a train station, waiting for the train to leave with it's fantastically tattooed and hard staring engineer before we began to peer under and over power boxes and climb atop fences.
All micros all day long, so at the last we went in search of a regular sized cache so we could drop off some travel bugs who needed to move on. I was about to climb down a creek bank to look under a bridge, looking it over first, like I do, considering the odds of a broken arm or snake attack, and I saw a huge gigantic spider! It was a monster, right where I planned to step on my way down, HUGE, maybe possessed of poisonous and blood dripping fangs.....no wait. It's plastic. Yeah, the cache is under the bridge. So we dropped in our bugs and stuffed a bunch of fun little toys in it as well, left the spider where he sat, and about called it a day.

Friday, December 12, 2008

The things we do for a smilie

During our last hunt we ended up searching for a cache that was located in a childrens park. If you were unable to get the cache due to children (there were a million of them!) you could take a certain picture in order to claim the find.

So here is that picture lol
I SWEAR TO YOU SAZ YOU DO THE NEXT ONE OF THESE!

Two Weekends Two Hides Part two

After moving the cache to the back of the sign in our middle finger move we decided it was time to go caching some more.

We started off close to home at a park I could have sworn there were no caches in. Reading the description it said the cache was magnetic. So that of course sends your mind and eyes looking for metal right? Well we learned a lesson on this cache. Just because the description says magnetic the cache may not be stuck to metal. After walking around a light pole for a few minutes and probably looking like crazy women we found the darn thing in a tree. *rolls eyes

The log was completely full. So we wrote as small as possible to sign.

Now can I just throw a complaint out here. These tiny tiny logs that are smaller then the tip of a pen are a pain in the rear end. You try to sign as small as possible but sheesh!

The next cache we set off for said it was in plain sight to a geocacher but a muggle wouldn't see it. So we end up at this pretty little bridge and proceed to look for something in plain sight. Of course we don't see anything. So we start looking like the geocachers we are. And we find it.

How anyone can say that a cache hid under a bridge is in plain sight I am not sure.

We hopped in the car and went for the next one. So there we are standing on a sidewalk looking around for something we should be able to see since we are not suppose to step off the sidewalk and of course we see nothing. This in case you were wondering is a cactus hide. Originally it was not in a cactus but over time the cactus grew. Plants do that you know... Something to remember when placing hides lol. We spent WAY longer looking for this thing then we should have.
You would laugh at Saz and I. We just have not got stealthy down at all. Here we are on the sidewalk trying to move prickly plants around and here comes a muggle. So what do we do in our attempt to look like we are doing nothing? We sit down on the sidewalk. OK two random women sitting on the sidewalk is perfectly normal right. *rolls eyes again

We did end up finding a great camoed hide. Of course the top was no longer connected to the box. We left a note saying this and I noticed a few other notes saying the same thing. That is to bad it is a good camo job.

We hop back in the car and drive to this cute little random park. Isn't it great how geocaching shows us all of these little out of the way places!
We get out and start looking for a "easy micro"
Right! We search and search and search. Nothing. Not even a wiff. Is there a clue? Nope. More searching. Did I mention that we had to tromp through freaking ivy to do this search? We hate ivy!!

Needless to say this was our first DNF of the day. Sigh. And on an "easy micro" UGH

After a short drive we came to our next cache location. What a cute park! We started to walk into it and watched so many cute little squirrels playing in the middle of the field. There were tons and tons of them. So of course I have to go try to see if one will come up to me. There was this bushy black one that was way to cute.
Suddenly a totally camoed cat leaps up and runs away.
Saz and I saved the squirrels today!! LMAO!!!
We did end up finding a camoed cache too. But I think the fun for us was walking through the field with tons of squirrels.

Our next search had a mystery involved. It talked about a lady. Here let me get you the search page....

After finding the cache, look for the Lady. I see her as I drive to the freeway and wonder why she is there. From the cache site you can ponder her existence. Feel free to tell us in your log why you think she is there or what purpose she is serving. I placed the cache across the street from her so that we don’t bother the nearby business.

After searching in circles... we seem to be doing that lately lol... we found a great cache. This sucker was in plain sight. Seriously. This cache was right there in the open but your eyes would just pass over it. We were amazed at the almost perfect camo job on this one.
Here is the story I came up with about the lady lol
So once there was a woman named Ann. She lived back in the days when there were no asphalt roads only dirt. Her fiance was to meet her at this very spot in a stagecoach. Ann waited patiently all that day. But he never showed. Ann being in love and patient and understanding that stagecoaches cannot be hurried if they have a broken axle or something like that came out every day for the week after he was to arrive. He never came. Ann became increasingly worried and continued to come out every day at the same time. Months would go by before word came that her fiance had died in a accident in route to her. Ann continued to come and wait every day after the news much to the dismay of her family. She refused to eat and after a month or so died herself.
This is a tribute to her love.

(totally made up but what I saw when I saw the lady lol)

By now it is getting dark. DARN these short days!! Totally messing with our geocaching mojo.

We decide to go look again for a micro we had previously DNF on. We knew exactly where it was suppose to be but couldn't find it the last time. This time however we had it within 2 minutes. We walked over and watched the dogs playing in the dog park and called it a day.