Miramar Airshow in San Diego

On Sunday, The Boy and I went to the Miramar Airshow in San Diego. We got there pretty early and had no problem with traffic or getting on the Marine base. Rather than wait in line for a shuttle bus to drive us the mile and a half to the tarmac, we got a pedi cab. Brody thought riding on the back of that three wheeled bike was one if the most fun things he's ever done. (Funny, we were just at Disney last week)



Once on the tarmac, there were tons of things to do and see. There were also plenty of ways to spend your money. We spent some time exploring the static displays. We saw lots of aircraft. We got to walk all the way through a C-5 Galaxy. We checked out the helicopters, UAV's and many many aircraft.



We made our way over to the fence protecting the runway from hoards of crowding fans and set up our chairs. The first act we saw was a bi plane doing stunts that would have made me pass out. They had some stunt parachute guys and a tactical assault by the Marines on a completely unsuspecting patch of grass along the runway.



The Marines showed off the impressive maneuverability of the F-18 Super Hornets. They did multiple low altitude, high speed pass by's. They seemed to be only 100 feet off the ground and on the verge of breaking through the sound barrier. As they passes you could see a cylinder of condensation forming around the center of the aircraft. It was impressive and it was loud. The F-18 also displayed the ability to maintain control at speeds below 100 miles per hour.



My favorite part of the event had to be the F-22 raptor. This is the newest addition to the United State's arsenal of military aircraft. The first thing I noticed about the F-22 was it's size. This is a big jet! It's noticeably larger than the F-18 and Much larger than the F-16. The next thing I noticed was how loud it was. This thing puts out some serious noise. The vectored thrust allows the F-22 to be as nimble as a ballerina. This ballerina just happens to have stealth technology and be armed to the teeth.



The Boy's favorite was the Blue Angels. They put on a spectacular show, as usual. It's amazing to see 6 F-18's flying at high speed and have only 18 inches of clearance between their cockpits and wing tips. The Boy kept screaming, "Awesome!" the entire time.



The end of the Blue Angels marked the end of the Airshow. By this time the San Diego sun had been beating down on us for several hours and we were tired. We joined the thousands of people in the march back to the parking areas. As we were walking, the pedi cab driver passed us with no fare and a flat tire. The lack of a repair kit had to have cost him a couple hundred dollars. The lines for the shuttles was out of control, so we walked the 1.5 miles back to the car.



It took The Boy about 2.7 seconds to fall asleep once we were in the comfort of the air conditioned car. I had to stay awake the 45 minutes back home. The Airshow in San Diego is fantastic. The Boy is already talking about plans for next year. I got a bunch of pictures printed to make a display in The Boy's room.

My New Geocaching Style

When I first started geocaching I wanted to try and get as many geocaches as possible every time I went out. I've settled into a new style of geocaching that I think works better for me. I kind of figured this out during my recent trip to Massachusetts. Instead of loading a ton of geocaches in an area and focusing on finding them all, I like to find a couple of caches in an area that I'm visiting and focus on the area rather than the caches. This worked out nicely last weekend when my brother came to visit from Illinois.

We spent the first day at Disneyland. I think there's a cache or two there but I forgot to look and we go to Disney all the time anyway. The next day we went to Point Loma in San Diego. Geocaching in San Diego is always a great time, however I wanted to enjoy the area rather than race around looking for caches. We had my two kids and my brother's wife and daughter.

We started out by visiting Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery. There is a regular sized geocache just outside the cemetery walls. We spent some time paying our respects to the many fallen heroes laid to rest in one of the most beautiful places on Earth. We walked over and found the geocache and signed the log. Then we walked across the street to a memorial to the USS St Lo. My Grandfather was on the St Lo in WWII when it was struck by a Kamikaze. Grandpa made it off, however many men did not make it to safety before the ship went down.

Next we headed down the hill to the Tide Pools. We took off our shoes and walked around looking for sea life. The weather was perfect. The Boy and I were first to walk to a nearby beach area which gave many others the inspiration they needed to do the same.

We put our shoes back on and went back up the hill to the Cabrillo National Monument. I was pleasantly surprised to find the 10 dollar entrance fee was waived for the day in honor of newly naturalized citizens. The view is breathtaking. The monument is at the very end of the upper portion of Point Loma. You stand and look out at the great Pacific Ocean. To the South is a great view of the San Diego Bay, Downtown San Diego, and Coronado/North Island. To the North you see fantastic beaches lined with cliffs.

