Urban Geocaching, I Know What You Mean

I needed to run down to Temecula to get some printer paper from Office Depot. You know what that means! I loaded up the GPSr with some geocaches and headed off with the entire family. We went a round about way (Shocking!) so we could make an attempt at a multi cache.

There are some local cachers that love to put caches on fountains. Their caches are all titled "Tranquility, something something something." This Multi was pretty simple. You walk along this small strip mall and at each of the fountains you get a number. We visited all 7 fountains plugged in the coordinated for the final cache found where it it supposed to be and then...............Nothing. No cache. I know I was at the right place because if the hint provided but nope, no smiley for me. I couldn't even snap a decent picture of the kids because the sun was in their eyes. I'm not feeling very "tranquil"

Off to Office Depot. I might as well grab the skirt lifter in the parking lot. Man there are a lot of people in this parking lot on a Sunday morning. I finally get a second to safely grab the cache and sign the log. We move on to an Altoid can that is nearly rusted shut. My hand still hurts from trying to open that thing. I sign that log and it's off to another "Tranquility" cache. When we pull up to ground zero, there are 30 Muggles sitting on our tranquil fountain. Never mind.

Man I could use a nice trail in the middle of nowhere right now. Oh well, I did get 5 reams of paper for 20 bucks and I got a 5 dollar off coupon.

Sure, But Let Me Load Some Geocaches First.

This morning, The Boy asked if we could go bowling today. We got a Wii for Christmas and the bowling is our favorite. The Boy wanted to try out his new virtual skills on some real life fun. Sure we can go bowling, The Boy. Just after I hop on line and load some caches near the bowling alley.

The bowling was fun. They have it so you can choose which players get the bumpers. When it was The boy's turn, the bumpers would pop up and when it was my turn, they would go down. (I could have used the bumpers on a few shots.) After bowling, it was time to grab a few caches.

I just read a blog post by Tonka_Boy about urban caching and some of the pitfalls associated with it. I thought, yeah that's right! Now I'm going to go do some urban caching anyway. I'll just stick to ones that don't look like bombs. My first attempt was at an unknown (Mystery) cache. I have yet to log a find on one of these and was therefore missing the little question mark icon on my list of finds. So I pull into the parking lot at the listed coordinates and contemplate this clue. "In the late 1980's there were over 2.5 million of "these" in the U.S. In the late 1990's, there were less than 1.5 million." Well "it" was what I thought "it" was and I found the cache stuck to "it". I signed the log while pretending to talk on "it". Oops! I've said too much!

Then we move on to a traditional cache neaby. The GPS'r took us into a Dairy Queen parking lot. Just as I was walking up to GZ, her comes "High Maintenance" in her Escalade and parks right in front of it. She gets out and just stands at GZ talking on the cell phone. This is the part about urban caches that I don't like. Muggles doing dumb things! Thanks for nothing, High Maintenance!

We moved on to a park that I didn't get time to go to on our last park hopping adventure. I made the find on the first of two while The Boy peed in the bushes. What can I say, when a 6 year old has to go, that's it, he going. Don't worry, it was nowhere near the cache. The other find was through this forest of sycamore trees, big ones. There is a forest in the middle of town. It was a small one, but the trees were quite large. Of course I left the camera in the car. DUMB!

My favorite of the day was a cache called Liar, Liar. This cache is one big lie. To post a find you must first find the cache and then post a big old lie in the log. That's fun! You should read some of the logs. People have been "trading" exotic cars, multi million dollar Starbucks cards and much more. It was actually a very nice hide with great cammo in a high traffic area. I went a little overboard in my post but, hey, if we're going, let's go big! My post reads as follows;

" February 16 by Hick@Heart (73 found)
I'm the president of a local biker gang from far away. Me and my posse were in the area studying geocaches for the Smithsonian Institute. We actually pulled a couple of our bikes into the cache itself to make it look like it was just a biker bar and not a geocache. Curley, whose real name is Former President George H. W. Bush, brought his pet tyrannosaurus Rex. (They actually used it in the movie Jurassic Park)Curley walked his Dinosaur back and forth across the street to distract the parade goers so I could sign the log. We had just come from the bowling alley down the street. Since we are outlaw bikers working for the Smithsonian, I stole the shoes to trade for swag. Took: Space Shuttle Atlantis. Left: Size 18 bowling shoes."

A Great Geocaching Valentines Day Story

I read this story today and thought it was pretty nice, or sappy depending on your point of view. A couple in Newfoundland had been together for a couple of years and enjoyed geocaching together. The guy named Darren Harvieux had gone to find a cache (GCWOVP) and love the location. He knew this was the spot. He wrote a special note in the log and went home. Later, he asked his girlfriend, Jada Patey if she wanted to go find a couple of caches together. When they found the cache he told her to sign the log. She found the note and began screaming. The log they left reads, "A memorable hunt for sure. Thanks for a hunt we will remember for a life time. Very nice view. Left a Newfoundland key chain."

