Hellolost & Saz's Geocaching adventure

A slow caching day is better then no caching!

2009-08-24T14:58:00.000-07:00

FINALLY!!!! Time to get back to caching. After what seems like months of doing this and that and no time for caching we made some time. I think we both needed it.
We hopped in the car to head out for our first cache of the day and arrived at this cute little park in the middle of no where. There was this little pathway of fruit trees running alongside a community garden. We decided to make a game of what kind of fruit tree am I as we walked by them. We suck at figuring out fruit trees by the way.
At the last tree (which was a apple tree) we stopped and I picked a likely looking apple to munch on as we walked to the cache. No sooner had I picked that apple then a woman in the community garden started yapping to us about apple abusers. To prove that I was not a apple abuser I took a bite of the apple. Which happened to be one of the nastiest apples I have ever eaten in my life. I looked at Saz and tried to smile as we walked away from the woman. She kept telling me to throw the apple away but I was damn determined to eat that apple from hell.... well just in case apple abuse lady was watching me LMAO!
We walked around the community garden and followed a little pathway by some lakes until we found the spot where the cache was suppose to be. We started our search and I was frightened out of my mind by a cat in the bushes. Saz was having a fit about a nest of wasps and to top it all off the darn thing was inside blackberry bushes. Yup GREAT CACHE!. No it wasn't to bad. We actually did have fun.

We hopped back in the car and headed out to the next one. It was kind of strange since it said it was on public property but the gps led us directly to the front of someone's house. Who was having a open house. We did find the cache but it was not our favorite of the day.

The next cache had us driving a ways. The description said we would get to a combo of old and new houses. It wasn't until we were almost at the cache that we understood what they meant by that. It was interesting to see old farm style homes mixed in with cookie cutter style homes. We parked and started searching along this fence line. Sazy with her eagle eye found this one fairly quickly.

Off for the next one. We had to park in this little out of the way parking lot and walk down a trail to a creek that we have actually spent a lot of time at caching. We walked on the bridge and walked on the path and finally zeroed in on where we needed to be. There were muggles everywhere. In fact as we were looking a half naked muggle man comes right to where we were, bends down on a log next to us and starts doing.... ummmm can't exactly call them push ups....ummmm let's just say he looked like he was getting happy with the ground.
After the ground humper left we found the cache which turned out to be the first leg of a multi cache. Now we didn't know it was a multi cache when we went to find it but we decided why not. So off we went with our new destination.
It was hot by the way. And we were walking along side a lovely creek. A incredibly large should probably be called a river creek. Yup you guessed it. That cache was on the other side of that stupid creek. We walked a bit farther to see if we would come to a bridge but no dice. So we decided to heck with it we will look for this second leg later.

The next cache had us driving through a very fancy neighborhood. VERY FANCY. We stopped the car and found this little tiny side trail. We started walking and you know what it was beautiful. There was a tiny creek filled with fish and water plants. There were big giant houses tucked away. It was shady and sunny at the same time. It was just a perfect little path to follow. Sazy made the find and I had a few moments of "oh please don't drop that in the creek" but we made it out all right. I really enjoyed that path.

The last cache of the day (man we are totally slipping on cache counts here) was to be a giant cache. Sazy and I love those monster filled up with goodies caches. So we were pretty darn excited about this find.
It was hot and sticky and we had to walk through dried grass and bamboo. We found the cache inside a old rotted tree. After rifling through it we decided to walk to the creek that I knew was nearby. The first spot was kind of icky so we walked a little farter and found a wonderful spot under a bridge. I took off my shoes and put my feet in the water. Oh sweet bliss!
I told Sazy to do the same. About now is where I realize I am forever making her do things. Go to the American idol concert with me. Go to Green Day with me. Eat this Dim sum. Eat this sushi. Let's do this. Let's do that. TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES and put your feet in the water. Poor Saz.
But she did it because she is a darn trooper. I hope she enjoyed it.
On the way home I picked up a free bookcase lol. Gotta love free!

Ahhh another day of hunting! We missed this.

2009-06-03T08:45:00.000-07:00

It’s been awhile since we had a full day of caching, and it was a good one. All my favorite things about caching happened.

The first we found at the entrance to a park on the edge of the valley that we didn’t know was there. It was a tiny historic ranch with a falling down barn that we very much wanted to sneak into. We figured we could easily get through the fence and stealthily sneak through the long golden grass and examine that barn, but just as we talked ourselves out of trespassing and risking our bodies to collapsing walls and ankles to sleeping rattlesnakes, a park ranger drove by. We would have been so busted before we got halfway. We eventually turned our attention to the cache, and found it neatly stuck under a sign and not in the thorny bushes the GPS sent us to at first. Ouchie.

There was another at this historic ranch that we tried to find but didn’t. We did try, walking along paths with small lizards to a natural spring with cute little fishes and a pair of ducks, hauled ass up a steep hill, just to come sliding back down again on our rear ends, because it wasn’t up there. We didn’t mind, because we found something better than what we were looking for. What we did get to see were 4H gardens and chickens and a better look at the ranch. I had a nice talk with those chickens. And we ate a couple loquats fresh off the tree. We went into the cow pen and saw some old machinery, and gazed longingly at the old falling down fenced off barn from another angle. We saw a cute deer who wasn’t a bit spooked by us. I half expected it to walk over for some petting. The buildings are unfortunately closed on Sundays, so we couldn’t go in the ranch house, but we made use of the rockers on the porch and imagined what the valley looked like 100 years ago. There were signs all over describing the duties and chores of a 10 year old back in the day, including hauling water from the spring we had visited earlier. We decided it sucked to be 10 years old back in the day.

Another on the edge of the valley was a nice walk down a path to the Mounted Ranger Station. I didn’t know we had Mounties. It was hidden at the base of a steep steep hill (thank goodness we didn’t have to haul ass up that). We watched a man on a bicycle tackled that steep path. It didn’t look like fun. I’ll stick to caching. The cache was hidden right next to the station. The GPS did not take us quite there and we needed the clue, but we found it, and we found another deer, too.

Then back into town for lunch and town caching.

We found a metal box that had been cleverly camo’ed to match the big metal box it was placed against. It needed to be unscrewed, so we used a pen knife for that and pawed through a shoebox sized cache. We filled it to the brim, which is another of our favorite things to do.

We found one in a large community park with baseball fields. No one was playing on such a pleasant afternoon.

We found one in a gate that also held a wasp’s nest. After prior near catastrophes, we’ve gotten a little better about looking in holes before sticking our hands in.

We looked for one on a large hill. We walked the base of the hill, we walked up the hill and down the other side, and along the base again. Didn’t find it. Just as we decided we’d had enough hills and weren’t going back up, a man walked by with a trombone. He walked right up that hill with his horn and, as we checked a few more bushes, he began to play Taps. It was a lovely, mournful sound that must have echoed for miles and miles. It was touching. It was Memorial Day. We heard a man somewhere shout “thank you”.

We found one poor muggled cache at the base of a giant oak tree. The tree has a badge on it that says “Historic Tree”. Curious. It’s huge, gorgeous, standing all by itself in a huge field. The lid had been torn off the cache and the contents strewn all around. The log was in good shape, fortunately, so we put the box back together with plenty of swag and hid it in a way that it will hopefully be safe. When I got home I looked up the tree on the city website and saw all the other trees that have the historic designation. I hope I find some more of them.

We went after one named Geek Heaven. “We’re going to Fry’s, aren’t we”. “Yep”. So we follow the GPS and end up at Fry’s Electronics. The GPS just would not settle down, however, and we spent a lot of time wandering the parking lot, navigating the geeks and their geek cars. Eventually we find it.

We found one in the cutest little green bird house, hanging on a tree behind some bushes.

We didn’t find one in a little boutique filled downtown area, and, too bad, all the stores were closed so we couldn’t even find something else to look at. This one kind of sucked.

We didn’t find one near a commuter station, but dammit we sure tried. We went over every bit of the area. The GPS eventually settled on one specific tree and there was nothing there. Hmmmm. It’s a difficulty four. It’s cleverly hidden or, you need special equipment? Could it be in the tree canopy up over our heads? It could be, probably not……….I’m going to look. So we back the pickup under the tree and stand in the bed on wobbling legs, reaching up into the branches. One of the branches had a curious bulge in it. It looked like a big fat almond grew inside the skinny limb. It sure looked like a cache, but it wasn’t a cache. It was just something very strange I had never seen before. Oh well, we had been as thorough as possible, and it turned out the cache wasn’t there anymore after all.

By now we were tired out and filthy, had found new parks, found a big one to fill up, found one who needed some fixing, and many clever ones as well. It was a good day.

Darn that was a painful hunt

2009-05-28T08:27:00.001-07:00

Sazy and I decided to go hunting. We decided to start off with our newest nemesis. The cache at the bridge.

We have laid on our bellies and wandered onto a busy street looking for this thing. We were getting frustrated. However we now had a clue from the owner. It took us about 10 minutes and I have to admit we were a little pissed off! It was not a container at all. It was just one of those stick on magnets. We had been looking for a container the whole time UGH!!. We were disappointed.
But we were caching FINALLY!!
Due to the police blocking off a road we ended up on a little side trip. It was on this side trip that we got rear ended. One moment we are in stop and go traffic the next minute our heads are whipped back smashing into the seat rest. CRAP! This is so not what I needed.

I get out of the car to see what kind of damage is done to my Blazer. (Which I am now positive is a rear end magnent! This makes 6) After I check to make sure my buddy is ok I turn around and look at the car behind me. Holy freaking cow the thing was smashed. The front end was crumpled. Water was dripping. The light was crooked. It was a mess. I didn't even get a chance to look at my car when the woman got out of hers.

She looked terrified. I quickly asked her if she was ok. She started talking about being ok and that she couldn't believe it. She shouldn't have left the house. Since she seemed ok I turned and looked at my poor bumper.

Little thing here before we continue. I have been rear ended 6 times in this blazer. No damage except this time. All the other cars including the guy who hit me and drove away without stopping have had extensive damage. Good little bumper on that Blazer!

My bumper was pretty well scraped up. Enough that this time I needed to get it fixed. Around this time the lady who hit me starts begging me not to call the cops. A woman comes out of her house and tells me that I have to. I figured I did because there was so much damage. The woman who hit me Kimberly starts to freak out a bit. Please don't Please don't. Of course this makes me pretty damn sure that I have to. So I do.

It takes about 15 minutes for the cops to get there. The whole time she is freaking out. In between begging me to just leave right now and me trying to get her information I am beginning to get a little wierded out. Then she asks me if I can follow her home after the cops leave. Now I am a big old softy and I feel bad for her because her car is just plain screwed so I say yes. I have Saz with me so I am not alone.

Then the story starts. How she is on her way to meet a friend whose mother is in the hospital. Can we give her a ride there too? How her mother just died in her front room and her sister from Virginia is sueing her for half the house. How she just lost her job. All in all I am getting more and more uncomfortable. Finally the cop arrives.

He asks me if I want a report. I look at our cars and say ummm yes. So he takes our information and walks back to the car to fill out the report. This is when I find out that my stupid insurance card is at my house instead of in the car UGH so I get a ticket that he tells me will be easy to fix. It will cost me ten bucks. OK I can deal. But still.. grrrrr. My fault.. must remember it is my fault for not putting it in the stupid car when I got it. Sigh.

Anyway, she ended up getting a ticket too. What for I am not sure.

After much looking to see if her car was drivable for a few miles the cop says yes. She is so thrilled. I just kept looking at the car thinking there is no way in hell I would drive that!

Whenthe cop was done she asked again if I would follow her home. I said yes. At this point the cop looks at me and asks me if I am actually going to follow her. He looked at me like I was crazy. I guess it seemed crazy that some random woman hits my car, gets me a ticket and I am going to follow her home. But I do. When she pulls up into her driveway Saz and I wave and begin to start to leave.

This woman starts running and begging us please stop. So I do. (seeing a pattern of idiot here for me?) Please take me to the hospital. I look at Saz and she looks at me and both of us give a giant sigh and say come on. She gets in the car and proceeds to talk our ear off. Seriously. As we got closer to the hospital she starts telling us another story about how someone rear ended her and she got out of her car to kick her ass. That is when she seemed to become agitated. Things got pretty blunt from her mouth then. Saz and I looked at each other like Oh Oh.

We pulled up in front of the hospital thanking God that this woman was finally going to leave the car. It took her a good ten minutes of talking, cussing and inviting us to a bbq where we could talk about old times before she got out. I swear we couldn't drive away fast enough.

We were silent until we got onto an actual street and then we started to laugh in relief I think.

Un freaking Real

We never did find the next cache. I think we were a little stunned.

YAY the rain is gone

2009-05-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

After what seems like months and months the rain is gone. This means it is back to caching. We can't wait.
Look for posts soon

Our first Winter hunt

2009-01-06T10:40:00.000-08:00

We needed a new nemesis, one of those you lay in bed thinking about, so we went and got one. A four star blankety blank that apparently isn't anything I can touch or see, cause I swear I touched everything. One where you end up with filthy hands from probing every nook and cranny and dirty clothes from laying on the ground in a tantrum. Well, not a tantrum, not yet. It was only our first attempt. Laying on a dirty bridge, yes, reaching as far under the bridge as we could, hoping the trolls don't bite, fending off helpful passersby, hoping they don't call the cops to report escaped mental patients or druggies searching for their stash. This hide has been described as evil, mean, and dangerous. Perfect! I wonder how many tries this one will take?

We found several of the commonly seen types. Teeny magnets under park benches, keyholders stuck to this and that, under pole caps, hanging in trees, at the end of a "geotrail" that many caching shoes have pressed into the long green grasses. We need these as much as a nemesis. It's no fun if you don't find anything but new ways to curse your fellow geocachers. There was one really cute one stuffed into a large snail's shell. It was cold all day long, too. We had a frost advisory the night before so I wasn't surprised to have a chilly morning. I kept thinking it would warm up, but even though the sun was out all day, it never seemed to warm up a smidge. By the time we made each find and got back to the car my middle was chilly and my fingers were frigid. This was our first winter hunt. BRRR!