We walked from the Monument up to the Old Point Loma Lighthouse. The Light sits 422 feet above the water. That must have seemed like a good place for a light when it first began operating in 1855. 36 years later they decided that the low clouds and fog were often too dense and a new lighthouse was opened closer to the water. The Old light has been restored by the National Park Service and is still and iconic symbol representing San Diego. There is a virtual cache in the area which I had to answer a few questions to claim the find.

We finished the day with dinner at the Fish Market in Seaport Village. If you're ever in San Diego, make sure to stop by this great restaurant at least once.

It was a great trip and I enjoyed spending the majority of our time viewing the attractions with a few geocaches sprinkled in. There are tons of new caches popping up around home and I suppose I'll go after them eventually. For the most part, I'll go after caches that are near places I'll be visiting for reasons other than geocaching.

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

More San Diego Geocaching: Part II

As promised, here is Part II of of my geocaching adventure in Mission Bay San Diego. Don't forget to read up on Part I. (Click any image to enlarge)

After class I had Duncan's coordinates and I headed back out to the edge of Mission Bay Park. Everyone else in my class was headed home after a long day of regression analysis. Not me, I'm a lunatic. I finally got my hands on the cache that had eluded me earlier in the day. I dropped a geocoin that I had picked up over the weekend. Duncan's coordinates weren't too much better so I added mine to the log to add to the fun. Then I suggested loading all three sets of coordinates, putting your GPSr on a rock and looking under everything. These large rocks line the entire edge of the bay. They can make for some pretty tough searches. The large ugly spiders and stray cats don't help either.

My next move was over to Tecolote Canyon Park. There is an earthcache in the park and I have yet to log a find on one. Way out in the outfield of one of the many ball fields there is a sign explaining the Rose Canyon Fault Zone. It was interesting to learn about this fault and the extreme difference in ages of the material on either side. I blacked out a portion of the sign containing the information needed to log a find on this earthcache.




After successfully detailing my first earthcache I headed over to the Tecolote Canyon Natural Park Trails to find some regular geocaches. Click on the trail map image to open a PDF trail map that you can print out before you visit this area.

The trails here are great. They are gravel/dirt trails that are very wide. There is plenty of room for the muggles on bikes to pass safely. As I walked along the trail I had a great view of USD (University of San Diego) up on the bluff. I found a nice cache along the trail. It was a pretzel type container covered with camouflage duct tape. The clock tower at USD rang out it's announcement of 6:30 PM. I thought, "Wow, I was geocaching 12 hours ago." More evidence that I may be certifiable.



My Garmin GPS was telling me that the next cache was 100 feet off of the trail. As you can see in the photos, the brush is thick. And as I promised in my last post, there were signs of rattlesnakes. (This may be borderline deceptive advertisement on my part because the only sign of rattlesnakes were the signs warning of rattlesnakes. Signs nonetheless!) Combining these signs with several others telling you to stay out of certain areas, I thought better of bushwhacking at this point and headed to the next geocache.

This was another pretzel type container under a cool old tree. I spotted the container from one side and circled around to retrieve it. When I got to the other side, I couldn't find it. Pushing a few branches around revealed that I was almost kneeling on the cache. That Duct tape works well! I decided that was enough for the day. I was already going to end up getting home at nearly 8:00.

As I was headed back over to the trail I noticed a baseball laying in the weeds. Not a very odd find since I had passed 10 ball fields to reach the trail head. I picked up the ball and headed back towards the car. I was tossing the ball in the air and noticed it had been signed. Upon closer examination I realized that this baseball had been signed by QDman. HA! If you don't know, QDman has an excellent photo blog called Geocaching Pics. I've been reading his blog and enjoying his pictures for a while. There is also a link in my sidebar to his site. Add it to your subscriptions, it will not disappoint. I'm not sure how the ball got in the weeds, but it's a pretty cool memento.

I got a couple of photos of a nice walkway and of the cool staircase leading into this great park. There are a bunch more geocaches in this area and the park is a must do if you are looking for quality hiking trails in San Diego.

I ended up finding 7 regular geocaches and 1 earth cache. On the way home I snapped a picture of my favorite stretch of my daily commute up the North 15. the view is actually better before you drive all the way down into the valley but I couldn't get my camera out of my Camelback in time. I had a great day. Oh yeah, I was in training for 9 hours in there. I love this game!

On a side note, My Google Reader is telling me that I have 36 blog posts to catch up on. That's all from various geocaching blogs that I subscribe to. Looks like geocaching season is heating up in the rest of the country! And it looks like I have some reading to do.

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!