Honestly, Officer......It's A Geocache

I got my buff cache back in place last week and until today, no one had found it. I got an E-mail notice that Team Geo-Rangers (TGR) had found it today. I'd like to mention first that TGR's said "Great Cammo." Then they said that the Sheriff stopped by. They explained what they were doing and showed the officer the geocache. The officer was impressed! That's cool!

I have a large geocache that I want to go hide soon. I'm waiting for some geocoins that I ordered to come in. I got the "Mystery" deal from GeoSwag. I got 5 random coins for like $4.50 each. They will all be trackable at the Geocaching Website, but I won't know what they are until they get here. I also ordered a Signal FTF (First To Find) coin that is trackable and has a blue ribbon FTF icon. I want to give one of the coins as a FTF prize and then decide what to do on the rest.

I thought it would be cool to go ahead and register the FTF coin and have its mission be to be placed in new caches and whoever gets the FTF can take the coin and put it in their new cache. We'll see.

I've been trying to do a good job of taking pictures of other peoples trackable items and add pictures to my logs. I think I did a pretty good job on this coin. I added four pictures of the coin near the cache site. Here is my log entry:

6/30/2008	Hick@Heart retrieved it from Dining at the studio	California	[visit log]
I stopped by a cache near work looking for a place to drop this coin. I went over to a cache near the neon-lighted Studio Diner. It's an authentic trip back to the '40s -- in the middle of the Kearny Mesa Business District. Wrapped in chrome, the diner is a welcome roadside stop. And, fittingly, it's set on the lot of a working movie and TV studio, Stu Segall Productions. (Remember "Silk Stalkings" and "Renegade"? Currently filming "Mythological X".) The diner was recently featured on the Food Network on "Diners, Drive ins, and Dives" The episode was called "Open 24/7" You can see part of the movie lot from the street including a tower with a helicopter sticking out of the side. There is also what looks like a large fishing boat wheelhouse. The satellite image of the area reveals an airplane fuselage! I love casting days at the studio. People line the street for blocks hoping to get a chance to be cast in a real movie. Alas, the cache was too small for the geocoin, but I got a few pictures for you. Summertime in SoCal means lots of small caches for me, but I'll keep telling stories until I find a good enough cache for your coin.

I would be very happy to have someone log an entry like that on one of my geocoins. The geocache near the area had recently been muggled. Fortunately Kwvers had been there the day before and they just happened to have a spare cache container to replace it. They saved me from the DNF. So here is a special shout out to Kwvers for being well prepared geocachers looking out for the rest of us. Thanks Kwvers!

We are just taking it easy for the holiday. It's pretty warm and we are enjoying the AC. Have a great holiday. For my readers outside the US, have a great weekend.

Here's the pics I put on the geocoin page.

There Are Good Geocaching Days and Then.................

My geocaching weekend started off well enough with my FTF on Friday. Saturday went pretty well and Sunday was, well, not so great.

Saturday was beautiful. It was in the upper 80's and I went out in the evening for a little fun. I needed to replace my Buff Cache because the landscapers took it when they trimmed the tree it was in. I made a new container and headed out. I stopped by another one of my caches to rescue a really cool geocoin.

My first stop was to redeem a DNF from a couple weeks ago. The cache owner actually sent me a note so I knew right where to look. Have you ever tried to sign a log right next to the front doors of a supermarket on a Saturday afternoon? I used my "skills" to look natural and did just fine. I'm starting to notice that people don't really pay attention to what's going on around them. Muggles just seem to wander around and never look at anything.

The next three caches were Mystery Caches. The idea was that you are playing a game of Geo-Golf. You are given the coordinates of where to start and then the direction and distance to the hole. There is a chain link fence that borders a trail for a couple miles. The geocaches were each under a fence post lid. Once you get to where you think the cache is, you start checking under the lids. However many tries it takes for you to find the cache is how many strokes you take for that hole. The first cache was a par 4 and I found it on my 5th try so for that hole I was one over par. I scored a hole in one on the next two thanks to some crooked fitting post lids. That was fun.

I DNF'd a cache that is supposed to be really tricky. It's rated 3.5 stars for difficulty and there were just too many hiding places for me to lock onto it. I found a couple more including one that is called 3900-Temecula. This cache was on a bench that had been made out of recycled grocery bags. That's pretty cool. They took 3900 old grocery bags and made the plastic for a bench.

