Archive for the 'Geocaching' Category

There are so many beautiful little squares of awesomeness in this area. I had no idea there were places like this when we decided to move here. We moved here for purely economic reasons. This cache is located in a nature preserve run by the Riparian Institute. There are trails all over the preserve with running water all over. A riparian zone is the interface between land and a flowing surface water body. This area also houses a small observatory and is conveniently located right near a library.

Krissy and I brought lunch and ate it at the gazebo near the cache. While we were eating there were at least two other groups of geocachers that came by looking for the cache. There are a lot of other caches in this preserve, so we will be back here a few times for them, but this is a beautiful spot just to spend the day and enjoy nature.

I’m rockin’ my Windows Vista swag I got from the Microsoft rep at work. I’m so cheap that I’ll promote Microsoft crap if it means I get free clothes.

North of the lake in Freestone park is a skate park that I never knew existed. I bet Christopher would have liked to spend some time there if we had known about it. I had trouble finding this one, but Krissy used her cache-sense and grabbed it with little trouble. This is a pretty big cache which would be great for a travel bug in the future.

While walking around and getting these caches we walked a total of about three miles, which is pretty respectable for a couple hours of geocaching. We left home as the sun was setting and arrived home in the dark.

This cache is located near the banks of the lake at Freestone park. No one was feeding the ducks today, so I couldn’t get pictures of people throwing entire pieces of bead into the water like Frisbees.

When we started getting close to the cache there was a family getting their pictures taken on the side of the nearby hill. Krissy and I sat down near the banks of the lake and enjoyed the breeze, waiting for the family to get dona and leave. After a few minutes they were still there, so I got up, grabbed the cache, and walked back where she was sitting. While we were hanging out, I took a few pictures of the small-gauge train that circles the park.

Krissy and I decided that it had been far too long since we went Geocaching. Today is only the second time we’ve been out since we moved here. Since the weather is so nice right now, it’s the perfect time. There are parks all over the place out where we live, and that where this cache took us. There were tons of muggles out on this beautiful Saturday, but they were not close to this one.

The cache must be getting sprayed by sprinklers or something, because the logbook inside was soaked! Thankfully I had a pen that wrote on the wet paper without smearing and without tearing it.

This one is pretty close to the road if you know where to park. We came here from the Taylor’s Quarry cache and so we just followed the trail all the way out here. It was 0.33 miles according to our GPSr. When we were within about 800 feet of the cache there was another entrance from the road to the trail we were on. Oh well, we needed the exercise anyway.

The cache itself was a lot of fun. We were standing on top of it and I kept looking under the bushes for it. It was hidden under a rock so well that you would never even think of looking under it. The coordinates were dead on, but it still took us a while to investigate that one inconspicuous rock. We walked back to the car on the road and got to see a lot of fun Halloween decorations. What a fun day caching!

Krissy and I found this one without too much trouble, although it has some of the best camouflage I’ve ever seen in Geocaching. There was a Spiderman Travel Bug action figure inside, so I thought this one would come with us to either Las Vegas for Thanksgiving or to Georgia this Christmas.

This is probably the biggest surprise I’ve ever encountered in geocaching. This is a huge ammo box with (at present) tons of travel bugs in it. It’s really unusual to find such large, high-quality caches in the middle of the city. I wanted to come here to get some travel bugs to take with me to Arizona. There were a lot to choose from, but I chose NIKO, a metal dog looking to end up in each state before returning home to Idaho, and Jack the Pumpkin who seems to just want to roam all over the country.

This is in front of a small English pub called Churchill’s. The food smelled really good, although we didn’t go inside. It’s in a really tiny building, but it seems to be rather popular. I would consider going in, but since I don’t drink, I don’t think I’d fit in too well.

This is one I’ve been wanting to get for a while. I thought of trying to get some of the people at the dentist’s office where I go to come outside and get this one. It’s right outside the San Marcos City Hall and the dentist’s office is located in the same building as the city hall. I didn’t have time to do that, thought the last time that I got my teeth cleaned.

When Krissy and I got to the cache we found it right behind a large moving-truck. The truck provided excellent cover from muggles and had the added benefit of shading us from the late afternoon sun.

In the cache was the best thing I’ve found to date: a $2 off gift certificate to Baskin Robbins! We took that and left the Inspector Gadget we got a while ago from another cache.

This was our second atempt for the day in Geocaching. The first one we think we might have found where it was, but it looked like it might be in a hole, and I didn’t want to stick my hand down there in case I was wrong. Krissy found this one. It was right close to the Fry’s Electronics, and that’s where the name of the Geocache comes from! There were some spiders around here, but not too many. There was some fun stuff in this cache. When we opened the top it had a Koosh ball sticking up. Koosh balls were awesome when I was a kid!

This cache is really in the open. So many cars were driving past us and staring at us. The chances that any of them will even care are minimal, but if someone wanted to, they could come and swipe this cache or mess it up for everyone. One guy even winked at Krissy! Why I oughtta!!!