Hello finally got her dim sum lunch. I never had that so she made the choices and I tried them all. Most of them I really liked. Even the ones that didn't rock my world weren't icky. I'd like to try some of the other stuff I saw. There were so many different things, it might take 10 visits to try them all. However, I'm not eating a chicken foot, Hello, so just go ahead and take that into your heart. Nor the really slimey stuff, the stuff that would make slime go, "EW! SLIME!" I'll ask for a fork next time, too, since I sent some of the food flying and spasticly knocked over my Coke while wrangling my chopsticks. Despite that challenge, I was absolutely stuffed when we finished.
We took a leisurely looksee in an aquarium shop on the way back to the car. They had the most adorable little green turtles, no bigger than a half dollar. And a weird thing with a sucker on his head that I thought was icky and Hello wanted to pet. That's typical of us. Pretty little nemo fish, a cool stingray, some strange large silver fish with an indescribable expression on it's face that reminded me of an uncle. It was a pretty cool fish, like a shiny silver dinner plate with a loooooooooooong face.
We stopped for coffee and saw a rabbit-eared dog. We loitered outside a small playground, making parents nervous, waiting for them to take their children in out of the cold, which they didn't, so we just went ahead and dug through the bushes anyway and took the looks and questions. We loitered around a train station, waiting for the train to leave with it's fantastically tattooed and hard staring engineer before we began to peer under and over power boxes and climb atop fences.
All micros all day long, so at the last we went in search of a regular sized cache so we could drop off some travel bugs who needed to move on. I was about to climb down a creek bank to look under a bridge, looking it over first, like I do, considering the odds of a broken arm or snake attack, and I saw a huge gigantic spider! It was a monster, right where I planned to step on my way down, HUGE, maybe possessed of poisonous and blood dripping fangs.....no wait. It's plastic. Yeah, the cache is under the bridge. So we dropped in our bugs and stuffed a bunch of fun little toys in it as well, left the spider where he sat, and about called it a day.

The things we do for a smilie

2008-12-12T11:40:00.000-08:00

During our last hunt we ended up searching for a cache that was located in a childrens park. If you were unable to get the cache due to children (there were a million of them!) you could take a certain picture in order to claim the find.

So here is that picture lol
I SWEAR TO YOU SAZ YOU DO THE NEXT ONE OF THESE!

Two Weekends Two Hides Part two

2008-12-12T11:37:00.001-08:00

After moving the cache to the back of the sign in our middle finger move we decided it was time to go caching some more.

We started off close to home at a park I could have sworn there were no caches in. Reading the description it said the cache was magnetic. So that of course sends your mind and eyes looking for metal right? Well we learned a lesson on this cache. Just because the description says magnetic the cache may not be stuck to metal. After walking around a light pole for a few minutes and probably looking like crazy women we found the darn thing in a tree. *rolls eyes

The log was completely full. So we wrote as small as possible to sign.

Now can I just throw a complaint out here. These tiny tiny logs that are smaller then the tip of a pen are a pain in the rear end. You try to sign as small as possible but sheesh!

The next cache we set off for said it was in plain sight to a geocacher but a muggle wouldn't see it. So we end up at this pretty little bridge and proceed to look for something in plain sight. Of course we don't see anything. So we start looking like the geocachers we are. And we find it.

How anyone can say that a cache hid under a bridge is in plain sight I am not sure.

We hopped in the car and went for the next one. So there we are standing on a sidewalk looking around for something we should be able to see since we are not suppose to step off the sidewalk and of course we see nothing. This in case you were wondering is a cactus hide. Originally it was not in a cactus but over time the cactus grew. Plants do that you know... Something to remember when placing hides lol. We spent WAY longer looking for this thing then we should have.
You would laugh at Saz and I. We just have not got stealthy down at all. Here we are on the sidewalk trying to move prickly plants around and here comes a muggle. So what do we do in our attempt to look like we are doing nothing? We sit down on the sidewalk. OK two random women sitting on the sidewalk is perfectly normal right. *rolls eyes again

We did end up finding a great camoed hide. Of course the top was no longer connected to the box. We left a note saying this and I noticed a few other notes saying the same thing. That is to bad it is a good camo job.

We hop back in the car and drive to this cute little random park. Isn't it great how geocaching shows us all of these little out of the way places!
We get out and start looking for a "easy micro"
Right! We search and search and search. Nothing. Not even a wiff. Is there a clue? Nope. More searching. Did I mention that we had to tromp through freaking ivy to do this search? We hate ivy!!

Needless to say this was our first DNF of the day. Sigh. And on an "easy micro" UGH

After a short drive we came to our next cache location. What a cute park! We started to walk into it and watched so many cute little squirrels playing in the middle of the field. There were tons and tons of them. So of course I have to go try to see if one will come up to me. There was this bushy black one that was way to cute.
Suddenly a totally camoed cat leaps up and runs away.
Saz and I saved the squirrels today!! LMAO!!!
We did end up finding a camoed cache too. But I think the fun for us was walking through the field with tons of squirrels.

Our next search had a mystery involved. It talked about a lady. Here let me get you the search page....

After finding the cache, look for the Lady. I see her as I drive to the freeway and wonder why she is there. From the cache site you can ponder her existence. Feel free to tell us in your log why you think she is there or what purpose she is serving. I placed the cache across the street from her so that we don’t bother the nearby business.

After searching in circles... we seem to be doing that lately lol... we found a great cache. This sucker was in plain sight. Seriously. This cache was right there in the open but your eyes would just pass over it. We were amazed at the almost perfect camo job on this one.
Here is the story I came up with about the lady lol
So once there was a woman named Ann. She lived back in the days when there were no asphalt roads only dirt. Her fiance was to meet her at this very spot in a stagecoach. Ann waited patiently all that day. But he never showed. Ann being in love and patient and understanding that stagecoaches cannot be hurried if they have a broken axle or something like that came out every day for the week after he was to arrive. He never came. Ann became increasingly worried and continued to come out every day at the same time. Months would go by before word came that her fiance had died in a accident in route to her. Ann continued to come and wait every day after the news much to the dismay of her family. She refused to eat and after a month or so died herself.
This is a tribute to her love.
(totally made up but what I saw when I saw the lady lol)

By now it is getting dark. DARN these short days!! Totally messing with our geocaching mojo.

We decide to go look again for a micro we had previously DNF on. We knew exactly where it was suppose to be but couldn't find it the last time. This time however we had it within 2 minutes. We walked over and watched the dogs playing in the dog park and called it a day.

ARGH moving one of the hides

2008-12-05T16:50:00.001-08:00

We placed this really neat cache in an alley in town. There are high fenced yards on either side with power lines above. It's a utility type space. The bigger ones are filled with nice grass and trees for park use. This one is small, a walkway really from one neighborhood to the next. It has no trespassing signs but I'm sure it gets regular foot traffic. There is a bus stop at one end and a grassy park at the other. I think these signs have more to do with limiting liability than keeping people from walking through. We hid a cache in there just beyond this sign:

One cacher bitched about it being in a no trespass area. Others said it was fine anyway and most didn't even mention it. It's up to the searcher to decide if they want to go in after a cache anyway. If you don't feel comfortable, you don't go. Everyone is responsible for him or her self. Well this one nagging guy wouldn't let it go. So we agreed to move it. What do you suppose he thinks about it now?

Here are the caches we hid. CLICK pictures to see full view

2008-12-05T16:45:00.001-08:00

I can't get the stupid pictures to post the whole thing. Click on them to see the whole view

Two Weekends Two Hides Part one

2008-12-05T16:39:00.000-08:00

Saz and I started out the first day hiding two caches. One was a log that we made and the other was a real root ball that we drilled a hole in and put a micro container inside. We then proceeded to go on a hunt! We started out at a pretty school that had a exercise area and that is where we were heading. Seems my gps is a little grumpy with me lately so she wouldn't get the correct coordinates. We ended up looking at the clue and still searching for quite a while. But find it we did!

As we placed the second hide in it's location there was a cache we have tried to get to twice all ready. For some reason muggles love to sit right where we needed to go. BUT!!! Saz and I have discovered we have super powers. A sort of anti muggle device I guess you could call it. We walk over and loiter. The muggles seem to scatter fast when we do that LMAO!!!

Today though we didn't need to do that. The park was empty. After many comments about the young police officer that lost his life and the statue was dedicated to we found the cache. This thing was in plain sight!

It amazes Saz and I how many of these things are honestly in plain sight but people don't see them. That hidden around everywhere are these tiny treasures just waiting to be found. Amazing.

We tried to hide it a tad better but it was kind of hard to do.
The next cache we tried again had my gps fighting with me. We ended up walking in some kind of giant circle before we found the cache. At one point Saz was under a tree and she pointed down and said look at this bug. I came over to look and they were freaking EVERYWHERE. Needless to say we took off quick since these weren't your average bugs!

We sometimes don't look before we leap. So I had printed off a bunch of caches for us to go to without looking at difficulty or terrain. Lucky for us the next cache was easy on the terrain!!!
So there we are standing in the middle of a beautiful tree minding our own business getting frustrated when we hear "Find it yet?" I yell back "no!" Then he said something along the lines of this being a difficult one about a three rating.
Saz and I looked at each other and went oh crud.
Then the gentleman left for a run up the pretty mountain. Leaving Saz and I wondering what in the heck.
After searching for a while longer we decided we needed the clue. *shakes fist* Some clue.

Regardless we did find it. It was one of those things where you are looking at something else when an item comes into focus. A freaking pine cone in a pine tree. UGH
We ended up leaving a note on the guys window. LMAO

After I got home I logged our finds for the day and proceeded to enter in the coordinates for the two new caches we placed. They were accepted right away!! It was a shock. Not only were they accepted right away someone found the first one within a little while! It was kind of exciting because it was his FTF.

Then the trouble started with that cache. To far past a no trespassing sign. Saz and I wondered what they were talking about since we had only seen a no vehicle trespassing sign. So we hopped in the truck and drove over to the site.

You know having Saz live closer to me is freaking GREAT!!!

We drove over in the dark and pulled out our flashlights and of course there is a no trespassing sign. UGH!!!! Turns out the people part had been spraypainted over. So we disabled the cache and decided to move it. Then changed our mind and undisabled it. Got more complaints so we decided to disable it and this time really move it.

However both of us were a little pissed off at this point. Here are these people complaining but they still signed the log. Sigh.

After getting back to the house after having Thanksgiving at grandma's house Saz and I decided to go move the No Trespassing cache and hunt up a few caches for the day. Due to the fact that we were both a little pissy we planned a in your face type of hide. I had the idea to use a magnet to stick to the back of the no trespassing sign. Saz went a little farther and camoed a magnetic key box silver. Turns out the sign wasn't magnetic. But the pole was. I will post pictures in the next post so you can see. We even put a thank you for the hide button inside it to further the thumb against the nose potential. LMAO we are horrible!

Oh are we evil

2008-11-22T21:24:00.000-08:00

*rubs hands together in glee

Today Saz and I hid two VERY evil hides!!! We will post pictures as soon as a few people have found them. OH EVIL EVIL girls we are! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Meeting a fellow cacher in the wild

2008-11-21T14:57:00.000-08:00

Here are few pictures from when we met Foghead in the wild.

Been a while!

2008-11-21T14:52:00.001-08:00

Wow. We hadn't been caching in a month. That stinks, but I moved and spent a whole weekend with that, and I live nearer Hello now so maybe we'll get some spur of the moment caching opportunities.

So she picked me up and off we went. We scouted an area we want to hide one in. We're pretty sure it's far enough away from the cute green snail one we found before. And then we started caching. We spent most of the day in pretty little neighborhood parks. We also found two along a busy street that used to be a creek. The first one was easy to find, so I hid it a little better. The second one was not easy to find. We parked the car and walked to the coordinates. We both knew where it should be, but didn't see it. I forgot to carry the printout with the hint along so Hello had to go get it from the car when we couldn't find it. Still couldn't find it. Darn thing. We turned away from the search spot to ogle this mansion on the other side of the fence. They had a huge pool surrounded by what looked like terra cotta tile, a colorful tennis court....we turned our attention back to the cache and then Hello found it. I swear, it wasn't there a minute ago lol.

We found a good size cache hidden in garlic plants. It was full of tiny crappy things so we filled it up with good toys. Another was hidden near a very nice community pool. It was very hot this day, and not a soul was using the pool. Too bad. Hello spotted the cache right off, but there were two boys hanging out at the nearby picnic table. So we decided to wait them out. It didn't take but a minute or two before they decided to get away from the weird women. I grabbed it down and we filled that one up with good toys, too.

The next coordinates took us to a park with a sculpture. I suppose it's hidden on that sculpture? The one with little girls hanging all over it, playing with their little dolls? Yep. So we plopped down to wait the little girls out, and they ran off away from the two weird women after a minute or two. So we got that one. Poor kids.

We went to a sports park to find a sign only cache. Not my favorite, but a cache is a cache. The coordinates took us to a bench, right next to a green wall, against which a man was kicking a soccer ball as hard as he could. *careful search* WHAM! *cringe* *careful search* WHAM! *cringe*. We gave it a good try but didn't find it. I pulled some garbage out of a bush and threw it out and we went to look for something else.

Okay, you cache hiders you. If you say your cache is not hidden in junipers, but the searcher has to plow through junipers to get to it, you're just plain mean! I got lots of scratches, but I found it. I also hid it much better. The next searcher might lose an eye MWAHAHAHAHA. Oh, excuse me. Ahem. This park did have lots of nice trees. We were a little worried for the cache's safety at first, because the park had been recently attended to and there was a very deep layer of wood chips. If the cache wasn't in the juniper, it may have been woodchipped. But it was in the juniper. Liar.

The last we found was a micro in another neighborhood park, and this one had a playground in it. As we entered, a large flock of geese flew over our heads. They were pretty, and we could hear scads of hummingbirds in the high treetops. They were not bottle brush trees, but it looked like bottle brush blossoms way up there. Whatever it was, the hummingbirds are big fans. The cache was easily found, but not easily replaced. It was one of those tiny little things with a long thin log rolled up inside. Then we played on the swings. Holy crap! After I got going I was afraid I wouldn't stop. I had a lot more momentum working for me now than I did when I was 10. Eventually, I did get off without puking. We played there a bit more, but left when a group of actual children turned up to play.

The last one we tried to find was hard. Walking in, we saw several men walking out, carrying soccer goals. A cute little boy was reaching up as high as he could to get his little fingers under the goal. "I'm helping!" Cute little guy. There were many nearby structures to search, including bleachers. We looked over everything, but were running out of light. So we decrypted the hint and know what to search, but we just couldn't find it. It was getting dark. So, we'll have to go back for that one.

