100 Finds, The Geocaching Century Mark

The day is upon us. Team Hick@Heart has found 100 geocaches. Today was a beautiful day. Perfect for geocaching. I mapped out some hides and The Boy and I were off.

We started at a cache called Accuracy. It is not really necessary to sign the log. The idea is to put your GPS on a specific spot and log info such as the weather, how many satellites you are receiving, how strong your signal is and what latitude and longitude are you seeing.

Next we hit a relatively simple mathematical mystery cache. It was nice to be out on the rural roads rather than in town. We found one cache that had a pretty fun container. I've seen these on line but this is the first time I found one. It looks just like some poop in the grass but when you turn it over there is a cylinder holding a log. A log within a log if you will! Ah, the things you pick up/reach into while geocaching.

We climbed partway up a hill to find Hillside Hotwheels. Finding an ammo can under a bush just never gets old. We found a nice geocoin in there. A guy called PennyPacker from Etiwanda, California released 18 of these while on a 3400 mile road trip. the coin shows the Western United States. this discovery added a nice new icon to my list of trackables found.

We grabbed a couple more semi urban micros. At least these were in a quiet part of small town Menifee. I also logged two more DNF's while in this area. So here we are sitting at 99 finds. It's time to get the big one.

I had solved Magical Mystery Tour earlier in the week. I had to rely on a hint from the owner. There is no way I would have gotten on the right path. This cache is actually on my front page of caches closest to my house so I had to stare at it all the time. I knew this was the one. The Boy and I headed over to the area and began climbing the rocks. I finally made the find. this cache had not been found in almost a year. Everything looked good however a spider had taken up residence inside. I signed the log and made note of the milestone find. The Boy and I took some pictures tryng to use our hands to make the number one hundred. After 6 or 7 shots I felt I had it. It was only after I got home to look at the pictures that I realized we were holding up the number 001. I guess I'll have to make that up when I reach 200!

I'm happy to have reached 100 geocaches. I'm sure the urge to hunt the parking lot skirt lifters will subside. (For a couple months until I get close to 200!) The boy and I really enjoy geocaching together. Geocaching is all up in his head too. The other day while walking into a store, he stopped to examine a pay phone for geocaches. He said, "No treasure there." and moved on. Good job, The Boy!

Here are some more pictures from today.

Geocaching on Rawson Road

When I woke up this morning I decided it was about time to go drop Fish Tank in a cache. I also needed to send Brianna's Geocoin on its way. I saw that my cache total was at 58 finds. That means all I have to do is go grab two nearby caches and I'm at 60. Well, If I'm going to grab 2 I might as well grab 12 right? Check out the string of caches right down the street on Rawson Road.

Rawson Road is the old road into Hemet. The entrance is only 2 miles from my house. This is a beautiful country road bordered on one side by Rawson Ranch and on the other by an ecological preserve. The only thing that isn't private property is the road itself. I posted my first ever DNF on this road, and since becoming a Groundspeak premium member, I've learned there are a lot more caches here than was previously visible to me.

The boy and I actually drove to the farthest (6 miles) from home and worked our way back. When we stopped at our first cache a local resident stopped by to tell us the lady that lives across the street is crabby and her husband just passed away. I could smell the rural neighbor politics. He gave us permission to go cruise around his property. We might have done that if there was a cache on his property and if I hadn't recently seen a clip from Deliverance. We grabbed the cache and headed on our way.


The dirt road was really nice in some areas and in others it was badly washed out from all the recent rain. There were a few long stretches of washboard road that tries to shake your brains out. Most of the caches here are micros and nanos. Imagine that, nanos out in the country with no less than a bizillion places to hide them. At one, I was walking and looking at my GPSr when the boy holds up the cache and asks, "Is this it?" Yep, good one, the boy.


In one spot there is this really old abandoned hose built out of rocks. You can't go up to the house but it is quite a sight from the road anyway. And, of course, there is a stinking nano-cache nearby. We spent some time on the three DNF's for today. When you walk up to ground zero, and it is a huge metal fence blocking the road and somewhere a little tiny camouflaged container is stuck to it, how much time are you really going to spend on it? I know my brother suffers from "mocrosiscannotfindus" and this would have been a therapeutic trip for him!!

The views were awesome today. The recent rains have turned the area along Rawson Road into a green wonderland. Here is a nice shot taken along the way.


We did not meet our goal of 12 finds today, we were stuck with 11. That is still my biggest day of caching so far. On the way home we climbed the hill up to one of my caches to drop off Fish Tank and to see how my ammo can was holding up to all the rain. The cache looked good and the boy took some nice picture from up there. I'll put some here. My favorite is the last one. NICE!

Geocaching with the Family

Question: When it is 75 degrees in January on a cloudless sunny day, what do you do?

Answer: You put on some shorts and go geocaching!

Oh man, I can't even begin to explain how nice it was today!

We started off near Old Town Temecula at a cache called little red caboose.

How many places do you see to hide a micro? ..

Just after spotting the hide, I smacked my head on a very solid piece of train. OUCH! See that big black hook up thing at my waist in the picture below? That's what I hit. I was not very happy about that, but signing the log made me feel a little better. Here's Brody with cache in hand.


What a fun way to start the day. Another one we found was called Freddys Forrest. This was a pretty cool hide. It was in the................. What do you call the part of a tree where it splits off into two large branches? The fork, the split, the crotch??????? It was in the crotch of a tree about 10 feet off the ground. It was an M&M tube that was inside of a camouflaged tube. I had to step up on another tree to reach it.

One that was rather interesting was called Quiet Neighbors. There was a sidewalk path through the middle of a neighborhood that went for about 1/8 mile. Right there in the middle of this housing development was a small cemetery. The graves couldn't have been more than 300 feet from the houses. There was a fence, but spirits can haunt you through a fence!! This was a small tube hanging in the ivy that grows all over the fence. Quiet neighbors, get it?

Dugout was pretty easy. You know that fenced in dugout area on the side of a ball field? Well one of the posts didn't have a lid on it. It was up about 8 feet so you don't really notice the little hook on the lip of it. When I pulled out the hook, out comes 12 inches of wire connected to a small glass tube. Sign the log and off you go.

The best hid we saw today was at Spectrum. you end up behind a shopping center at one of those big green electrical boxes. The cache is about the size of a regular ammo can. It just happens to be a smooth hunk of steel painted to match the electrical box and stuck to the side of the box with magnets. You pull the thing off and there is a pocket for swag and a log. The paint on this cache has faded a bit over the years. I can imagine it was really tough to find when it was first placed! It is still very muggle proof. Why would anyone try to pull a giant hunk of steel off the side of an electrical box?

It was a good day of caching. We had 8 finds with zero DNF's! That puts our total finds up to 36. Now it is time for lazy and nappy time.