We took a C-3PO ring and left a Chuck E. Cheese’s token that my Grandfather found long ago while metal detecting. These tokens will soon be all over the place! He found so many of them when he thought he was finding quarters. He’d dig ‘em up and… a lousy, useless Chuck E. Cheese’s token!

Tommy remarked that driving into the San Elijo Hills town center is like driving into the Truman Show. Everything looks brand new, and it appears out of nowhere. When he said this two years ago this was definitely the case. Out of the chaparral wilderness sprang a spring surrounded by a well-manicured lawn. That same fountain that welcomes the thirsty traveler also calls to the budding geocacher.

This is now the closest geocache to my home. It’s also a great geocache to introduce friends in the area to the sport. This was a quick “cache ‘n dash.” I stood back a bit and let my Spencer and Jamie do most of the hunting. Their reaction to the caching experience: excitement with a desire for more!

This was the second cache I ever tried to find. I came here with Krissy just after the sun had dropped over the hill next to where this is located. I was brand new and really had no idea what to look for. I rummaged around for a bit, but eventually had to give up and return home. Not so today!

I’m so glad to finally get this one out of my system. It turns out that no one has been to this cache since I was here almost a month ago. For a 2-wheel drive compact car like ours the “road” is barely navigable. There are large boulders sticking up from the ground. The first time we were here we bottomed out once. We were able to avoid that this time. The cache is marked as easy both in terrain and overall difficulty. I think it might be the case if one were to hike from the beginning of the dirt road, but not if one wants to try and drive up to the cache.

While we were turning around to leave a man and his dog came out of the house just south of the cache and they just stared at us until we were gone. There is a sign saying that there is no driving on this road allowed without the permission of the owner. Oh well, in any event, this is number 17 for me.

Just north of Elfin Forest road less than two miles from our apartments is an old dirt road that is terribly eroded. We pulled off to the side of the road at the beginning of this trail and Krissy immediately found an abandoned Christmas tree with some Christmas lights still strung around it. She removed the lights and was excited to see if they still work.

This was an easy cache. On the way up the dirt path there are all sorts of discarded items including what looks like an old rusty gas tank from a motorcycle.

As the name implies the items in this cache are supposed to appeal to kids. We took the Inspector Gadget and left a Palace token and a Chuck E. Cheese’s token.

Krissy was so excited that she insisted we go look for SeaQuest again. The first time we were there it was dark and we couldn’t find it. Since it’s the closest cache to this one we drove right over to it.

I was a little uneasy going after this one becasue of the no tresspassing sign at the head of the service road we hiked on to get here, but Krissy charged forth without a second thought, so I followed after. This made for an interesting little hike. There appear to be a number of abandoned cars in the ravine adjacent to the road. they appear to have been shoved in and rolled on their sides or tops. Crazy looking, actually.

This was the biggest cache I’ve found so far. The reason for the name is that the cache mainainers, kawikaturn, Laa-Laa and Tinky Winky, put their items that they’ve failed at getting others to bid on on eBay into this bucket and request that geocachers take the largest item they might want with them to make more room in the bucket for more junk cool stuff.

On our way out I saw two men in the distance walking onto the road we were on. I told Krissy that they were probably geocachers. Sure enough, I was right. I didn’t find out until later, but they posted that they had seen what was probably us walking out as they were walking in. That’s the first time I’ve run into other geocachers while I was out.

There are these amazing flower fields in Carlsbad where, for $8.00, one can take a stroll and see them up close. If you’re broke like us, then you can go on a street just east of the flower fields and see them for free from nice lookout points.

This was the first cache that Krissy and I found together on our first try! She’s starting to like this so much that she requested we go today after she got off work. This cache was hidden just off of the sidewalk under a rock. There were tons of muggles around, so we followed the advice given by kawikaturn and pretended we were tying our shoes as we searched. The flowers were so pretty that we hung out for a while.

I left a token my Grandfather gave me for a “free gallon.” I still am not sure what liquid it was redeemable for, though. He gave me all sorts of random worthless tokens to hide in caches. He found them while searching for other things with his metal detector.

Dawn was really excited and didn’t want to go home even though we had already found the caches that I had brought information on, so I fired up the search tool on the GPS and had it point us to the nearest cache. With no details, not even a name, I was surprized that we found this one as quickly as we did.

As with other caches we found today, this one’s logbook was damp, but still signable. I woundered what people thought as the four of us milled about the front of the Wallgreens for no apparent reason and then walked away without going inside.

This was a fun cache that we could practically drive right up to. The ammo box was right in someone’s yard. As the name implies there were two dogs that came and barked at us quite a lot. Dawn said she wanted to hide a cache in her yard when she gets a house.

The cache owner came out and asked Christopher if we were geocaching. In the least enthusiastic voice he could muster, he told him we were.

Outside a tall black metal fence surrounding Taylorsville Park there lies a stagnant drainage canal overgrown with brush. In amongst all of this there is a large lone sprinkler head that almost no one would give a second thought to. We walked past it three times until Dawn voiced some concern over it being there and how out of place it seemed. She opened it up and found it to be the cache we were looking for.