I'm already looking forward to longer days. Darkness at 5pm sucks.

Our first Event of Terror!!

2008-10-20T19:39:00.001-07:00

Saz and I planned a busy day for ourselves on Saturday. We had a workshop we were going to where we would meet some fellow cachers for the first time. We were both pretty nervous about it. We both made excuse after excuse as to why we weren't going to go even though we knew we were going to.
We decided to start the day with a cache we have looked for 4 times already. This one was a 4 difficulty so we didn't feel to stupid not finding it but let me tell you we were getting very frustrated. We pulled up with high hopes. We stood there for a second and looked around the same area we had looked at so many times before. We even walked up a hill to see if we could get a different view. Nothing. I had brought a little mirror and started looking in holes. In one I saw something but moved on for some stupid reason. A little later I decided to go back to where I had seen something. I fiddled around with all kinds of things and nothing. UGH. Then I pulled out this little screw that didn't look like you should be able to pull it out and PLUNK there fell the cache at my feet. Saz and I looked at each other with big eyes and then got a big old grin on our faces. Then I had a moment of panic. How in the hell am I going to put it back. Saz of course came to the rescue and figured it out. We walked away feeling like queens. Now we didn't have to ask for clues at the workshop!!
Our next stop was Child of the Flame Station. That's right!! One of our caches we hid had a baby! Someone who found our cache wanted something in it and the only thing they had was a little camoed container. So they took it and hid it. Sniff I am so proud of our little child lol. Anyway, we followed this pretty trail that had a cute little creek running by it. We got to the location and started looking. Saz was on one side of the creek and I was on the other when I hear "Did you find it yet?" in a man's voice. We said no and introduced ourselves to a fellow cacher named Fogheads and his friend Fran. We got to meet a cacher in the wild!!! A real live cacher whose name we have seen on logs and whose caches we have found. We were actually thrilled. They were super nice people. He found it first and then let us hunt for it. After I found it he pointed out poison oak to us. We hadn't seen it without leaves so we would have ended up grabbing it at some point. Thank God for The Fogheads!!
He also let us know about a archived cache in a old stump that Saz found with no problem!! Go Saz!! Then we parted ways and we headed back to the car. As we got in here comes Foghead telling us to come over here. He had found a letter box cache. We looked at the stamps and signed our names. We then found out we were actually going to the same workshop later. We said our goodbyes and left for the next cache.
This one was closer to home. In fact I had seen it pop up right when it was activated and had Saz lived closer to me I would have made her go with me to get it. It would have been our first FTF hunt. But she doesn't. YET!!! Saz is moving closer to me! I cannot tell you how freaking happy I was as we drove to her new apartment to put the down payment on it. I swear it is less then 10 minutes from me. WATCH OUT CACHES!!!
The cache we drove to was actually between our houses. As we drove up we saw a man in a worker's vest and a hard hat. We snickered a bit because it was totally obvious to us that he was looking for the cache. What are the odds of seeing two people in one day at two seperate caches. But he left before we got to it. After a little searching around we finally found it. We giggled at the fact that we did since it was a little bit harder then normal. We hopped in the car and drove to the bank for that downpayment and as we drove back by that cache we just found there were three people looking for it. I had to honk the horn because I am bratty that way lol.
Now it was time for the workshop! This was our first event. It was a workshop to teach us how to build sneaky caches. We drove up and noticed that there was no parking. That is when we started to get a little nervous. Then we saw the house. OMG we almost had a fit. There were tons and tons and tons of freaking people standing all over that yard. We drove by still looking for a parking space and looked at each other in horror. I guess neither one of us is into crowds. We gave ourselves a pep talk as we got out of the car and headed towards the big group. As we walked up I told Saz that she was doing the talking. Now... normally I can't shut up and Saz doesn't do a lot of talking. That totally works for us. However when I told her I wasn't talking she didn't take me serious until about 20 feet from the event when she asked me a question and I said nothing. She gave me a look that would have peeled off my skin. I laughed and told her not to worry...sort of. Why? Because as soon as we got in that group of people I turned shy and quiet. Abnormal for me but that is exactly what happened.
We took the sodas we brought to the backyard and started to try to mingle. We kept sneaking peeks at everyones name tags. Oh didn't I mention that we had to wear name tags? It was kind of nice to put faces to names we have only seen on logs or caches we hunt for. Saz ended up buying me a really cool flashlight that has this long antenna like thing with a magnet on the end. She got herself one too. We also got a few little cache containers and a few garbage bag things. After about a hour we decided to sneak the heck out of there. I couldn't handle not talking and Saz probably didn't no how to handle me not talking lol.
Then we were off for the next cache. They had set up a few caches around the area for people to find during the event. We went to the closest one and it took us way to long to find. And of course while we were searching a cacher and his daughter walked by to go to the store. Lucky for us we found it super fast after that. Off for the next hidden one for the event.
We parked the car and started looking around this electrical box. So we searched and searched and looked and finally found it. We signed the log and got in the car to go. As we pulled away a group of about 15 people from the event come around the corner. We were so damn happy that we found that before getting busted by all these people who have like 5,000 or 7,000 finds. We would have been mortified. We did wave to The Fogheads in that group as we drove away.
We then headed back to a cache that had been muggled the last time we looked for it. Although we knew this time it was there. Can I tell you what an easy find that was LMAO!! After we found it we walked across the park to get another one in the area only to have a group of hoodlum teenagers sitting exactly where we needed to go. So we left that one for later.
We then headed to another area of the park that we needed to drive to. This one we searched high and low for. We couldn't find that one to save our lives. Turns out it was not there. *mental note to self: read farther down then one log to see what's up
Another cache we went to we ended up in a neighborhood that had a fence. Of course it was on the other side of the fence so we had to drive around the street and pull into a store. Once there we had to shhhhhh break into a giant fence only to figure out it was on the other side. We decided it was in the bushes and started to hunt. Nope.. then we decided it was on the fence and even though it was it still took us way to long to find that darn thing!
Our next cache led us to a beautiful rose garden. It was that beginning of twilight time so everything was so darn beautiful. We walked up to this old closed down building. Not a run down building but a building you almost would expect them to open the doors wide open and invite you in. We searched for a bit and then found it. It was a wonderful peaceful place.
The next one was a little different. We walked into a large grove of trees and had to search through there. Harder then it sounds. We LOVED the container though. It was a bell pepper made of ceramic I think. But it was totally clever and it gave us a laugh.
We thought we could squeeze one more in before dark. But when we got there it was almost full dark. And we were blocked by a stupid fence. That didn't stop Super Saz though. She actually got down on her belly and shimmied under and through a fence with her new super flashlight. She gave it a great effort but searching in the dark with a flashlight just didn't work this time. We have to wait two weeks until we can go again. I am looking forward to it.
Look for pictures tomorrow!

A geocaching milestone

2008-09-21T19:10:00.001-07:00

Hello and I want to place some really evil and clever hides. There's a masterful hider here we are going to visit next month to learn some cammo tricks, and there's a trailhead micro we've tried to spot three or four times already and we just can't see it. So this day's hunt was all about micros. We found a whole pile of them and learned about some new containers and placements. We have a big tackle box full of fun swag and, even though we were going for micros today, we filled our packs up with trade goodies. Mine was completely empty and that just doesn't feel right, so I crammed in as much as I could. It was as full as it could be and it turned out to be very naughty swag.

Neither of us are morning people, so we only catch a couple before we are ready for lunch. We hunted for one in a huge empty parking lot, empty except for a cop sitting in his car smack in the middle of the lot. We print out the hides we are looking for, and I had it in hand while Hello worked the GPS, so we were prepared to explain ourselves. Despite lurking in and out of the bushes (and getting poked in the eye) he paid us no mind and Hello found it as I rubbed at my eyeball. I forgot my sunglasses and haven't found the safety glasses I want for my pack yet. It was a funny hide, under a cammo'ed container and set in a rat trap! We went for another and didn't look long before I had to pee. So I went to use the bathroom and Hello found the cache. Oh good, says I upon returning, where is it? She made me look for it. Mean thing. So I found it for myself and we chatted with a cute little black squirrel and then we went to find one placed in memory of a fellow who passed away this year. I read the hide description as Hello drove, and we park and (of course) hunt in entirely the wrong area. A young family walks by. "Mommy, what are they doing in the bushes?" asks the little girl. "Looking for their ball", answers mom without missing a beat. I bet that little one asks LOTS of questions. We got covered in ants and spent several minutes ewwwwwing and brushing them off each other. Hello tried to get a butterfly to sit on her finger, but they all had attitudes and wouldn't cooperate. There were about a hundred of them, and one fully grown muggle hopping up and down like a kangaroo. What the hell? Dork. We eventually find the cache. Rest in peace, Fred. Then we head off for lunch. We have japanese food and lavendar tea, use the tree filled bathroom and off we go again.

We found many clever hides, new styles, and as we hunt I am thinking up evil hides with my newfound knowledge. I haven't come up with anything really horrible yet, but I will. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Hello has two evil ideas already, but it's a secret. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! We want to stump one of our longtime local cachers, who hasn't been impressed at all with the few hides we've placed and leaves us teasing logs. In fact, we were going for our 100th find today and we wanted to make it one of his so we could tell him how boring it is in the log to commemorate it. We're a bit snarky. LOL.

A cute green snail was sitting on a cloaked cache stuffed into the bark of a redwood tree. There were many cute snails in there, so I carefully removed and replaced the tiny cache. We also visited another local cacher's house. We're not crazy about residential hides. Whispering, quiet voices, eyes darting around, peering into the yard of the wrong house, quick grab and replace and then getting the hell out of there. I act and feel like a creep. I can see why the burly men who cache alone make some folks nervous. We're not even a little bit scary looking, crazy maybe with leaves and twigs in our hair, but we laughed about what the neighbors must be thinking. Peeking through their curtains, dialing 9 1 and waiting for us to do something before pressing 1 again. We finally find the clever hide, admire a yard full of birdhouses, and get the hell out of there. As we're driving along to the next, I pull my cell phone out. Mostly to make sure I still have it. I forgot to move it out of the meshy front pocket to an inside zipper pocket and as I have it in hand to move it, I realize it's making a call. In fact, it's calling Hello!

"I'm calling you."

"You are?" She pulls out her phone. Ring ring. "You are! Hello?", she answers. Ha ha.

I hang up the phone and it immediately calls her again. Ring ring. I hang it up and it calls her again. Ring ring. WTF? My phone is haunted. Then I realize what's happening. My ear piece is somewhere in the swag stuffed pack, and something has pressed the on button long enough to connect it, and now it is repeatedly dialing the last number I called with it. Ring ring. I hang it up. Ring ring. We're cracking up as we make our way to the next hide. Ring ring. I'm poking at my pack to try and move the naughty bit of swag that's pressing on the autodial button. Ring ring. Holding the phone so I can hang it up. Ring ring. Ring ring. Ring ring. We get to the next spot and I dump out my pack, find and disconnect the ear piece and place it in it's own little pocket, and off we march to catch our next find. Woo hoo! A creek trail. Do you know you just called me twelve times? Ha! Oh shit, it's directly on the other side of the creek. Wait. We've been over there. We climbed on that brown grate thing, didn't we? We already got that one! Crap. How did that happen? Oh well. The next cache we try is near the same creek, and Hello is triumphantly waving it over her head almost before I've unassed the car. I did the same thing at a large parking lot for commuters. I grabbed something funny and there it was and got a look as I held it up for her to see. Of course a bus came in right then and 40 people got off. Another sent us to "where the old people live". I thought the "old" was a trifle unnecessary....until we got there. Now we think it should be changed to "where the grumpy old people live". I don't think we've ever been scowled at so much.

It's getting late in the day and some clouds have moved in to filter out much of our sunlight, so it's time to get that 100th and we're composing the teasing log we are going to post and giggling on the way there. As soon as we reach the trail entrance, we suspect that we've found this one already, too. Hoping it's only familiar as part of a series in this large hilly park, we head in, but nope. We hunt it down and we did already find it. Crap. Well, we saw two black tail deer and got a mini hike and we've got just enough light to hunt the nearby trailhead micro we've had trouble with. It's rated a four difficulty, so not finding it doesn't make me feel stupid, but I sure would like to get it. All we learned this day about micros did not help, so we gave it up and debated whether to ask for a hint, or try again when we've got more experience. I vote for a hint. Damn thing. I wonder what it is?

