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

Geocaching on the "Big Bay" San Diego

My workweek ended with an early Friday. I aced a test for my new job training and was done for the rest of the day. My company headquarters is on Harbor Drive in Downtown San Diego. This is right on the San Diego Bay, also known as The Big Bay.

It was a beautiful day. The sun had come out and I had mapped out 8 caches along the Embarcadero at the edge of the bay. It was only about 10:00 in the morning and with the exception of a few homeless people and the occasional jogger/biker, the sidewalk was empty. I made my first find quickly. It was an electrical box magnetically stuck to the back of an electrical station used by a large tour boat docked below. No one saw me? I thought the muggles would be a much bigger problem than this. As it turned out, they would be.

As I continued my walk, I passed the Maritime Museum of San Diego. This is home to 5 historic ships that can be toured for a small entrance fee. The ship that really catches your eye is the Star of India. Star of India is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the worlds oldest active ship. Named a National Historic Landmark in 1966 and a California State Historic Landmark in 1999, Star of India has been awarded both the American and World Ship Trust Maritime Heritage Awards. First launched at Ramsey, Isle of Man as a British full-rigged ship named Euterpe in 1863, Star of India was rigged down to a bark in 1901 when she was used to work the salmon fishery in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Full rigged means that there are square-rigged sails on all three of the masts. A bark is a sailing vessel with three masts, the front and middle masts square-rigged, the rear mast rigged fore-and-aft. Laid up in retirement in Alameda while steamships ruled the oceans, Star of India was restored just in time to sail again for the first time in nearly 50 years on the Fourth of July, 1976. I believe the Star is also the only iron hulled sailing ship still in operation.

This Museum is also home to a 300 foot, 2000 ton, Soviet B-39 submarine, a stem ferryboat built in 1898, a steam yacht built in 1904, and the HMS Surprise. The Surprise is the ship used in the movie, Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe. This ship is an outstanding replica of an 18th Century British Royal Navy Frigate. Another ship of interest is the Californian. The Californian is a "tall ship" replica of an 1847 revenue cutter and was launched in 1984 during the Olympic Summer Games in Los Angeles. In July 2003, The Californian, was designated the official Tall Ship of the State of California by the Governor at the time.

I continued on, past the San Diego Cruise Ship terminal and into Seaport Village. My next cache attempt was at Hope and Happiness. I found the cache immediately but just as I spotted it, a tour bus pulled up and opened its doors right at ground zero. I waited for 50 tourists to unload only to see that the bus driver had no interest in the attractions and was sitting in his seat staring at me.

I used this muggle opportunity to snap a few photos of the Bob Hope Memorial and A 25 foot statue of the famous WWII photo known as, "The Kiss". This monument is called, Unconditional Surrender, and no, there is nothing to look at up her dress!

This is also home to the USS Midway CV-41 Museum. The USS Midway was in service for 47 years and set new standards of naval aviation in the latter half of the 20th century. A captured German V-2 rocket was launched off the USS Midway in 1947—the dawn of naval missile warfare. The USS Midway blazed new trails of sub-Arctic air operations off the coast of Greenland. It was the first carrier home ported in a foreign country, calling Yokosuka, Japan home for 18 years. When others came home, the USS Midway remained at the “tip of the sword” on an odyssey shared by 225,000 Americans that spanned the surrender of Japan in WWII, the Cold War, Vietnam, the era of détente and Desert Storm.

The name, Midway, was actually taken from a smaller escort carrier for the commissioning of the new class of carrier. The name was in honor of a great American victory in WWII and the Navy wanted to use that powerful name for it's new carrier. The smaller ship, renamed "Saint Lo" was tragically sunk off the island of Samar by the hands of a Japanese Kamikaze. My grandfather was on the Saint Lo when the Kamikaze pilot, Lieutenant Yukio Seki, reached his destiny. Grandpa Smith earned a Purple Heart for surviving the incident. Many US Navy Sailors believe it is bad luck to rename a ship and the 143 brave men killed that day on that ship alone would probably agree.

My other attempts at nearby caches proved to be too risky. It was now lunchtime and it was the nicest day we had seen in a week or so. The muggles were out in force and every cache I approached had tons of people surrounding it. I was able to pick up one find and had fun checking out the attractions and checking out the people too. I said goodbye to Bob Hope's friends below and headed home. This is a wonderful section of San Diego. I recommend anyone traveling to the area take time to visit these sites.