Alas, it was not watertight, and everything inside was damp from the previous day’s rain. This was the most creative way to hide a cache that I’ve seen thus far. No one would suspect it unless they knew it was there and what it was.

We had some hours of daylight left after General Conference on Sunday. We statyed home to watch it because we didn’t have tickets for any of the Sunday sessions. Dawn wanted to see what this geocaching thing was all about, so off we went!

This was the first cache I was able to take my Aunt Dawn and my mom on. This one was hidden well and was a lot of fun for them to discover. I guess I hadn’t talked to them much about stealth around muggles because even though there were people criscrossing the area Dawn got really excited and was making all kinds of noise. In the excitement of it all people were staring at us, but none of them seemed very curious as to what we were doing.

I explained the importance of stealth, and we were able to proceed further without incident. Dawn took some ugly buttons that she had with these clouds and a rainbow. There were pretty big for buttons and we could only fit one in the cache. I guess one is enough.

This was the last cache of the morning that we were able to find. Well, since it was a virtual cache there was no physical box to find, but it was still fun. I’m confused as to how there could be a travel bug on this cache since it’s a virtual cache, but that doesn’t matter.

This cache consists of fifteen questions about temple square that you can find out if you walk around to the various buildings, statues, and monuments. Christopher and I had a lot of fun walking around Temple Square finding all of these. I overheard a conversation between a Sister and two men visiting from Germany. I was tempted to join in, but thought better of it.

It was on this tour that I came across the statue of Joseph and Emma Smith. Someone had put a bouquet of fresh flowers is Joseph’s hand as if he were giving them to Emma. I don’t know if this is something that people always do every day or if it was just for this occasion. Geocaching takes you places you wouldn’t go on your own, and I wouldn’t have seen this if I hadn’t been geocaching.

This one was an unusual cache to say the least. Christopher was getting thirsty already from hiking all around Temple Square. This was only our second cache of the morning, but I had forgotten the batteries on for my camera and was looking for a store that was open at 8:30am in the malls south of Temple Square. Well, I didn’t find any, and when Christopher saw that the description of this cache said there was free ice water, we just had to go here next.

This cache is placed in the Salt Lake City tourism office. The cache is out in the open with a lock on it. It has a description of what geocaching is and why the box is there. In order to open it you have to solve a little puzzle given in the description of the cache. Christopher got his ice water, and I got a few travel bugs. I took a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and a matchbox car called bluebird. Chrstopher said that the model of the car is Bluebird, so I guess that makes sense, even though the car itself is red. The car wanted to go to Japan, so I thought I would bring it to San Diego and see if I could help it along. The next day while traveling around the city I saw banners for a Japanese Culture Festival in Salt Lake at the end of April, so I am having Christopher take it back for me. The Ninja Turtle, on the other hand, is going to end up right near my apartment in San Elijo Hills. I left the Insanity and travel bug and the LLOT Selective Service geocoin.

There was a guy that worked at the tourism office who came over and talked to us for a bit about the cache. He said they get about 12 groups per month coming in looking for the cache.

Christopher took some silver earrings with some Navajo artwork on them to give to Dawn, and I put in the Yankee Stadium keychain from Heber’s Heavenly Hideout. There is a gift shop integrated into the travel office and I was able to get some overpriced batteries for use in my camera.

This one was quite interesting. This was the first geocache of the morning. This was also Christopher’s first geocache. My family had only three tickets for the Saturday morning session of General Conference so it was decided that Christopher and I would go geocaching in the vicinity of Temple Square while Dawn and my grandparents attended the conference. This was probably my favorite cache of the day. This cache is located behind some apartments just to the east of the Conference Center.

On our way there Christopher asked me if it was fun being a missionary. I told him that it was a lot of work, but that you get to do a lot of things you would never have a chance to do otherwise. Just as I was saying this we came upon a group of about twenty Elders standing in front of one of the apartment buildings. I walked up to them and asked if I might ask them all a question. I told them that this young man here would like to know if it’s fun being a missionary. All together they started cheering that it was great! There was one senior Elder who said that it is fun, “even at my age!”

We walked past the missionaries and into the parking lot they were standing in front of. The GPS pointed right up a steep embankment with a fence at the top. Christopher was considering climbing it, but I convinced him that there was probably a much better way. We walked back out of the parking lot and a little further up the street found a walkway between two buildings. behind the northern building we found what looked to be a small fenced-off park. This was the Kimball cemetary. Heber C. Kimball is buried there along with many of his family members and descendants.

When we arrived there were a few muggles looking at the monument in the center of the tiny plot. While we were waiting Christopher pointed out the “No Dogs Allowed” sign. I wondered aloud if anyone had realized that dogs can’t read. In the back corner we found the cache. Christopher got a kick out of the old rusty Altoids container that the loot was hidden in. The logbook was a little damp, but still signable. I took out of it a Yankee Stadium keychain and put in the Keeping An Eye On You travel bug that I got at the meetup on the last Wednesday in March. It was tough getting all the things back in the container, but Christopher got them all in. It still wanted to pop back open, so he wedged a couple of rocks in on top of the container when he hid it again.