101 FINDS! WOO HOO!!

Pictures Pictures Pictures

2008-09-15T19:03:00.001-07:00

A hunt and a Hide

2008-09-15T19:02:00.001-07:00

Saz and I decided to go geocaching Saturday. We also decided to hide another cache. So while I was waiting for her I loaded up the ammo can and got everything ready for our trip.
Sazy came over and we hopped in the car with the ammo can and drove off to where we did the death hike the last time we went out. I had printed out all of the other caches around it so we would have an idea of where they were so we wouldn't have the you are to close to another cache problem again.
We hiked up the side of a mountain in between two caches, climbed up below a huge tree and climbed a steep incline to put the cache up on a ledge. As we walked back down all covered in dirt and leaves we looked at each other and decided that we were going to be told to move it again. But we kept on going and found a tiny little cache at the front gate.
This time we took lots and lots of pictures.
We were off then to find one right by it in a park that we thought was called Miracle Mountain. Up we climbed thinking we were going the right way only to find out we weren't. So down the hill we went seeing what has become a staple of our caching days. A kitty. This time the kitty wanted nothing to do with us. To bad because I love a good kitty lol.
We finally arrived at the spot and started looking. And Looking. And looking. We decided we needed to look at the clue. Not a live oak. What? Saz and I looked at each other and thought we have no idea what a live oak is. We poked around a bit more in the multitude of different oak trees and got pretty frustrated. At one point I got a long stick and started pointing at trees. Is this a live oak? Saz say I have no idea maybe it is a scrub oak. Is this a live oak? While pointing at another tree. I have no idea. Is THIS a live oak? While pointing the stick up in the air at yet another kind of oak tree. Then Saz goes HEY there it is! Take a look a the picture. We were darn lucky to find that guy. We opened it up and had to remove some crud. Like a splenda packet and a golf ball with a gouge out of it. Who puts stuff like that in a cache?
We hopped back in the car and headed back over towards the cache we had tried to find when I lost my cell phone the last caching trip or so. It had been almost dark when we started searching and our minds weren't on the hunt so we had to take a do not find. This time however we found it! Along with tons of cute squirrels playing "OH my god I hope I don't die when I make this jump" at the very tip tops of these giant redwood trees.
We felt much better after finding it!
The next stop was Vasona park. Of course the stupid lady in my GPS thought that we should be searching on the freeway but we drove around and around until we figured out that it was in the park. We paid our six bucks to get in, parked and set off on foot. There were two in the park so we carried our little packs.
Did I mention we look cute with our little backpacks?
On the way to the first one we heard an ice cream man. There is something about Ice Cream Man music that brings out the little kid in people. Before I knew what had happened I was happily walking along with a missle pop lol.
Pretty soon after getting the ice cream we found the first cache tucked away behind a tree. By now we are pretty happy with ourselves since we have found all of the caches we have searched for. We then headed off towards the next one in the park.
We had to cross over this pretty bridge and then hike around the lake a bit. We found the spot and started searching. This should be easy after all it is a ammo can. Well we searched and searched and searched. Finally we found it under a pile of pine needles. Sneaky caches today YAHOO!
Inside that cache I found the best gargoyle statue. I was freaking excited since I collect them. LOVED IT!!! We filled the cache back up and put it back.
We tend to do that. Take a empty cache and fill it back up with goodies. We figure we would want to find a full cache why not let the next person be happy. We are happy cache fillers lol.
After heading back to the car we came across a whole bunch of geese. Of course I wanted to pet them and Saz wanted to take pictures. She even snapped a picture right before one bit me lol.
We hopped in the car and drove up up up up this windy road to find the next cache. We parked the car in a very expensive area and started down a lovely paved walking path. Nothing at all like we are used to. We are use to gravel or dirt. I guess having money has it's perks. We ended up at this beautiful little bridge with a tiny bit of water running under it. A nice surprise since it is high summer. It took just a few minutes to find the cache. We had a good laugh reading the log book since it said things like.. "there was five of us and it took us over 30 minutes to find it". We wandered back up the pretty trail to the car and headed out for the next one.
We had to sneak through a fence and wander around under power lines to make the next find. We have decided we hate power lines with their crackle and snapping and buzzing. At one point on the trail two huge dogs come out of no where towards us. We had that moment of OMG run before we saw the owner. Like Saz and I could out run dogs LMAO!! We found it inside a fence pole. We have found a few of these but we were kind of shocked when we pulled it out and it was HUGE. Filled with aliens.
By now it was getting to that stage where it is almost dark. Where you are not sure if another hide will put you in full dark or if you can make it. We decided to go for it.
Again we ended up in a fairly affluant neighborhood with a pretty little paved trail. Of course off of the paved trail was a not paved trail where we found the cache. We then decided to go to the next one which was only .1 miles up the road. After getting that one we hopped back in the car to go home but instead ended up at a party store buying more swag to fill our cache bags and cache tackle box up. Yes we have a tackle box filled with swag.
When we got home I entered in the new cache and logged our day's finds. We waited for a little while and then BAM DENIED!!
ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
You are 37 feet to close to another cache.
Funny thing though this time we were ok with it. The next day we made a quick run back and climbed our butts up a rock cliff thing and up a mountain and moved that sucker.
Got home and put it back in with the new coordinates. It was accepted and posted!!! We have our first finder who seemed to like it a lot too.
I am going to post pictures from our outing in the next post since I can't figure out how to put them in where I want them.
I am looking forward to our next cache hunt and hide!!!

Went for a Cache ended up at a Willie Nelson Concert

2008-09-09T15:33:00.000-07:00

Hellolost's version:
After spending all day in a seminar I arrived home early. It was 103 so I changed into a tank top and a pair of capri style pants for the concert. I was getting pretty darn excited even though it was only 3:45 and the concert didn't start until 7:30.
At around 4:15ish Sazy calls me and tells me she is only 15 minutes away
She comes in and we leave pretty much right after. We even printed a cache to go visit. Of course on the way to the concert we notice that the terrain is a 3 which would include climbing up a hill in a 103 degree heat so we think forget it.
Saz drove since we would be going home in the dark on a windy road and I don't see very well in the dark. As we drove up the hill I was turning into fan girl. You know those screaming crazy girls.. I have that potential when it comes to Willie Nelson.

The first thing we decide to do is eat. We walk up a tall set of stairs and decide on what we want. I send Saz to go get us a seat in the shade while I order. Two sandwiches, 2 bottles of diet coke and a piece of cheesecake cost $41 In line though there was a semi friendly man in a giant cowboy hat to chit chat with.
After sitting down who should come sit at our table? Our new little buddy Mr. Cowboy hat. We struck up a conversation for a while and then Sazy looks right at him and asks......."Couldn't you find anyone to talk into coming with you?"

He looks at her and points at her.

The rest of dinner goes pretty well and then his phone rings at which point I (miss PMS) say "hey that must be the girlfriend calling bummed out and wanting you to come get her right?
My turn to get pointed at.
We leave the restuarant and head down to the smoking section where we proceed to laugh ourselves silly over people. People in santa hats. People in bright green socks. A woman carrying a 5 year old in a baby carrier on her back. Hats. boobs. shoes. Anything and everything including security guards. I had tears in my eyes from being such a world class bitch.
Then who should we see walking down from the restuarant? Our new little buddy Mr. Cowboy hat.
He points at both of us and says. "hey! there are the troublemakers."
We decide we should go potty at this point and walk through the crowd of people. All kinds of people. All walks of life. We spent a lot of time showing each other our types.
<---likes vampires
Saz----> likes wrestlers
After we found the bathrooms we decided to look at our seats. At which point I was going into excitement overload. We were sitting so close!!!!! CLOSE!!!!!
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
The opening act was a little girl ok ok she was about 20 or so in a little yellow dress and a man on a two necked guitar. She had a pretty voice but please shut the hell up. At one point I turned to Saz and told her I had a mental image of her accidently swallowing a fuzzy. A little while later she accidently swallowed a bug LMAO!!!
After she sang there was a brief intermission where we ran up the mountain of stairs and bought a cup of wine for me. $8 Then we went and had another smoke and bashed more people. The bell rang and we went back down the stairs and to our seats to see Willie.
When he came on stage I was so freaking thrilled. He looked good. He sounded good. I wanted to dance. The woman in front of me wanted to dance. We did dance a few times. I made Saz dance too lol.
At one point in the concert the guy in front of us lit the biggest joint I have ever seen in my life. He would blow the smoke straight up but it would come straight back down and go down his aisle of people. The lady three seats down ended up with her head on her honey's shoulder after a while lol.
There was a point in the concert where a disabled man walked down to the stage and put his hat down in front of Willie. Willie took off his bandana and gave it to him and put his hat on and sang two songs wearing this guys hat. They then returned it to him a few songs later. me----> boooooo hoooooo
Also at one point they had people going up to get autographs. Sazy is like "let's go you know you want one."
Me----> :O I will pass out.
Sazy grabs me and we start going down at which point of course the autograph session was over
After the show we waited for the mad rush to be over and I bought a willie shirt Whiskey River with his autograph.. well not a real one but still
We hopped in the car and I didn't get home until about 11:20. I couldn't sleep at all!!!
It was the best good time

Sazy's version
It was great. We got everything we went for.

Found it easy, parked easy, and were in line to enter just before the doors opened. Then we walked around the arena and looked at the food carts and t-shirt shack and then headed up to the grill to have dinner. We had italian panini sandwiches and onion rings and cokes at a large table. A dude joined us, sitting all alone. He heard us talking and joined in. He was nice. I asked him, "Couldn't you talk someone into coming with you?" He said nope. The woman wouldn't come. About the time we finished eating his cell phone rang. Hello says, that's her! Tell her she should have come. I said, tell her you just had dinner with two hot women. We left the grill and when we ran into him later, he said "There are the troublemakers!" We laughed at ourselves quite a bit over that guy. I don't know why, a tad giddy maybe. We were at the Willie Nelson concert! We watched people for a bit too. There was one guy in the shiniest flashiest clothes I'd ever seen on a man, with his goatee dyed to match his shiny flashy yellowy orange shirt. Then I think we went to go pee.

We went to our seats, which were awesome. The warm up chick was a slip of a 20 year old girl named Pricilla on acoustic guitar with a very bored looking Gus on the double neck. He really only chirked up when they played a song they wrote together. She also played a harmonica or kazoo, both of which I would have gladly stuffed up her ass if we were just a tad bit closer. She was a bit annoying with banter that everyone laughed at, I think, because it was just silly. I don't know. We abused her a bit to ourselves because it was fun LOL. After she finished her little set of love songs from a 20 year old's point of view (something about how her boobs are poems - I don't know) they asked her to play two more. Oh no! Willie's dead! SHUT UP! LOL Hello was afraid he'd die before he got on stage. I liked both of these last songs better than her actual set. The first was funny (elephants don't associate with fish, just in case you didn't know) and the second was a simple ballad that really showed off her pretty voice and didn't have any squaking in it.

Hello usually has to be the driver to things like this, so she doesn't get to have a drink. Since I was driving, part of the plan was for her to have a glass of nice wine for Willie (hell, we were at a winery). She sampled the offerings and chose one. I'm one of those, not having a drink is easy. No problemo. Not having a second one is hard. So I stuck to coke so I didn't have to tell myself "no" all night long. Then we hung out until the bell rang, which I think was a 10 minute warning but I'm not sure about that. Then it was Willie time.

He was fantastic. He looks great, he sounds great. We were close enough to see exactly what each musician was doing. I spent time watching their hands, watching the bass player shake his ass, the flashing lights, the lights and shadows zinging on the cut stone and vine covered building they played against and the craziness of the crowd and being surrounded by the good honest music. Willie on his guitar, a bass guitar, a piano, and a snare drum. And of course the obligatory guy who shakes a tambourine and whacks sticks together. He went from one song to another without hardly a breath in between. I was in complete sensory overload. It was surreal. I thought concerts affected me that way because I was always stoned before. Guess not. Huh. There again, a guy in the row in front of us sparked the biggest doob I've ever seen and sent billowing clouds of it over the section. Hello and I sniff at it hopefully, and laughed at the older lady who ducked her head.

He really, really was good. His sister played piano, his daughter joined in on an encore and she really, really sucks.

We spent what we brought to spend and still had a few bucks left. It took hours for me to key down to sleep.
Leaving the venue, we got lucky I think. Our line was the only one moving. There was a bus a few cars back and it might have been Willie's. Anyway, getting out was no trouble and it's usually a lot of angry people just sitting around.

We get to the bottom of the winery and I can't remember whether to go left or right. I decide to follow the guy ahead who goes left. Two other idiots follow me. Everyone else goes right.

So, we are in the mountains, right? No street lights, cannibals and coyotes and shit out there in the total darkness. There's woods out there, but I can't see them. It's dark. Darker than dark, but we are driving downhill, not up and over, so I think we'll come down into one of the funny little towns squished up against the foothills. The GPS won't talk to me. I think she lost me. We know very well by now we made a mistake, nothing is familiar. The guy ahead of me knows he blew it too and keeps putting on his left turn signal. Um, there's a canyon there. He does it again. Um, there's woods there. Braking, signaling, I suspect a small amount of panic up there, but I'm not worried yet. We are still going down. We arrive in the same teeny town we entered to go up, but in a different section. Now I am feeling smart about not getting stuck in the middle of hundreds of cars trying to inch through the tiny downtown. Don't feel too smart, Saz. You followed an idiot and got lucky.

Finally we go again! A new hide and a death hike

2008-08-31T17:11:00.000-07:00

Hello took me geocaching yesterday! Yay! I had started threatening to go without her, and I knew she wouldn't stand for that. So off we went.

Hello had a cache in the car ready to hide, and an idea where to put it, so that's what we did first. It was a funny bushy parking lot, sort of odd and all alone. We looked over all of it. One corner kind of stunk, another was full of thorny blackberry bushes, a dog turd guarded a likely spot. At least I hope it was a dog turd. That was the best spot, though, so the turd wary will just have to deal with it.

We went to a historical part of the big park-like cemetary to grab a cache. We had explored this part before without coordinates, just because we were already there. Hiding a cache. Poor little cache. Anyway, Hello found it pretty fast and then we went to lunch.

I'm not real adventurous about food. I'll try almost anything once, though, and we decided on dim sum. I was warned that I might be offered a chicken foot, but that I didn't have to take it. You know, if I were really hungry, and that's what I had, I would eat the chicken foot. But the truth is I've got a few extra meals stored around my middle and I can get along really well without it. Chicken feet are totally unnecessary, and I can't tell you how grateful I am for that. The GPS says the nearest dim sum place is 40 miles away. Awwwwwwwwwwww. We went to The Elephant Bar instead and had an awesome lunch. Later we were caching in the downtown area. We had to give up on one after the other because of events at the college and an art show and $20 parking fees. Kind of frustrating. Then we spotted a dim sum place. Awwwwwwwwwwwww. Too late, we're already full of sweet and sour and teriyaki chicken. Maybe next time.

The next few caches we found, no problemo. We started beating each other up a little bit though. I accidentaly got Hello with a stick, she accidentally got me with another, a bush took a bite out of her foot. I dropped a cache in between a chain link fence and a wooden fence. Things weren't going so well. I was wondering to myself if I could get over the chain link fence and stuff myself down there to retrieve the cache. Hello took the more sensible approach and was able to bring it up by reaching her fingers through the links. She's so clever. We parked near a very pretty small residential park and were accosted by a bossy smart mouthed teen holding an ugly little dog. I had just opened the door when she stalked up and informed us that we were not allowed to park there. It's their house and that's where her mother parks. I informed her that we were not on private property, she does not own the street in front of her house. I didn't get hot, but she had a snotty little attitude and I had a few extra hormones I had to hold on to, so I stopped after making my point. I was sorely tempted to tell her to call the cops to complain if she didn't like it and let them tell her a few things. After she finished and stalked off we just sat there wondering how long we should let her stew. I left the door sitting open. Nope, not moving. HA! Take that, snottty little shit. Hello had a few extra cranky hormones, too, so we sat there and let her fuss and fume a bit before moving to a better, closer spot a short ways up. I didn't want to move, but I didn't want the car to get damaged while we were searching out the cache. So we found a pretty pregnant momma cat and the cache, then we got our first little bit of nature.