Imagine if he had left the ring and another cacher came along and found it. Cool swag! I thought this was a cool story and wanted to share. Geocaching, bringing people together since 2000. You can read the whole story here. Now let's all say it together. Awwwwwwwwwwww.

Happy Valentines Day!

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!

Brianna's Geocoin Goes Park Hopping

I've found out that the type of caching I do depends on which members of Team Hick@Heart go with me. If it's just me and the boy, we go get some really tough ones like "King of This Hill". If the girl is going along I like to cache in a style I call park hopping. The girl is only 3 and most geotrails are no fun for her. Most parks in the area we live have at least one cache in them. This makes it perfect to bounce from park to park and let the kids play while I grab a smiley. We have found lots of great play areas this way and that's the way we went caching today.

We started today's trip at a cache near home. I saw Brianna's Geocoin in the cache and thought it would be nice to take her coin along on our adventure today. Brianna's Geocoin was released by a 4 year old girl in Mississippi to celebrate her family's 50th find and Brianna's Birthday. Interesting that this coin was originally released on my birthday, 11/27/2004. I'm not sure if that is her actual birthday but we will go ahead and assume that she is a very gifted young lady to have a birthday like that! I guess that now makes her 7 and makes me old. So, here is the trip Brianna's Geocoin made with our family today.

Our first park hop was at Kent Hintergardt park in Temecula. This park is named for a fallen hero. Kent Hintergardt was a Riverside County Sheriff's Deputy, killed in the line of duty on May 9, 1993. The park has a Boy's and Girl's club and is apparently very popular. The 50 or so kids at this park left no room for the kids to play. I dashed over to the cache, noticed someone had already found it today, signed the log and we were off to the next park.

This next play area had a very small playground and was designed for toddlers. I knew the boy, age 6, would tire of this park quickly so I had to cache in a hurry. I found the second of two caches in this park and was surprised to find a full size ammo can! It was under a large rock that I had to roll over to reach. After signing the log and closing up the can, I reached to put the rock back and it was covered in ants. THOUSANDS of ants. Looks like that cache is on an anthill, Capitan Obvious! There were no ants on me so I headed back to the kiddie park and we were off again.

We stopped at another Temecula community park and this one had some shade. It got up to 85 degrees today and we were warm. That's right, 85 degrees in February in Southern California. That's why my mortgage is so high! We ate some lunch and I searched and searched but was forced to post a big old DNF on this one. There was a nice view of the snow on the nearby mountains and we made sure to snap some pictures.

Our last stop was at the Murrieta Pond Park. We stopped and got a picture of Brianna's Geocoin on a statue dedicated to Mr. Guenther, founder of Murrieta Mineral hot Springs. The hot springs are no longer accessible to the public as the property is owned by the Calvary Bible College. HOLY HOT SPRINGS! the ducks in this pond are obviously used to people bringing food because they all started swimming towards us as we reached the waters edge. We found the nearby cache, checked out the ducks, snapped a few more pictures and it was time to head home. The ducks followed us out of the park.




We had a great time taking Brianna's Geocoin to a bunch of local parks. This is a great way to geocache with young kids. If the parks near you don't have at least one geocache each, I would suggest putting one in them and make fun trips for other families. We made 5 finds one DNF and will be dropping Brianna's Geocoin off so it can go on other adventures.

Travel Bug Update

I just made a new travel bug and thought I would just post an update as to the travels of the others. This is Fish Tank TB21D2B. Fish Tank is still in my possession , I will be dropping him/her soon. This TB wants to travel the world and get its picture taken at, guess what, fish tanks. Nemo here also wants to see Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota. Hmmm, why do I know that place. I hear it's real nice. Nice and cold! That's kind of a side mission.


Brody's Bad Wolf TB21CZT just got dropped off in Duck Crossing, 40 miles from home. BBW's mission is to travel the world and gather photos of people being bad. He also is trying to catch Raegan's Red Riding Hood. Check out the trail of caches this TB is in! This area is just outside Palm Springs, CA.











Raegan's Red Riding Hood TB21D22 is running from BBW and trying to gather photos of people doing good things. This TB is only 16 miles from home in Bautista Hike, and has only moved once.




My Motogrrl Geocoin is still at Penny Pines Plantation where I dropped it. No one has logged the cache since I was there on December 31. I am holding onto my FTF Prize Geocoin that I just got. I am virtually dropping it in all the caches I find and logging mileage on the coin. As of today, it has 82.4 miles. I love trackables! I still have one set of unactivated TB tags. I'm just waiting for a cool hitchhiker to hook them to and away they'll go.

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.