platypus | Entries tagged with geocaching

A lot of geocaches have really nice camouflage, to the point where they can be sitting in plain sight and most non-cachers wouldn't look twice at them. Here's a few we've seen lately.

(I used LJ-spoiler coding for this -- you just click to expand it. If you right-click and open in a new window, it won't work.)

I didn't upload a picture of this one in its native habitat, so it can be my example.

It's a rock!

No, it's a geocache! (That's a "nano" cache glued to the bottom of the rock.)

Now you try! First one:

This one was particularly good. Yes, I overlooked it the first time I checked.

Next!

(Actually, this one sort of stands out, if you pay attention. In a different environment, it would be invisible.)

One more!

I wasn't sure about this one until I actually lifted the corner. It's a magnet.

Here's another magnet cache – this one was called "a scrambled vow."

Congratulations -- you are now qualified to find caches that stump many newbies :).

On Saturday, we geocached. And we (unexpectedly) got to do one of our favorite things: walk down drainage tunnels!

The cache description was very coy about what to expect, merely saying that we were looking for three "urban waterfalls."

Those would be the ones.

( Read more... )

On Saturday, we went to Penasquitos Canyon to start The Hunt for Red October, a fifteen-leg multicache. We knew it would be a long walk (6-7 miles) and involve a fair bit of terrain. It was good to do this cache before we found too many others in the area, since we'd probably end up walking right past several of them in the course of doing this one.

So where was the first waypoint? The waterfall? Del Mar Mesa? Nope... straight up that hill ahead. It was about 200 feet, I think, and the trail was about as vertical as you can get while still defining what you're doing as walking rather than climbing. Someone had actually put paving stones in for footing in some places, but a lot of them had been washed down by the rain over the course of however many months or years they've been out there. Near the top, though, some were wedged in (at a 90-degree angle to the ground, mind you) well enough that they actually helped.

Eventually we made it to the top. I'd brought a lot of water for the long hike we were anticipating, and it was heavy and my shoulder already hurt. It was sunnier and hotter than we'd been expecting, too. I know it's hard to get a proper sense of perspective from pictures like this, but you see that little tiny car parked on the left side of the curved road way down there? That's our car.

( Onward! )

Busy weekend. I am now two weeks behind on laundry, so I'll be doing that and catching up on TV tonight. (Yes, I have to schedule TV like a chore. I generally enjoy it while I'm watching it, but I never want to watch it.)

On Saturday, we played mini golf to use up our last 2-for-1 Groupon. We are rather serious mini golf players, lining up shots carefully and tracking our scores. (I had not realized that there were people who don't write down their mini golf scores, but a few times lately we've been asked if we even want scorecards.) We are not insanely competitive (Ken generally wins, but I did this time), but it bugs me when people just swat the ball around a bunch of times and don't even try. Because we are all srs bzns about it, we are rather slow, but this time there weren't any groups behind us, so that was nice. Unfortunately the mini golf around here is a bit boring. I grew up with a nice little course near home, and the best mini golf ever was the course we played on Catalina Island on our honeymoon. If playing mini golf on your honeymoon is wrong, I don't want to be right.
It was too hot for geocaching, so we went home and I spent some time re-reading Fire and Hemlock while Ken read news about the hurricane (his dad is in New Jersey, where they had some flooding but no major problems). I also got a call about my credit card -- the Amazon one, this time. There was a $1 charge on it for some kind of app I did not download. Little fraudulent charges often precede big fraudulent charges, so the card's been cancelled and I'll get a new one. It's annoying, but at least it got caught quickly. I won't complain the next time they ask me to verify a 99 cent iTunes charge.
We got In 'n Out for dinner, and then found some urban geocaches in the area since it was dark out and had cooled off a bit. There was an upside-down snail hanging out by one of them, but I haven't uploaded the pictures yet, so I'll leave you in suspense. I think that was a pun or something.
And then I WATCHED DOCTOR WHO. More about that later, probably.
On Sunday, I woke up early (I've been getting up early ever since Comic-Con, even on the weekends) and went to the mall to get ~~a thing in a bag~~ something small for Ken's birthday. I found it right away and was able to hop on the next bus back home. (Why do people open the windows on buses when the air conditioning's on, anyway? Yes, a blast of hot, humid air would be just lovely. I am all in favor of buses having windows that do open, because sometimes on a bus one needs to have fresh air, but please, use your windows responsibly.)
Then we went to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes, because we'd heard it was reasonably good, and also theaters have air conditioning. It was fine; Ken enjoyed it more than I did, because I kept fixating on how everything big that went wrong happened because people were being really stupid, but it killed two hours efficiently enough. I know y'all are seeing Fright Night (multiple times), but I don't think I'm all that interested. Even my boss said she liked it, though, which does make me wonder if it's worth seeing. My husband's not going to go on the strength of half-naked David Tennant, you know.
I am just not capable of being a huge fan of a particular actor, I think. I have actors I like, but I'm in no way driven to see everything they do. I do get very into characters, though. And shows, obviously. A select few.
We ate at Outback after the movie. Mmm, steak. I had the small one. Which is, like, moderation or something. I'm not even going to tell you how delicious their fries are these days.
And then we decided to go night caching again. There's a relatively new night cache in the Calavera nature preserve, which is 30-40 minutes north of us. Night caches are the ones designed to only be done after dark, usually by following around a trail of reflectors on trees or bushes. I really love them, so I've been wanting to do this one ever since we noticed its existence. Because the area's pretty far from home, we haven't found any of the other caches along those trails; we weren't sure how many we could do whlie following the reflectors, but another group that went out there for the night cache found ten other caches that same night.