The next cache was hidden above a little creek. We could hear it gurgling below the bush and tree we were searching. We could see little shadowy fishes and I was thinking about going down there, but it was a sheer drop of something like 20 feet and I had a cache to find. So I stayed put and looked for the stupid nut jar, for about three minutes, then I wandered off to look for a way down to the creek. I can't help it. I was surveying the only likely spot, wondering if it was too steep and too loose to risk a broken arm when Hello came to find me. She decided it was okay and went off down to the creek. I love Hello LOL. So I followed her down and looked all around while she cooled her tootsies in the creek and pointed things out to me. There were many little fishies, a cat in a tree, a rooster was crowing somewhere nearby (keep an eye on your feet dude!), cute little pot plants, old gross socks, a perfectly good garden hose nozzle. Some day I'll remember a trash bag and take the garbage out with me. We didn't get the cache, we wanted the creek more I guess. It was a cute one.

We cached in front of geocacher's houses a bit. I think we've visited three or four of our compatriots. It still creeps me out to poke around in someone's yard, though. It's probably the only type of cache where I truly remember to be stealthy. We had a couple of other things to do, like finding some place to pee and getting into the Hallmark store before closing. So we took care of that and then it was six o'clock. We figured we had at least two hours of daylight left and headed off to see how many more caches we could pack in. Just one, it turned out, as it turned out to be the death hike. Don't get me wrong, I like the caches planted along a game trail on a high hill. I really do, for the sights and the exercise (I'm a little bit stiff today), and we always end up on a least one of these heart pounders. So, we got our death hike at the end of the day. On our way up we saw an old quicksilver mine, two bunnies, some joggers, a bear cave, sweated a lot, appreciated a stray seabreeze that managed to get over the coastal hills, wondered if we would ever remember to carry some water on a death hike. We got to the cache just as the sun went down. After walking about 100 yards way off trail and through a field of big rocks. Rocks that have been soaking up sunlight all day long. You know who likes warm rocks? Cold snakes. I reminded Hello to watch for snakes. We sat to paw through the ammo can (our favorite!), enjoyed the view as long as we dared and then started down while the sky still held some light. There were a few more joggers in the area so I was convinced we had enough light to get back down. Losing light. Is that a snake or a stick? The bear cave is coming up. Losing light. I've got a flashlight. Should we peek in that cave? Um, no. Hello says, if a bear eats her, I should go ahead and run away. Um, no. Did you know we have a serial killer on the loose? WHAT! Well, I don't know where he is but I saw a link this morning that says there is a serial killer in California. Losing light. Crickets singing from every leaf and golden blade of grass. The killer probably isn't up here, but I didn't open the link so I don't know that for sure. How can you not open a serial killer link? I was late for geocaching!

We're half way down and the light is pretty much gone. The sky is a really pretty deep and dark purple and the trail is still visible under it, so I don't bother with the flashlight. I don't want to draw the attention of a ranger who might give me hell for being in the park past sunset. Nor serial killers. Nor mountain lions or bears. It was completely fully inky dark before we got all the way down, and as we were coming down, a young guy was pushing his bicycle up. I thought, what a dork. If his car is on the other side, he should ride around the mountain, not over, in the dark, where there are animals that would like to eat him. Hello says, watch out now. He'll be coming back down really fast. He did. He was just playing, racing down mountain trails in the dark where he knows people are walking. What a dork. We survived the rest of the walk and we were completely used up and pretty dirty. That's how I know I had a good geocaching day, by the amount of dirt I wash off. Frankly, I was kind of dirty before lunch. Hello had to pull some leaves off me before we went in the restaurant, so it was a great geocaching day and our hide was approved and published. A couple of people ran off this morning to try to be the first. One of them was a little concerned about the turd, but went for it anyway. Because geocaching is awesome!

Saz is real too lol

2008-08-06T08:40:00.000-07:00

Here is a quick picture of Saz to prove she is real too. She is standing in front of the easy path of death mountain. Trust me that it is NOT as easy as it looks. About half way up your heart is pounding and you are seeing little spots in front of your eyes.

Our first hide!! SUCCESS Finally

2008-08-05T11:36:00.001-07:00

After the 4th refusal of our hide Saz and I were a little frustrated. Actually Saz was turning into a cranky pants LMAO!

Yesterday after work Saz came back over and we drove to DEATH mountain again to move our cache AGAIN. Now I am Miss Cranky Pants and Saz is fine. We start tromping around the mountain to go do the retrieval. After we had the cache in hand we started walking back to the car when this random man in his backyard proceeds to tell us we are not walking on a path. Umm dude I totally am aware that I am not walking on a path. I think I must have given him the look of death or maybe he heard me call him a fuck head because he never said another word to us.

That did not stop me from pretty much demeaning his manhood for the rest of the walk to the car. At this point Saz is laughing at me…

Seems like when Saz is mad I laugh and when I am mad she laughs. That works!

We hopped back into the car and proceeded to drive to a second published cache on the other side of the mountain in the flat part of the park. We wanted to make 100% sure that we were NOT within .1 miles when we hid this one. Of course we couldn’t check on any mystery caches but we had a tiny glimmer of hope this time.

After judging the distance we hopped out of the car and proceeded to walk around this part of the park trying to find a good location. We scoped out quite a few likely locations and decided on hiding it under this oak tree that is probably over 100 years old. After we placed it we both took steps back and eyeballed our hiding spots for any tell tell signs that we hid the cache. It looked good to go! We took the coordinates. Then turned off the gps and turned it back on and took the coordinates again. See.. we learned from our last time lol. We wrote them down and started walking back down to our car.

At this point we decided to take a few pictures of Saz in front of death mountain since we haven’t shown her yet. Of course after a few pictures the camera dies. When the pictures are downloaded I will add them to the blog.

We drove home and entered the new coordinates along with a OMG PLEASE POST THIS note. Ok it wasn’t as bad as that but it should have been lol. We waited for a while to see if it would be approved but it never happened so we decided to go eat and then come home and check to see if it had been reviewed and rejected YET again.

SUCCESS!!!!!!! WOO HOO!!!! Saz and I actually were so freaking happy we hugged each other. I think we might have actually squeaked out a tear lol.

Saz went home and about a hour later I get a text that says Woo Hoo. We were so freaking happy.

We have had two finds since it was posted. Both happened today. I am so happy that our journey with that cache is over!

Our first hide part 3

2008-08-04T14:07:00.001-07:00

Boy, we had a busy weekend! With a mixed bag of successes and failures.

You may remember what happened to our first hide (disgusting!). The second had to be moved because it was too close to a published cache. No problemo! We measured more carefully and moved the sucker further down the trail. Then it was too close to an unpublished secret cache. So (sigh) we hauled ourselves up the mountain trail again and moved it down the hillside and much further off the trail and crossed our fingers. Then it got rejected for being too close to the first cache we crowded. Actually, we were right on top of it. Oops! We gave the guy the coordinates to the micro we first crowded! LOL

Hello had a family event on Saturday in a community rose garden and I went along, then we went caching afterwards. We found one in a cute neighborhood park, at the far end where there were some christmassy looking pine trees and an awesome cat. We petted the cat and found the cache, petted the cat, petted the cat some more. Hello would have liked to take that cat home but he was collared and tagged and obviously well taken care of, just enjoying some "me" time in the park. We went back up the mountain to retake the coordinates of this stubborn second hide and to try to find another before dark, but had to quit on it for the night. Soon, Hello realized her cell phone was missing. Crap. Could be anywhere. A phone call to the family didn't pan out, we hurried back to the rose garden, no phone there. Now it was full dark and we had to call it an evening and get some food. Hoping for some good news, we checked on our hide. It was STILL too close to that secret puzzle cache. CRAP! It wasn't our best caching day. So, we decided that Sunday would be our day. We'd find the phone, move our cache to just the right spot, and a stubborn Hello baby would be born. His poor momma had been trying to evict him for two days. We were exhausted, so we vegged in front of Finding Nemo and then called it a day.

Sunday we raced off to undo all our failures. No one reported kidnapping Hello's phone from the rose garden. We checked the christmas tree/cat park, no luck. We went to retrieve our second hide and hopefully get far enough away from the secret one (seriously, is this guy hiding his allowance in there or what?). So we haul ourselves up there and retrieve our cache, and what do you suppose is lying right on top of a field of golden leaves, glinting silver in the sun? Hello's phone! I swear to God, it winked at me. Does it work? Yes! HA! Here we go now. Everything is going to be alright. We are going to walk far away from this crappy hillside and plant this cache just right. A woman helpfully let us know there was a five foot snake in the area earlier in the day. "Thank you", I call back. I'm thinking, there's 10,000 snakes in here. Thanks a whole frackin' lot. You've saved my life, seriously. A snake was on the mountain? Did you call SWAT? The National Guard? Hello, get your mace out! Oh yes, I'm getting testy, knock it off. It's going to be approved today and we can spend the last part of the day watching to see if the first to finders come a-runnin' and see if we hid it well enough for the old timers to look confuzzled once or twice. We hide it really well, simply setting it among the natural landscape and camo'd with natural materials. The old timers will be all over it but someone like me is going to curse a little (or a lot) before they end up hands and knees in the dirt and simply pull it out with a relieved grin lol. We send in the new coordinates and go caching. When we come in later to check, we have no approval but we do have a baby! YES! Everything is going to be alright. We go caching, come back to check and, we are still too close to the super secret puzzle cache. Mother........let's say I hit the end of my patience with this cache I have to stay away from but it's location is a secret. What the fudge? We were finally advised just to avoid that whole mountain. Thanks guys.

As I rinsed off a serious amount of dirt, muttering about how this is supposed to be a game and why be so serious and closed mouth about this cache I can't get away from that must contain state secrets or a Honus Wagner card or SOMETHING just too frackin' special to tell me about, I finally remembered to tell myself the same. It's a game. Don't like the rules? Don't play. You don't complain about not being able to find a cache because you like to be in the park anyway. Go get your cache off the mountain and try somewhere else. Enjoy the scenery, fill your shoes with foxtails, be happy.

Meatloaf says "two out of three ain't bad". That was okay for Sunday, but we are going to find the perfect spot tonight. I know it.

The hide part 2

2008-08-01T14:14:00.000-07:00

Saz and I were so excited about our first hides! I wish you could have seen us giggling as we hid both hides. We were so sure that we had to wait 72 hours before they published them and allowed people to look. The website says it can take up to 72 hours.

Imagine our surprise when in the morning we woke up, drove to work and found out that our cemetery cache had been published!! Not only had it been published but someone had already found it!! That started an email campaign back and forth.
“Did you see Rocket girl found it?”
“Yes!!!”

We were thrilled. Refreshing over and over just to see if someone else had come. I told my coworker Tyler about how our cache was published. He has just started caching due to me lol. About 15 minutes after I told him I went looking for him to ask a question. He wasn’t there. I looked for his car and it was in the parking lot so he hadn’t left. I figured he was just in someone else’s office. I sat back at my desk and opened an email from him. The picture you see…That’s Tyler. He snuck out of work to go find our cache. LMAO!!

On and on it went all day. “Did you see!” “Yes!!” We felt like proud parents. I had to go to an offsite meeting and when I finally got home I sat down at my computer and started to read my emails. I was horrified. This is the email I got!
We went to your geocache at the cemetery today. When we got there someone was already signing the log so we drove on and parked a discreet distance away. We saw him signing, and saw him go over to the tree two times...once with the cache (we think). The second time he went to his camper and then returned to the tree. We couldn't see if he had anything in his hands. After he left we drove to the obvious nearest parking location. Before we could get out of the truck a maintenance guy in a white truck drove up behind us, up the curb, and across the graves to the tree. It looked like he has a GPS device. He walked right over to the tree, fumbled around in the large partially covered hole, and seem to hide something in his jacket as he went back to his truck. He drove off, but only far enough away to watch my family wander around looking at headstones. He actually moved his truck, every 5-10 minutes, but was always obviously watching us (not working or anything like that).
Eventually he left. My grandkids went over to the tree to look for the cache. My grandson pulled out a container, thinking it was the cache.
It was about a quart sized jar filled with liquid and brown solids.
It smelled really bad. He immediately put it back, came back to the truck, and we loaded up and left. I don't know if you need to check this one. I don't know if the maintenance guy was just waiting for us to leave so he could return the cache to the location. I have only bad ideas about the contents of the jar. Even if the cache is in the same hole as the jar of putrid smelling stuff I wouldn't dare to put my hands anywhere near it. I don't want to post a public log with this information. I would appreciate some feedback from you to know if we're being duped, or stupid, or not very savvy. I honestly hope the maintenance guy was just waiting for a chance to put the cache/log back in place and our presence stopped him. Wish he had just initiated some conversation so we could have figured it out while there.

OMG!

So I had Tyler run and go check on it. I asked him to email me as soon as possible. Of course the Mr. came home and wanted to go to Walmart. So there I am fretting while in Walmart. I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and called Tyler. He told me it was missing. CRAP! So I told the Mr. that I had to go to the cemetery. That I needed to see. Inside the tree was a “new” container filled with human waste. Someone took our cache and replaced it with human waste! What kind of person does that?

Saz and I were horrified. We also laughed. A lot. I think it was either laugh or cry. .. OR get angry. We decided to be horrified. We also decided that was NOT going to stop us from hiding our next cache.

Did I mention that we were 138 feet to close to a micro to place our giant ammo can? Did I mention that we have to haul ourselves back up a huge mountain to move it a little over 138 feet? UGH.

BUT… we can’t wait to see what happens with our next one. We are excited still. If something does happen to this one though we will turn all the rest of our caches into members only!

Our First Hides!! part one

2008-08-01T13:51:00.001-07:00

After lots of careful planning we were ready to plant some caches. How exciting! I couldn't wait to get one out there so I could watch the seeker's logs. I'll tell you about the hide. Hello will tell you about the "logs". :|

We've been shopping for and planning out our Lost themed caches almost since we started geocaching. We wanted to rack up some experience first so we would have fun and exciting finds for our fellow cachers to enjoy. We finally had all we needed, chose two good spots and got two boxes ready to go, each packed with a travel bug (sending John Locke on his Walkabout was first), an unactivated geocoin for the first to find, lots of cute little toys and games and colorful trinkets. We couldn't wait for the weekend so we ran out after work to hide them.