I liked it so much that I went over to 3900-Murrieta. This time there was a muggle on his break sitting on the bench talking on his cell phone. I thought if I sat next to him, he would get annoyed and go somewhere else to talk. No such luck. He just turned his head and kept talking. I thought it would be funny to hold my camera off to the side and snap a picture of the two of us. He never even noticed. I took a look behind the bench to see if it was the same type of hide as the other. I didn't see it so I claimed the DNF and went home. (Looking at the picture of me from the side reveals facial wrinkles that I don't normally get to see. Bummer.)

Sunday was a different story. It was 95 degrees today so that added to the fun. I started off by returning to 3900-Murrieta for a better look. This time I had the freedom to look really well. I found nothing. I looked all over that bench. After giving up, I was driving away and wondering if maybe it was one of those little nano capsules and not a hide a key like the other. If it's a hide a key, it's gone. If it's a nano, I could have easily missed it because my mind was focused on the hide a key.

Next I headed over to a cache in a Temecula park with views of Palomar Mountain. You can actually see the observatory from way down in Temecula. This one I knew was one of those nasty little nano geocaches. I looked all over the bench at ground zero. It was hot and kneeling on the ground was not comfortable. The only thing I found was a big old black widow. I messed with that for a while trying to get a good picture. Keep in mind that the green stuff in the spider picture is the part of a park bench where your butt goes. Makes you want to check before you sit doesn't it?

I headed to another park and made my only find of the day. My GPSr had me about 15 feet away from the cache. No one else had mentioned the coordinates in their logs and I was beginning to question my Garmin. I guess 15 feet isn't bad, but I like when it hits zero and I look down and there's a geocache. Call me spoiled.

Next I went to a cache that is along a small pond. I took the wrong trail and ended up on the other side of the water, 150 feet from the cache. I walked forward to see if it was a loop trail but it seemed to go on for as long as I felt like looking. I turned around and headed down the other side of the pond. I was walking along a concrete drainage ditch and the cache listing said there was no need to leave the concrete "trail" to retrieve the cache. The GPS was pointing 25 feet straight down a hill towards the water. I looked around but came up empty. Now that I go back and read the logs, it sounds like the cache is down that hill. No thanks. I spent an hour walking in the 95 degree heat around that so called pond.

I had three DNF's and I was getting hot. When I got back to the car and saw the info for a nearby multi cache looking at me, I thought that I'd had enough and headed back home. I never found a suitable cache to put that geocoin in. There's one near work in San Diego that I might put it in next week.

The day ended up good in the end because we all went to Ruby's Diner and got fat on some good old diner food. I finished my fish and chips off with a nice root beer float and life is good.

Watch where you sit!

World Wide Flash Mob III, San Diego

Today was the day for WWFM III flash mob event on Coronado Island in San Diego, California. Sonny and Sandy of PodCacher were the hosts of this event. They had seen my previous posts stating that I was going to be attending and contacted me to ask if I'd like to volunteer to help at the event. I was happy to help out.

The event started at 10:00 am but we needed to meet the rest of the team working the event at 9:30 near the first waypoint. I found the group and after a few introductions and trading some geocoin discoveries, I was assigned the role of "Official event still photography technicial expert" OK, so I made up the cool sounding title but, I was the photographer. There's not very many situations where you can meet someone for the first time, hand them a very expensive camera and wait for it to be returned half an hour later. Geocachers are generally a good group of people. So, my job was to take pictures. Lots of pictures. That's what I did.

The first waypoint was right in front of the ferry landing that services Coronado. The signal for everyone to converge on the waypoint was an orange bucket, carried by Sonny, being placed on the ground. As soon as it hit the ground, people started coming from all directions. Log sheets were passed around for everyone to sign. There was a travel bug box and a swag box for people to trade things.

Soon the whistles blew, announcing the time to move to the second waypoint. This was a nearby grassy area that provided nice seating for the group photo. The San Diego Bay and the downtown San Diego Skyline were the perfect backdrop for our memory. I'm sure this will be a great photo. The sun had eaten through the marine layer and it was an unexpected 75 degrees right on the water. Several comments were made cursing the decision to wear jeans rather than shorts.