( Pictures from night caching. )

In addition to the sleeping bees, wakeful spiders, debatable scorpion, assorted bunnies and beetles, and the occasional mysterious rustle in the brush that we didn't stop to identify, we saw some adorable kangaroo mice. One hopped along the trail in front of us for quite a long time before finally ducking into the bushes. There was no way I could've gotten a decent photo (maybe I should have tried video) but it was extremely cute.

We were out on the trails for 3 1/2 hours, all told -- I don't know what our mileage was, but it was probably pretty low, since we were picking our way along in the dark (sometimes on rather steep sections of trail, or crossing the creek, etc, not to mention the nine times we stopped to find other caches). The terrain was a piece of cake compared to our recent canyon adventures, but we were still careful. Wouldn't want to step on a scorpion.
So we got home around 1am, I think, and then we had to take out the garbage (I cleaned the litterboxes, too) and medicate Toeffe for his ear infection (ONE MORE DAY of this, thank goodness) before bed. I've been waking up early for the past month, I mentioned earlier, but getting to sleep at 2am is not conducive to waking up before 8:00. I even hit snooze this morning.
My feet were a bit sore after last night, so I switched to my worn-out Hersey shoes for work today. They have no tread left and the soles are unevenly worn (I'm planning to have them resoled imminently) but at least it's a change for my feet. It was fairly hot out (low 80's and humid counts as hot here, okay?) and we'd been out hiking until the wee hours, but I went on my two-mile lunch walk anyway. I did it slowly, but I feel pretty good about doing it at all.

On Sunday's trip to Penasquitos Canyon, our big goal was to find a cache called The Cave of Wonder. It's not really a cave, more like a big overhang, but it's still pretty cool. It's also one of the toughest caches in the canyon, based on elevation/lack of trail/etc, and I was pretty doubtful about my ability to do it at all. But if we wanted to join the Hall of Fame, we'd have to find it.

We parked at a strip mall nearby and found our first cache in the fence of a dog park up the hill. While I was signing in, something buzzed by -- one of these giant green beetles that are blundering around everywhere in the summer. They're pretty neat looking, with brilliant metallic green undersides. I am not unnaturally afraid of bugs; I caught grasshoppers and fireflies as a kid, I rescue spiders from the cats and put them outside, etc. However, I wasn't completely thrilled when this one crashed into my neck (I told you they were clumsy) and hung on with its prickly little feet. Ken was studying it with great interest and I was a bit CAN YOU GET IT OFF ME NOW but when he finally coaxed it off of me I took some glamour shots:

Pretty, isn't it? I know you don't believe me, but this is totally worth viewing at original size on Flickr. You can see the metallic stuff so much better.

( No more bugs, I promise. But there are deer! And the Cave of Wonder! )

Here's a few pictures from Saturday in Penasquitos Canyon. We only did ten caches that day, but we covered a lot more elevation than usual. We've been working on finding the caches along the north rim of the canyon, but that also involved descending a few hundred feet to the canyon floor. Then, of course, we had to climb back out.

Tribbles!

( Read more... )

For a while now we've been working on the Penasquitos Canyon Hall of Fame, a list of 135 caches in or near Penasquitos Canyon. If we find them all, we'll get our name on a list, and maybe even get a little certificate if we attend next year's awards dinner. There are several Hall of Fame lists for San Diego, but Penasquitos Canyon is (a) fairly close to home (b) a fairly short list and (c) not so strenuous as to be completely impossible for us to complete. We're about halfway done; it'll be a while before we complete it, but we've done some of the toughest caches already and I think we'll make it to the end eventually.

Last Sunday we took a six-mile hike along the floor of the canyon, to the waterfall and back.

The first cache was called "Hey, What's That Doing Here." Upon finding the cache, we had to say the same thing.

( More caches, and the waterfall! )

We took a few weeks off from geocaching (first there was Comic-Con, then there was the epic case of con crud that kept Ken out of commission for a couple more weeks) but now we're back. The first caches we did last weekend were "Helen Bach" and "Helen Bach's Dirty Little Sister," which were hidden in a drainage tunnel near UCSD. We actually lucked out a bit by finding an "urban exploration" meetup page from a group that explored this tunnel last fall. (It was led by the guy who placed these geocaches, actually.) So we had pictures and stories and knew what we were getting into. I've occasionally said that I'd be interested in urban exploration if I weren't so slow and clumsy and generally law-abiding. Well, here was our chance!

The view from where we parked. The entrance to the tunnel is on the lower right, below the concrete wall. We just needed to get down there somehow...

( You know you want to see more! )

Ken and I had a three-day weekend -- the UC system observes Cesar Chavez day on the last Friday in March. We spent the whole thing geocaching.

( Cache stories and pictures and stuff. )

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I slept in a tree again?

Entries tagged with geocaching

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November 2022

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