The first one we placed in a cemetary that Hello visits almost daily for her afternoon walk. We each went back and forth about whether it was okay to plant one there or not, but not for long. It's a really big place, full of huge old trees, beautiful statuary sprinkled throughout, memorials for all faiths, a memorial for the victims of 9-11. You might not expect it to be so, but it really is a nice place to spend some time. Very peaceful, pretty, and park like. There is an older section that is seldom visited. The grave markers from that time period can be ornately carved or serenely simple. I looked them all over, but what's really special about this part of the cemetary is a huge old old tree with a huge hole in it. A really big hole, so big you could climb through it and sit inside that tree if you wanted to. That's where we planned to leave our hide and, after dismissing any misgivings we decided to go ahead with it. We both really like finding ammo cans and we have those ready for our Lost "hatches", but that didn't suit this hide, too heavy, so we packed a tupperware with goodies instead and hung it inside the tree. We also got the coordinates of a spot with a spectacular view and those of the 9-11 memorial to add to our hide announcement and we were very excited about it. Any cachers who weren't turned off by a cemetary hide would enjoy visiting this one.

Then we had a gross Jamba juice. It was advertised as an orange delight, or something similar, but tasted like bananas, which neither of us like. Yucky.

The next hatch was going on a hiking trail we went hunting on a couple of weeks ago. At the time, we both remarked how pretty the area was and how nice the trail was to walk on, so we wanted to plant a hide there. It turns out there are only a few caches here and plenty of room, and there was a micro already hidden near the entrance. When we were here before, we weren't up to hunting micros yet. We've gotten a few now, so we were going to find that little sucker on our way out. We entered the trail lugging our ammo can hatch, hoped the muggles wouldn't call in the bomb squad due to the can, picked a trail and walked off to find the perfect spot. After hauling ourselves up a very steep path, we found the perfect spot just off the path. There were muggles offroading on the other side of the trail but they weren't paying us any attention. So we planted the can, stuffed with Desmond's travel bug (he's searching for Penny), an unactivated geocoin for the first to find, lots of toys, games, colorful trinkets, and pennies. This is another type of hide that I really enjoy, being in little wild spots just steps from civilization. So we left the park very pleased with the placement. We spent maybe half a minute looking for the micro before Hello just walked up and plucked it out of a hinge on the fence. Sometimes I could kick her. Just kidding!

Then we headed back to Hello's house to activate the caches and settled into impatient waiting. We didn't have to wait long. The cemetary cache was approved that night, but the hatch on the trail needs to be moved. It's too close to the micro, so we'll go move it this evening and hope it's approved for the weekend cachers.

And that is the tale of our first hide.

Our first Micro hunt

2008-07-27T12:17:00.000-07:00

Saz and I have spent all of our time hunting larger containers. We were afraid to look for micros I think. And the idea of some super tiny thing with just a log didn't sound appealing. Where was the fun in something that you can't paw through tiny treasures?

Since we are in the process of creating our own geocaches to hide, we only had a half day to search. So we decided to try a few micros and go look at a potential hiding spot for one of our caches. I found it during my daily walk and wanted Saz's approval on it.

Saz printed out a few caches to seek and showed up around 2 on Saturday. We stopped off to get something to eat and then set out on our very first micro hunt. We stopped at a tiny little itty bitty park and began searching. Funny how we noticed two homeless people sleeping away and were still stealthy enough to find the cache shaped like a fish and sign the log without being noticed. Because I live down the street I was kind of disturbed that this little childs park had homeless people in it. If they sleep there during the day every day it finally explained to me why I never ever see children in there when I drive by. That is just to bad.

Then Saz said... Micro's aren't hard. UGH shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh don't jinx us Saz!!

Our second cache was at a library. This one was a little tougher. Thanks Saz! After a bit of searching we finally found it up in a tree. Here is the problem though. We are short! It took some fancy ummm reaching to finally get it down and sign it.

We went to the next one at a school and after searching through bushes for over 20 minutes we realized that we were totally in the wrong place. After moving to the proper area we finally found the cache. Man this one was smaller then the other two but still not what we were expecting.

The next one however knocked our socks off. After walking back and forth along a fence line I spotted this tiny pokadot on the fence. It was the size of a thumbnail. Tiny. Somehow they were able to put this freaking tiny tiny little rolled up paper inside that I was worried to death we would not be able to roll back up after signing. I have tiny hands and this thing was tiny in my hands. Unreal! I hope we don't find to many more of those.

We found another that was just a log sheet attached to a magnet stuck under a bench. We had to wait until a woman got up and left before we could get to it. Not to thrilled with micros....

The last one we found was actually in a playground. I found that kind of odd. How do lone men look when they are searching inside a playground. It was weird enough two grown women searching but I feel sorry for men. It took us playing on the teeter totter and grabbing our inner child for us to be able to find this cache.

So we found all the micros we went looking for. I like the bigger ones better. I like the opening of the container and the excitement of looking at the stuff inside. Micros are fun to hunt but they are missing something.

Did I mention that Saz and I walked through a masoleum? Kind of creepy but fun too.

A dirty sweaty day

2008-07-20T16:26:00.000-07:00

WOW!

We haven’t spent a full day caching like this in awhile. At the end of the day, we were as filthy and worn out as we could be, and Hello brought home a nasty hitchhiker. A TICK! Gross! I’ve been told a large tan tick is a wood tick, and they are not dangerous, but the little dark ones are deer ticks and can make you sick. I don’t want to cover myself in poison, but I don’t want a tick either. I’ll have to think about this.

We missed finding two caches pretty early in the day (found some blackberry bushes and a prickly pear cactus instead), so we had a slower than usual start. We’ll go back to those, but we did find one down a path that used to be a railway. I think my favorite part of caching is finding these funny little areas I’ve only driven past without even noticing. We walked down the old rocky railway bed and Hello found the cache. We took two travel bugs and left a travel bug. We like travel bugs. We also found an apple, but no apple tree, so methinks a cacher left this area a little hungrier than he/she entered it.

We got another one at an ancient entrance to the city college. Parts of the college have been updated to look very modern, but this out of the way area made me remember what it was like when I was a kid. A woman wandered by and offered us some religious pamphlets. She was nice and went on her way pretty quickly. Hello found this cache, too, a really clever hide. She knew where to look as soon as we drove up, but patiently worked the numbers until she got there. We got two more travel bugs. Woo hoo!

We had a nice sushi lunch. Er, Hello had a nice sushi lunch, I had a bento box. They had a strange bathroom, a couple of big fake trees filling the little room and a huge wall mirror facing the toilet. I’ve never watched myself pee while nestled among leaves and branches, so that was something.

I was looking forward to one cache that had birdhouses nearby. It was at one end of a really long, long, grassy park. It was a beautiful, completely empty park. We walked along with our GPSes, marveling that no one was in the park when Hello suddenly stopped. “Listen”, she said. I listened. This park was making use of the strip of land beneath power wires. Those wires were humming and buzzzzzzzzzing in a really unnerving way right over our heads. We got the cache and moved along, and completely forgot to look for the birdhouses. The buzzzzzzzzzzzzzing was really creepy. So we ran off to the next one, which was also under the power lines! This was harder to find. We ended up visiting three different parts of this large park, sort of a giant triangle. The GPS was all over the place. I blamed the buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing power lines for my trouble. We found half of the cache container, the other half and the contents had been kidnapped. This was a really clever cache container. Too bad someone ruined it. But we did see a sculpture with creepy eyes and a nice dog park with a very happy dog galloping along, and another dog had stationed himself outside a hole in the ground and was extremely focused on it.

Then we got into some serious offroading along a hiking trail. We were up and down the trail, up the hill on one side of the trail, down the hill on the other side of the trail, looking for game trails in the long dry grass, collecting foxtails in the shoes and sticker balls on the clothes. A tree grabbed Hello by the head and tried to rip her hair off. I was having trouble picking up any coordinate anywhere and was all over with this one. I really like hunting along the hiking trails and big trees and bushes, but this was a toughie, and we were hot, sweaty, and dirty when we finally emerged with swag in hand. Well, we proclaimed, we got our workout. Then we returned to a previous cache that we missed because it had been muggled the first time. We like to go back for the ones we missed for one reason or another, and then we hit the drive through for giant sodas.

We looked for one near the entrance to my favorite creek trail. It was not on the trail, but on the sidewalk outside it along a very busy street. I climbed over the railing to check the wild side of the wall, but it wasn’t there. Stealth was not possible on the street side so we just gave the whole wall a good looking over, found a benchmark, but could not find the cache or a shred of evidence of one. It’s a really good hide or it got muggled, so this will be visited again another time.

Someone forgot to bring the park pass (that would be me, forgot the camera, too) so we parked outside and walked into a lake park full of BBQing families. How can we cache in here? It’s slam full of people! Following the numbers, we enter the park and then walk quite a ways past the lake, then headed up into the hilly walking trails. Ah ha! We were certainly getting our exercise today! Hello’s GPS took her in one direction and mine took me in another. She was up the trail on one side and I was down the trail on the other side when my giant soda insisted on leaving, immediately. So I moved a little further out of sight of the trail and hunkered down to pee in some long dry golden grass. It tickled lol. I heard Hello holler out so I went back her way and we sorted through the nicely hidden cache she found. On the way down the hill I managed to remove a small stick from my underwear without Hello noticing. She managed to find us a short cut back to the car through a hole in the perimeter fence. She’s my hero.

We ended up on one more hilly park walk. It was beautiful, but I was running out of steam, to be perfectly frank, so I didn’t do much offroading, lol. We got the cache, and it was lovely up there. The valleys are full of smoke from all our wildfires so the view was a bit spoiled. I’d like to go back this fall when a little rain will clean the air up. I’m sure it’s stunning, and the walking paths are in excellent shape. For our final hunt we went back to one we missed before near a music store. We still couldn’t find it. The GPS was having more issues with me. Hello was in one area consistently, and I was walking along one side, then it changed and I ended up on the other, then it seemed to want to go in the store, so I circled around to the front of the building and then it was happy, then the numbers changed again and FRACK I don’t know. I went back to where Hello was searching and before much longer we quit on it. It was getting dark, and we were filthy and tired out. So we went home, showed Mr. Hello our new travel bugs and made a plan to move them along.

I think the power lines scrambled the handheld GPS’s brain a bit, so next time it wants me to wander off I’ll just put it in my pocket and stay near Hello instead. Unless I have to pee.

The rest of the Grandma Trip

2008-07-06T11:59:00.000-07:00

After we found the beautiful winery and grandma got her applause we decided it was time for the second cache. Of course grandma was all fired up now. She figured she could find anything. Saz and I kept quiet because we have learned the hard way that right after you start boasting you have a string of not found caches.
Due to the fact that we were in the mountains right next to a freeway we had a interesting journey. We would be traveling along and it would tell you to make a left... well kind of hard to make a left where a center divider is. But we finally made it to our second cache location.
There was this long winding sidewalk that led down into an old abandoned golf course. There were giant blackberry bushes along the side and every once in a while we would find a yummy ripe one. We walked all the way down hill to the bottom and started our search. Saz found it under a tree under a piece of concrete. Grandma had to hold the container and read the log. She told Saz that she had LET her find it LMAO!!! Then we turned to walk back to the car.
I have no idea how this happens. We walk a leisurely walk and then end up with a monster hill to climb to get back to the car. Grandma, Saz and I looked up and I know all of us thought oh crap! We truded up the hill in the boiling heat and were all tomatoes by the time we finally reached the car. Needless to say we needed full blast air conditioning to become human again.
After a wonderful lunch we continued on to the next one. By now the temperature was soaring. After truding along through mountains of poision oak on every side of us we decided to not look for that one anymore. We were all wearing shorter pants and none of us wanted to catch poison oak lol.
The next one was better. Grandma wanted to stay leaning against a tree in the shade while saz and I wandered down this bike trail in the middle of no where. We were searching for a ammo can. One of our favorite type hides. They hold so much stuff lol. I noticed the GPS said it was up the side of this hill. Well I am deathly afraid of heights so poor Saz had to climb. I'm pointing to areas and she is the mountain goat. When we found it it was so full! So there I am at the bottom wishing I was at the top stareing longingly at Saz with her hands in the Cache. We ended up rescuing a dinosaur TB and a boyscout travel bug and leaving a firefighting travel bug there. It seemed fitting since California is on fire lol.
After taking a while to see if Saz could get down the hill without killing herself we headed our sweaty dirty selves off to the last one for the day. You could see that Grandma was tired. We thought we were going to another winery. Start the day wine tasting end the day wine tasting. Nope. We ended up in a vineyard. I ended up scrabbling along the side of this cliff thing while Saz ended up in some drainage ditch and grandma sat in the car with the air conditioning. The cache ended up being on the guardrail between Saz and I so neither of us actually had to do the mountain climbing in the first place lol.
When we got back in the car grandma kept talking about how she stayed in the car to let us have a chance to find some caches since if she went looking we wouldn't have found any lol.
We had a blast and will be going again down here soon.
Saz just bought her new cache bag so we need to fill that up with stuff and we will be ready. Now... if we could just remember to bring some water lol

2008-07-04T19:03:00.000-07:00

Saz and I decided to take a trip up to Placerville to show my grandmother what "all this caching business" was about. I went through caches within 3 miles of her house and printed out a few that looked fairly easy on terrain and larger cache sizes. Didn't want to bum her out if we couldn't find one lol.
We got up Saturday morning and bundled grandma in the car and entered our first coordinates. She asked question after question. What are we looking for was one of them. How to explain that every one we have found has pretty much been different. So we told her that it will probably look out of place. Quick and easy answer.
What a surprise it was for us to end up on a road neither of us has ever been on before. After all she has lived in Placerville almost 20 years now and I visit her at least once a month.
We followed a small side road and came to a beautiful winery. After Saz and I admired one of the more perfect areas for a cache we started looking with grandma. We got the general area with the car garmin and started searching. There goes Saz off in the distance. Why? no idea. She was no where near the search area.
With grandma and I in the general area we started looking around. Grandma turned to me at one point and said this is frustrating why do you like it. lol. Then she headed off to the other side of the area we were searching. Not 5 minutes later I hear "is this it? it rattles?" As grandma holds up the cache.
Here is where it got so cute. Up in the window a gentleman starts applauding. Congratulating her on the find.
Saz and I never got applauded before lol.
We took the container around a corner and I showed grandma how to open it. She was sooooo thrilled. Talked about how clever it was. I let her take the stuff out of it to look at. I told her she could pick an item to keep. She got a big smile and took a quarter. I put in a geocoin and handed her the bag of goodies we keep with us when we cache and told her to pick something to put in to replace what she took. Now it was my turn to laugh. She had to put a few things in. She was so proud.
We then let her put the container back and walked into the winery where we tasted a few wines. YUMMMMMMM I have got to go back and get that desert wine. Grandma bought a bottle that she said was for celebrating her first cache.
Here are a few pictures.
Grandma first Cache and Grandma and I looking at the log

It's a turtle!!