Again, whistles blew and the group broke apart to head to the third and final waypoint. We were headed to a giant compass rose that decorates the entrance to the park. The sign in sheets were used to hold a raffle where some lucky cachers won FTF rights, a tee shirt, an ammo can filled with swag and an official WWFIII Flash mob geoocoin. (Yours truly never wins anything but I am the first to discover this really cool geocoin.)

At 10:15 the event was over. We all were supposed to leave the area via the different directions identified by the compass rose. I took team Hick@Heart back to the prep area to return the camera and chat with some cachers. QDMan recognized me and introduced himself. We had a laugh about the baseball I found that boasted his signature. It was nice to finally get to meet him.

I grabbed a handful of travel bugs to take up to Mount San Jacinto on the weekend of May 30th. I also took some time to log a few more geocoins. My favorites were; ea6bflyr's SPUTNIK Geocoin, Fatboy's tanktop, and a cacher from Australia had his Australian Pioneer geocoin.

Since The Wife was busy chasing The Girl, and I was taking award winning photos with the event camera, I gave my camera to The Boy. He took some good photos but it seems he had the zoom all the way out and so I don't have a photo showing the entire mob very well. You can view the official Flickr photo set here. The Boy did capture a close up of himself that is pretty funny so I'll put it here!

After the event we walked about a half mile down a small beach to grab a cache that someone said may contain a travel bug that wants to reach mountain peaks. That bug wasn't there but we enjoyed the walk and enjoyed finding the cache. One of the houses was for sale and for a cool 11 million dollars you could have your own piece of heaven right on the water in Coronado. 11 million is slightly out of my budget so I can only enjoy the view from the pictures The Boy took.

The temperatures were warm and The Girl was ready to relax so we had a gourmet meal at Burger King and then headed over to REI to drool on all the cool stuff that's on sale. The event was a blast and appeared to be a success. I believe the final tally of events participating in the World Wide Flash Mob is 167 events. They were scheduled to happen in 15 countries, including 45 US States and 11 Canadian Provinces. Be sure to check in with PodCacher to see details on all the events. Sandy said they would be very busy with hundreds of emails documenting them all. PodCacher plans to cover the details in a few posts. You'll definitely want to go check out the high quality photographs. If you go look at them it would be funny for a bunch of people to comment on the great job Hick@Heart did on the pictures!

Here's a bunch of pictures from today.

The team

Downtown San Diego seen from the Coronado Bridge

Part of the mob

Setting up the group shot. (Sandy reacts to The Boy taking pictures)

I'm sporting the demo flash mob geocoin

The event filmer films The Boy taking pictures

The Girl finds a flower

The Boy with the event coin

Fattboy shows off his threads

The San Diego Bay

Nice little stretch of beach. Perfect for a walk.

The Kiddies under a really cool tree.Mean streets of Coronado

The Boy with USS Midway in the background

Nice little house right on the beach with a vanishing edge pool/waterfall.

A Perfect lawn with a flagpole from a ship.

Bugs I picked up to take to the mountain

Official event schedule

A Geocaching Anniversary

No it's not the anniversary of my geocaching career. It's my anniversary as Vice President of the Hick@Heart family. Yes, I was married on April 19, 1997. What other great events happened on this day, you ask? Let's see........

• 1775: The shot heard 'round the world was fired, starting the American revolution.
• 1897: The first Boston Marathon was run.
• 1956: Grace Kelly married the prince of Monaco.
• 2005: Pope Benedict was elected.
• 1995: Oklahoma City Bombing.
• 1993: Branch Dividian Compound in Waco, TX burns.

We are reminded of the last two every year as the news replays those horrible images. Columbine was one day later on April, 20th. So that gets plenty of airtime too.

Enough with the history lesson. Today also happened to be date night at the gym. You get to drop the kids off for four hours and do adult stuff. The adult stuff we chose was to look for Tupperware, hidden in the woods, with small toys in them. Yes, we went geocaching for our anniversary.

Date night began at 5:00 PM. The kids had their bags packed ready for a night of excitement in the gym. They had pizza and a movie and got to play in the gymnasium. Dropping them off was kind of funny. There were lots of parents dropping kids off for their "four hours of sanity". the parents all had their nice "go out" clothes on. Some were even wearing ties. Only two parents that we know of had jeans, hooded sweatshirts and hiking boots on. That would be us.

The kids were occupied and we headed down into Temecula. Into Wine country. I just had to stop at one cache because it contained a Minnesota Geocoin. If you haven't figured it out yet, Tonka_boy is my Dad and he lives in Minnesota. So this coin is practically family. Well maybe not, but it is a very cool coin and I just had to grab it.