2008-06-16T15:06:00.000-07:00

Just thought I would share the picture of myself (Hellolost) and a weary traveler we found... And yes it was hot outside.

The hunt of death lol

2008-06-11T19:29:00.000-07:00

There is this hide we’ve spent hours looking for in a very pretty urban park. The dirt ground is swept clean, the redwood trees are awesome, lots of grass – nice park. With a horrible hide in it. We’ve hunted and hunted and left dejected and low so many times. You see, almost immediately after we give it up as impossible, another cacher would find and log about how easy it was. “Walked right up – maybe 30 seconds of looking – thanks for the easy hide!” Yeah yeah. So back we’d go. I find myself pacing the fence line, scanning every square inch of ground, glancing at Hello, hoping for a gesture of excitement. She often had her arms wrapped completely around the pretty redwoods, praying to the tree spirit for help I assume, or weeping quietly to herself. I couldn’t quite tell through my own tears of frustration.
So that’s how we started the day.
Spent an hour with more of the above. Giving each other grim looks as we passed by one another. Lots of innocent muggles in the park today, playing basketball, throwing horseshoes, running on the grass.
Hello says we need a cover story, so we are looking for a tag that fell off the dog’s collar. Okay, works for me! So I am staring up into an oak tree when a man asks me what I am doing. So much for the cover story. I tell him we are playing a game, like a scavenger hunt, and something has been hidden for us to find. He was interested, asked some questions and told me how he came across one in another park. He didn’t know what it was, but he signed the log and put it back. Nice fellow. One muggle educated! That’s a first for us.
An hour later, CRAP! I quit. Let’s go find something else and come back with a fresh point of view. So off we go.
A couple of our hunts today included solving puzzles, which we aced because we are fabulous. We got a couple of hides in town, one of them in a cacher’s front yard! We sat down in his driveway to dig through it. Stealth, thy name is not Hellolost nor Saz. Have to work on that. There was one in a strange rocky park across the street from a garage band. They did not entertain us for very long, maybe a minute or so before they stopped playing some fast metal music that had me bobbing my head. Maybe they were watching us. We got this one after a bit of searching. I got a tiny thorn in my finger, too, that is starting to blister up. It still kind of hurts.
But that was nothing compared to what happened at the bomb site. This cache site really did look like a bomb went off. There was a crater and huge chunks of concrete and twisted metal things and some nice soft looking green plants. Stinging nettles and Hello in open topped shoes!
Ouch!
Ouch!
ACK!
Get some real shoes!
Okay!
Ouch ouch ouch.
In the car and wiping feet with antibacterial wipes. I shouldn’t have laughed, but it was kind of funny.
There is a walking trail near eBay where we found one. Tree cover made nailing down the coordinates hard, but the area was not very large and we got it. We walked around the water district's perc ponds, some we hadn’t been to yet, so that was good. This was a small walk and a clever hide. We saw a lizard here that was about 18 inches long. I thought he was icky – too snakelike. So of course, Hello adored him and wanted to pet him. He ran for it, lol.
Another clever hide was found along one of the prettier urban trails beside a clear and free flowing creek. We’ve been along this creek many times already and it’s one of the nicer places to have a walk to see what you can see. There were two pretty mallards floating in a peaceful tree covered spot, and that’s about all I saw besides hordes of muggles enjoying the trail as well. In fact, as we stood beside the trail to check our location, two bicycles went by and one definitely said “geocachers”.
Gotta work on that stealth bit. Honestly.
We did some hunting up near the famed albino colony of Shannon Road. They may also have been murderous cannibals. There are stories. We looked for three caches along the hilly dirt trail, possibly amongst poisonous snakes and plants. My favorite! The first near the trail head has likely been muggled. We found a movable brick in a retaining wall, behind which was a hollowed out spot that must have been made for a cache. So we went down the trail to catch the second one. We had to leave the trail and Hello spotted the poison plants, so we managed to avoid those. I made some noise with my feet and kicked pinecones and stuff around, no rattling rattlesnake, so we felt free to examine the off trail area and it was found fairly quickly. We were on the upper part of the trail and the view of the south valley below us was gorgeous. We also saw a few lizards, the ordinary short ones that I think are cute, poppies and pink flowers, but no albinos.
The next one was at the bottom of the trail, likely an hour walk down the mountainside, so we hiked back up to the car. Which was parked on top of a steep hill about 300 feet from the trail entrance below. Again. Why do we keep doing that to ourselves? I think it’s a subconscious quest for exercise. So we hauled ourselves up the hill and drove off in search of refreshment. We headed into a rustic area with no water.
Again.
A couple of Big Gulps and we were off. The third cache near the bottom of this trail, we didn’t get it. We might have, we were absolutely in the right spot, but it was also directly on the trail head on a residential street. A woman suddenly appeared in front of a house. When she was not staring at us, she was staring at a bright yellow fire hydrant.
Just absolutely studying it.
It is either the most interesting and coolest fire hydrant in town and she was afraid we’d steal it, or she was keeping an eye on us. Likely the latter, so a bit creeped out, we left this one for another day.
We finished the day with our old nemesis amongst the redwood trees. Pacing, muttering the hider’s verses, hoping for a lightening bolt of inspiration, cursing him and his evil hide anyway.
Crap crap crap.
No friggin’ idea.
We have to ask for a hint. Done for the day.
Mr. Hello took us out to eat as we brooded over that darn hide that every cacher but us has found so easily. We part company and Hello logs our finds and begs for a clue. We were happily obliged the next day and we ran over there to try, try again. We had a smaller location to search and the approximate cache size. I swear, we spent another hour combing through just ONE CORNER of this park and if you don’t think I felt dumber than a block of concrete, you’re wrong! I did find an arrow, which I thought would be fun to poke Dr. Jekyll with if I ever met him. It’s in the car just in case. Then…then…we found it! We both went right through this spot so many times. ARGH! It was very anticlimactic. We should have had the sucker four searches ago. Oh well. We went and spent some money on swag and felt better. I might not poke Dr. Jekyll afterall.

awwwwwww a turtle

2008-06-11T19:28:00.000-07:00

and now the continuation of the Adventures of Saz and Hello
I printed out a bunch of caches for Saz and I to find on Saturday and included one that we didn't find the last time. My anal nature came out and I "borrowed" a tool box from Mr. Hello to put all of our swag and toys in. So by the time she got here I had everything lined up on the table ready for her inspection. We oooed and ahhhhed over what we each had gotten in the mail. Saz got travel bugs and I got two ammo cans and two geocoins. And then we hopped in the car.We pulled up to the first hunt which just happened to be the one that we missed last time we went out. We got out and walked over to the area and started looking. And we looked. And looked. And LOOKED. At one point I could no longer see Saz. Kind of freaked me out a bit. I yelled "SAZ" I hear "over here" coming from a bush. You completely couldn't see her inside that bush. I laughed and we decided we had spent enough time looking. Turns out we spent a hour. So that was Do not find #2. Pissed us both off. We will find that damn thing.
We got back in the car grumbling a bit. We proceeded to find a few and not find a few. At one of our not founds I had to actually laugh out loud when I looked over at Saz as she lay down on the ground in the leaves under a bush Some of the best finds for the day were totally fun. We actually went to a cemetery. Have I told you how much I love cemeteries? We walked around and said hi to the guys relatives. I found the cache inside this wonderful old tree. It was tiny but just the location was great.
One of the locations was in front of a office max. We kept walking back to the light pole where it said it was and then spread out. Turns out it was inside the bottom of the pole. Who knew those things lifted.
We also did a multi. Where we had to go to one location in order to find the cache location. We had to walk a maze on the ground while writing numbers next to the authors names in the order they were on the ground. I did the walk while Sazy did the numbering. I felt like a goon walking in circles but it turned out fun. We then head off to find the cache. After walking around a nice lake I see something on the path up above.
A Turtle!!!
So off I go about a hundred miles an hour. Saz probably thought I was loony. I pick up this cute little water turtle. Saz actually knew the name of it. Red eared..lkfj;kaf;kf;ajs. hell I can't remember. We walked it to the lake and I set it down. You should have seen that sucker move once it realized it was free! Then we walked the rest of the way to the cache. It was in blackberry bushes.
Sorry Saz .
We got a beautiful butterfly geocoin from it. As we are walking back Saz says she almost fell in the lake. I missed that. *snort.
These caches are totally out of order by the way.
We decided to go rescue a trading bug from a cache in a park called Vasona. We pull up and there is this giant party going on. But we seem to be the worlds worst stealth people on the planet so we went for it. Walking through ivy. I hate ivy. walking back and forth across the street. Walking back into the park... walking through the fucking ivy again. Finally saz finds it. No it wasn't in the ivy. We rescued the travel bug and because I had gotten so irritated... errr pissed off... I kept our other travel bug to put somewhere else. Stupid cache UGH.
Another cache we went for was good for some laughs. As we pulled up in the parking lot there was a group of rennisaunce (sp) people.. ok.. err budget rennisaunce (sp) people. I guess they were playing swords in the park We hopped out and walked up this path. As we got to a turning point we saw 5 deer. They were beautiful. The spot was beautiful with little bridges over a trickling creek and a mini waterfall. I loved that spot.
We then had to hike up this little ugly trail where I got my prerequisite ouchy trying to get this cache out of a fence post. The walk back was nice.
OH I almost forgot about the attack of the dead squirrel. Saz scared the hell out of me as she comes running through the ivy (yes more god damn ivy at another cache) with her hand on her heart saying don't go over there.
Me-----> WHAT?
She then tells me it was a dead squirrel..... but see at this point I am thinking homeless man who grabbed her leg. Dead body...I had to try really hard not to laugh.... Saz found that cache.We are becoming cache homing devices I think. We are pretty much getting to the point where one or the other of us knows where something is going to be. For example I walked up to the fence post and just grabbed the lid without looking anywhere else. I just reached in a tree hole. Saz finds things in spots I wouldn't think to look at. I can't wait to go again
When are we going Saz?
ooo Saz took pictures of the turtle

Hunting buddies

2008-06-11T19:26:00.000-07:00

Well let's see. What did we do first?
I know I am going to screw up the order, so please feel free to set it straight Ms Hello.
I think it was old Calaveras Road, because I was pretty sure where we were going, but didn't end up there. Now I know how Hello feels, lol. We've mostly been hunting in her area and we'd get there and she'd say, this isn't where I thought we were going lol.
We drove around a bit for this one as the GPS sent us in a wide looping circle around the site before directing us in. Each with a GPS in hand we tracked it down. Mr. H got a handheld eTrex working and it worked pretty good, too, after I got the hang of it. We would miss the turn by turn driving directions without the other, but for the search site itself it was very good. And we found it! Yay us!
Let's go get another!Then I think we went to the park with the tennis balls. It's sort of a long park, with tennis courts on one end and grass and a jogging trail on the other. We were at the grassy end, but there were plenty of tennis balls about anyway. I expected trouble with muggles in this one as the park is usually packed with soccer and football players, but very few folks were around. And we found it! Yay us!
Let's go get another!The next was in a smaller park, with some little kids playing right near the search site. I meant to be stealthy, but it wasn't long before I was on my hands and knees pushing leaves around and poking into tree roots. Not suspicious at all, not me LOL. Anyway, we got it! Yay us!
The next was in juniper bushes. Actually, it was in one juniper all by it's lonesome. We had already searched the sticky pokey clumps of juniper a bit and decided we hate junipers. I was trying to read the cache log again for a clue and my fingers were sticking together and to the paper. Sticky junipers. Anyway, the name of the cache? Uno Juniper. And where did we find it? In the lone juniper. Yay us!
We go back to the car and break out the hand wipes and plot our next victim.This one, okay. I may have mentioned this housing community that I am sure is full of zombies because it was built over an old paint factory, there is a high wall all around it, and only one way in. There is one other entrance, a huge metal gate in the wall, for the fire department's use. This gate is where we were headed. After some looking around we found the hide on the side of the gate in a magnetized container behind some funny clinging plants. Woo hoo! We're awesome!
I'm not sure if we had lunch now or hunted one more. If we ate, it was Taco Bell. It's comical when we see that we are both slightly nuts in similar yet different ways, which is of course so much fun if you like to laugh at yourself. Hello lays out all her sauce packets side by side, those that carry the funniest sayings of course, and I lay out my burrito and break out the spork. If I were at home I'd be using a knife and fork. I know. So we had our Taco Bell our way, with a very tasty apple thing for dessert.
So next, or before that, or later, I don't even know, we went to a water station to notch our next victory. We walked around quite a bit on this one, trying to get in the right spot. None of the usual suspects were right. The trees, the bushes, the large power boxes.....we'd been from one end of the lot to another and, it seemed right, but it wasn't, so we were leaving the lot to try and find one workable coordinate next door when Hello suddenly spotted it. Sitting all alone and in plain site, a water sprinkler with nothing but concrete to sprinkle lol. That was a new container siting for us. Woo hoo!
The next was in a business park next to the railroad tracks. We didn't have to hunt much for this one. I tugged on a strange little post to see if he was hiding something underneath and he was! Somehow this one got water in it. The log book was soaked, but still usable, so I recorded our names, put it back, and off we went.
I believe this was when we got cocky enough to head into the hilly county park. There are some serious hiking trails, but also some nice walking trails, and there were two caches along one of the trails. I hoped it was one of the nice soft lake trails. We, uh, ended up in the friggin' outback. By accident of course. We could see the trail entrance on the right side of the road, so we parked and walked back to the entrance. Along the roadside. Cars whizzing by. Guess what was right beside the trail entrance? A GD parking lot. LOL So we enter the trail, and we've got two choices. A trail to the left and a trail to the right. We are at the junction of two different trails. A woman on a horse was guarding the trail on the right. I guess. Who knows what they were doing. Just standing there being weird. So we went left. We went as maybe as 100 feet, not having any success in picking up a coordinate. It's further along one of these trails. This one or that one?
While we are standing there considering, the woman on the horse comes walking by. "I guess she thinks you need some help", says the woman as they pass by. She attempts to converse with us but the horse has no interest and soon she's out of sight. Before we go any further up a trail following an animal who craps every three minutes, we decide to try our luck on the front part of the other trail.
Nothing. We aren't even close to either coordinate.
We'll walk down the trail a bit. It's rustic but not much work. Pausing every minute or so to check the GPS and hope for something encouraging, we pass a snake's skin lying on the trail. Hello: do you know what a rattlesnake sounds like? Yep, I answer, wondering if the maniacal running screaming from a snake was at hand. This would be a good spot for a serial killer to live, she remarks. Buzzards and vultures and hawks are stalking us. Horse poop everywhere. Now we've got imaginary murderers and rattle snakes to worry about, too. The trail starts uphill. I am fairly sure we have no further to go to get to the car than we've already been, so there's no point to turning back unless the trail is impassable. It's severely rutted but okay for walking, so we haul our asses up a steep climb and when we finally get to the top, my heart is trying to bang straight through my chest and I am so out of breath and I can feel my face flaming.
If we had proper caching packs, we'd have had water with us. We didn't have a frickin' thing. One day we'll get set up right.
The walk is easier now that we've got to the top and I am breathing slow and deep, trying to get back to where I can speak without huffing and puffing. There is a man ahead of us on the trail. He stops to inspect little houses along a fence just off the trail. A cacher! Let's follow him! He inspects every little birdhouse looking thing, and when he's left we check it out. I can find no way to open this box, but up the trail we can see him and it sure looks like he is opening these little houses. I have no idea what he was doing. We come down the trail into the small lake area where we left the car. Guess what's directly on the left? The other trail. The one we left to try the demon trail instead. What must be a shorter and easier walk, a shortcut, if you will, to the loopy piece of shit that we just finished. The caches have to be along this trail, but neither of us have the heart for it right now. We walk into the lake area, take a look at what's going on, take a look at the lake. Hello points out a swirly spot where she says a big fish is. I watch the swirly spot and pretty soon I do see a big fish! Kind of light colored with brown spots in very shallow water. Maybe a catfish?So we get to the car. Admonish ourselves for heading down the trail with no water, even though we had no intention of taking a hike like that, but refuse to call it a failure. It was the horse's fault. We'll take the right trail and outfit for it next time. This is a hold, not a giving up.
We picked up about six more caches after this. One was hanging in a tree, one was in a field under a rusty piece of sheetmetal (must get a tetanus shot), under a bridge, under a giant fake rock.....we got them all.

And here is my take on the "hike"
Welcome to our nightmare cache. This was one of those hunts where everything went wrong. Where you curse the hider while you are hunting but forgive them after you FINALLY reach the car and give yourself a chance to laugh!We didn't see the parking lot at the trail head. Totally missed it. We ended up parking at the park .3 miles up the road and walking down the road to the trail head. That was our first mistake. Cars wizzing by. Ugh. Then we started up the trail and for the life of us couldn't find the coordinates. Of course we were totally distracted by this woman on a horse who kept walking it by us telling us the horse thought we needed help..What? Weird? Finally we figured maybe just maybe we were on the wrong trail since it had split earlier. Off we went around the mountain. Mistake #2 We started walking... and walking... and walking. Then we were walking up a mountain. And UP a mountain. Of course we didn't bring anything with us even though we had promised ourselves we would be bringing water and such. Mistake #3. After some pretty hard core up hill hiking in what we hoped was the direction of the car I turned to Saz and said this is where people make their fatal mistakes right. Then a giant vulchure flew over our heads and we laughed. Then it flew over again and again. I told it that we were not dying even if we looked like it. By this point we were so darn far from the caches on this trail we put the gps away and prayed for the car. We kept going in the same direction and finally emerged at the total back area of the park we had parked in. We were so darn happy. We walked around the lake. Looked at some fish and finally made it back to the car. At this point we pretty much hated the hider lol. Once we got back into the car and got something to drink (almost a hour and a half later) we laughed and decided today was not the day for going back up the other side of the trail. We WILL be back for these two caches... after a while.. Oh and we don't hate you anymore LMAO!!!

Creek walking

2008-06-11T19:24:00.000-07:00

Saz and I did it again!
We went back to that cache we hadn't found on Wednesday. The one with the ass bush. This time we found it!!! It is funny how finding a cache that you have previously not found makes you proud while at the same time makes you feel like an idiot lol
We next set off with the intention of starting at a beautiful park with a creek running through it. There were two caches along a trail.. well actually there were three but because I am not a premium member (yet) I couldn't see one. We hopped out of the truck and walked along this wonderful trail filled with flowers. And different beautiful trees. We had a great time. We did run across a few punk children on the trail who barked at us and made me want to turn them over my knee and spank the hell out of them. I hate punk children. I really should have started chasing after them just to scare them lol....
After some searching I found the first container. We logged our find and continued on our way to the second container. What a wonderful walk! I found the second container and we pawed through the stuff and I found a GREAT patch that said Geocachers of the Bay Area. Which of course reminded me that I need to join them!!!
After leaving the trail back to the car we came across a herd? Gaggle? of geese with their babies. There must have been at least 20 babies of various sizes. We stood there for a while and watched. We hopped back in the car and started to pull out when we noticed the coordinates for the next one were for right in the park. We pulled back into the parking space and walked to where the cache was suppose to be. We searched and searched and never found the darn thing :(
grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
We hopped back in the car and were off to the next hide. This was a hide on private property. It was one of the best caches we have run across yet. Tacked to a utility wall was a bird house that said it was a cache. However we couldn't open it because it had a lock on it. It took me a few seconds to figure out that the key was inside the hole attached to a string. We opened it and took a signature item that needed to be logged on a seperate website and left a pen and balloon.
The next hide said we had to think out of the box. For some reason when I found the container that was in plain sight I just reached down and picked it up. I would never in a million years have thought I would have picked one of these up. But these hunts have made Saz and I get kind of clever. What a good hide. Plain freaking sight!!
The next cache Saz and I decided to take a DNF.We decided not to try after seeing that it was in a persons yard. Then decided to drive around to the back of it and walked through the park only to have the coordinates show it was on the other side of the fence in that persons yard. Didn't feel comfortable searching private property.
We had a good time searching for the next one. Saz and her eagle eye found this one! I was searching exactly where the coordinates said and she was searching a bit to the left she found it. Signed the log. Took a yoyo and put in a emergency blanket.
The last one was the best though. Here is the log I put for the cache.This one took some fancy driving to find. It wanted me to stop at the freeway. Finally we found our way to where it was suppose to be and there was a family pulling out of the driveway. We waited for them to leave before resuming the search. A little while later I see two men down the street staring at us. I stood up and stared back at which point they both turned around real quick. hmmmmm the hiders? I called Saz over to me and told her to take a peek at the two men.. who then pointed at us. We giggled a little and decided to sit on the ground and wait them out. They left but we both figured they were hiding in the bushes watching us. After some ummm hard ummm searching we found the cache and signed the logbook. I actually hurt myself a bit on this one. GREAT hide.
Trying to pry the top of a pole off killed my arm as it popped off and scraped my arm. I know that those two men knew what we were doing lol.Another perfect day of caching with a great and wonderful friend who gets to write the next adventure.

The shopping trip that wasn't

2008-06-11T19:21:00.000-07:00

If we end up shopping LMAO!!!!
That was the plan. Hunt for one before dark then go buy stuff. We..uh....just hunted. Besides, two car wrecks and a fire along the roadway made me pretty late. We still packed in three hunts.The first one was hidden across the street from the hider's friend Larry's house. "Larry can sit in his easy chair and watch cachers". Great.
The coordinates led us to a school yard and near the center of the lot with a chain link fence. The fence had vines all over it. So we searched the vines and the neighboring trees, all along the ground and looked up where we couldn't reach. We decided being short people will not work to our advantage. Must think what to do about that. There was a guy washing his truck and I wondered if that was Larry. He didn't pay us any mind, certainly didn't tell us where to look.
Larry's a bastard.
We found it anyway. The hider used one of the M&M plastic tube container things, covered it in brown tape, and hung it on the fence in the vines. It was a good hide.
Then we officially blew off shopping, laughed at ourselved a bit, and headed to the next one. This was near a canal, along a chain link fence covered in vines again, and the ground was covered in deep ivy. The coordinates placed the cache either directly on the ivy side of the fence, or directly on the other side where the canal is. For about 1.5 seconds I considered hauling my ass over that fence.But there wasn't much plant life there, bare ground, and I'm not 12, so it had to be on the ivy side. We couldn't find it, but didn't want to quit, so we were both head and shoulders digging in the plants. The clue said something like "you would find this in a leprechaun's mouth", and after all my dirtier thoughts passed (lol ), I suggested we look for a pipe. Hello found it and examined it carefully.
We were head and shoulders in the bushes again. I imagined someone driving by and noticing the asses sticking out of the bushes .
Oh look! An ass bush!
We tried our best, and we were in the right spot, but it wasn't there or we flat couldn't see it. So on we went.Riding in the car to the third, I realize I have little scratches all over my hands and 100 leaves in my hair. I had gloves in the car, but I didn't want to carry them or carry my purse so I've got to get on the cachepack problem.
Hello, didn't we see the little bags we want at Macy's? With a cute little monkey toy grabber thing? I've still got that gift card.
So we get to the third hunt. I figure why bother with gloves now and leave them in the car. We had more trouble finding the search spot this time, but we did get there. It's starting to get dark, and we are head and shoulders in the bushes again. It was a big group of bushes with a trail through them just the right size for a three year old. So I am crawling around on my hands and knees and the bushes are catching at and trying to rip my top off. The flashlight would have come in handy here, but my pockets carried only toys to leave behind. The flashlight was in the car. Must get a damn PACK! Hello finally found it. A green box in a green bush in the near dark! She also got poked in the neck with a stick. :(
Then she pointed out that we were in the same park as one cache we could not previously find, so we decided to see if anything had changed. As we cross the park, half the sprinklers come on and I wonder if we are going to make it. We only take a quick glance because it's pretty dark now, and the spot is still ransacked, and we manage to get back without getting sprinkled.Then we laughed at ourselves all the way back to Hello's and now I've got to comb leaves out of my hair and wash up. I see I picked up some spider webs, too.

Our first treasure hunt

2008-06-11T19:19:00.000-07:00

So today Saz and I went on our first treasure hunt. It was hot but that didn't stop us. We hopped in the car, entered the first coordinates and were on our way. First stop was a park. As we walked up there were muggles! Lucky for us they left right as we arrived. We walked around for a bit and finally found the area the coordinates said we were suppose to be at. LET the search begin!! There we were searching in bushes and around trees. We were there only about 5 minutes when Saz said "Found it" Hidden under a flower bush was a plastic tuperware container with the words Geocache written on it. We were so freaking excited. We opened it up. Looked around for muggles and then started pawing through the goodies. We signed the log book. We also found a traveling bug (a item with a tag attached to it that likes to move from location to location) We took that and left a wooden fish in it's place.
We hopped back in the car and went to the second location. A park. We were looking through bushes and around trees and not having very much luck. Saz warned me about bees. Then again Saz says "found it!".. Again we got all excited and started looking through the stuff inside. We signed the log book again. "Saz and Hellolost" We put Dill Pickle the traveling bug inside and I got my first swag. A skeleton keychain! Boy were we smug now. We talked about how good we were doing. We put the coordinates in for the third location and went on our way.
When we got where it said we were blocked by a locked fence. We drove around for a while and found a different way in. "in between two trees are six bushes. rear left bush" was the clue. The thing is there was ivy everywhere. We spent quite a while digging through ivy. Getting bushes in our hair. Crawling around on our hands and knees. We finally gave up. We couldn't find it That is what being smug got us. We hopped back in the car sweaty and dirty and disappointed. We decided to stop and get something to eat before we moved on to the next cache.
The next cache was in another park. After searching a while AGAIN Saz says "found it" (I was beginning to wonder if I was blind)This one was a magnetic box that was attached and painted to look like the electrical box it was stuck to. It had been muggled All the stuff was on the ground and there was no log book to enter. We put the stuff back inside and added a dollar coin. I let the owner know it had been muggled when I logged our find when I got home.
Off to the next one!!! First we turned into some industrial area and were blocked by a fence. So we got back in the car and looked for a different way to get in. We found a pathway and started walking for about a mile (if it wasn't a mile it sure felt that way in 99 degree heat). We had to go off road. So there we were walking through tall dry grass getting stickers all over us. Me in flip flops and we come to a creek. YUP coordinates say it is on the other side of the creek. So back we walk to the car in the heat begging the gods for a hole in the fence. We hop in the car and go to Starbuck and get a GIANT iced coffee while picking stickers out of our shoes and pants. Back on the hunt! We drive around to the other side of the creek and walk along a nice path mostly in shade. We find a place where we need to go off road a bit and find the coordinates. We start the hunt. I find it!!!! YAY FINALLY!! It is a ammo box covered in camoflauge. we pull it out and open it. Inside is all kinds of fun stuff. Since it is Sazy's turn to pick something I hand her the box while I am looking through the log book. This cache has been there since 2003!!! There were many many entries. And I found one and Saz found one from other people who accidently went the wrong way too. Saz chose a glass fish bead thingy and we put in a candle. Back to the car we went.
By now we needed gas and another soda to drink. MY GOD it was hot. We put the the next coordinates and off we went. Yup another hike. Sheesh. But it was fun actually. We found the coordinates and started looking... and looking... and looking again. We found the bird cage the person whose cache it was talked about but no cache. There were rocks moved all over the place so you could totally tell that there were people looking for it. We never did find it Off we went for home. In the meantime we started making lists of stuff we needed for our treasure hunting trips. Little back packs, water, bandaids. We also started planning our own caches for the future. I had the best time ever today and can't wait to do it again!!!