We were traveling the back roads of wine country, through orange orchards and grape vines. The Geo-Prius was put to the test on some dirt roads for the first time. A resident stopped to see if we needed any help. He was very nice and told us about all the planned development in the area. It's sad to say that there will soon be many more houses along these beautifully empty roads.

We headed into the Redhawk area of Temecula and into the Santa Margarita Riverbed. It's a dry riverbed and had some nice trails. While we were walking, we saw lots of large insects. There were some huge ants, even more huge stinkbugs, and some kind of centipede. I was surprised to see these centipedes pay no attention to the ants. I would have thought the ants would devour them. As the centipedes scurried along in the sand, their bodies left a trail and their many feet made very interesting marks along the sides. It looks like tiny tire tracks all over in the sand. That's twice this week that I've taken pictures of tracks in the sand.

We found another cache near a neighborhood park that used a very clever container. It was one of those travel soap dishes. The hider put an excellent camouflage paint job on it and it was quite difficult to spot inside the chaparral. The log book was bone dry and had never been wet. There was plenty of room for small trackables and trade items. It was the first time I had seen a soap dish used as a geocache container. Nicely done.

The Wife and I enjoyed our time alone walking deserted trails and driving the back roads. We found 8 geocaches and we picked up two geocoins and one travel bug. It also seems that nothing too disastrous happened in the news today. Here's to a good wife. One that enjoys a walk in the woods on our anniversary. I wouldn't have it any other way.

More San Diego Geocaching: Part I

This week is week 3 of my 6 Sigma Black Belt training. Once again I am down on Mission Bay for the week. My geocaching day was in two parts, before class and after class. I'll break down the story into two posts to make it easier for everyone. I like to ramble on with my long winded stories and I have a lot of pictures to share. Bear with me. (Click any image to enlarge)

Part I: There have been some new caches added since my last trip to Fiesta Island. I arrived at the island around 6:30 in the morning and the sun was just barely ready to peek out above the hills. I quickly found my first cache of the day. It's nice when you find a lock and lock in such a public place. Walking back to my car, I was humbled by the beautiful sunrise seen above.

As I approached Ground zero of the second cache, I was stopped 80 feet short of pay dirt by a chain link fence. I walked a little ways each way but did not see an entrance. I wasn't going to jump the fence and the clock was ticking so I was off to the next cache. When I found the decon container hiding in a bush, I saw the entrance to the inside of the fence that I was looking for earlier. Nice! Let's go!

As I was walking the quarter mile to my third find, I started noticing very strange patterns in the sand. It looked like some sort of worms were leaving very erratic trails. I thought sand worms only existed in Dune. I snapped a photo as evidence they really exist! I found the camouflaged M&M tube and was on my way.

As I walked back to my car, the sun was shining, the crew teams were out practicing and I was at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. My race Prius looked as if it were posing for a Toyota commercial. I stood on the berm at the edge of the road and just enjoyed the views. I could see SeaWorld and I was glad I live in Southern California.



I grabbed the cache I had forgotten to look for last time I was here and I had just enough time to get over to the conference center, change my shoes, get a cup of coffee and set up my laptop for class. On my lunch break I walked the half mile to a new cache that had been placed since my last time down here. Some of the logs mentioned the coordinates being a bit off and most geocachers were finding it using the coordinates provided by Duncan, the FTF. I looked a bit too long and the half mile back to class took a little more than the four minutes I alloted! I'd have to come back with Duncan's numbers. As I was walking back I saw this large sail boat in dry dock. I like the image on the side. It's hard to see just how tall this ship is, but the street light helps put a little perspective on it.

Something rather strange happened at 1:30 in the afternoon. All of the sudden, the fog rolled in off the ocean. It got very windy and the temperature cooled down about 10 degrees. I snapped a picture from just outside the classroom looking out in the marina. (It can be hard to focus on statistics when you have a view like that out the window.) An hour later the fog was gone and it was sunny again. Mystery fog. Just enough to scare a GPS purchase into an unsuspecting novice boater!




Geocaching around Mission Bay was a great way to start my day. Here's a new geocaching slogan for you; "Geocachers, we turn over more rocks before 7:00 am than most people do all day!" Stay tuned for part II where there are signs of rattle snakes!