Travel Bugs

A Travel Bug (or, TB for short) is similar to a geocoin in that a TB is trackable on the geocaching.com website and is meant to be moved from cache to cache. Each TB has a tag, which looks like a dog tag, attached to it that contains its unique tracking number.

Like geocoins, TB's may have a goal. The difference between a TB and a geocoin is that a TB may be attached to anything. Some of the TB's I've seen/moved were attached to cheap McDonald's toys, stuffed animals, figurines, keychains. Basically, anything you can attach a tag to can be made into a TB. When I was in Lake Tahoe this summer, I brought home a TB that was a bowling pin (yes a real bowling pin)! The only reason I took it was because there was a geocache in Folsom that I knew would be big enough to hold it; it has since moved on to another large cache in the area.

Back in February, 2007, I released my first Travel Bug called "Molly the Golden Retriever" Travel Bug to honor Molly. It was a dog collar that contained a laminated card with some pictures of Molly and her goal, to travel to places where she can walk, swim, or hike. I intentionally kept the tag smaller in size and the goal for her pretty general, so that she doesn't get stuck in a cache where people may not pick her up because her goal is too hard to meet or where the TB is too large in size to be placed in another cache.

I started her TB at a cache near my house, then picked her up from that cache and took her to Oceanside when I went down to visit a friend. From there she has visited geocaches in Virginia, NY City (she actually was placed in a geocache in Central Park!), Lake Tahoe, Arizona, and she is now in a cache in New Mexico.

It sounds kind of silly, but in some ways this was my way of keeping her alive. So far she has travelled over 5300 miles and its been fun to watch her travels and see pictures people have posted on her TB page of the places she's been to. Heck, other than Oceanside and Lake Tahoe, she's been to places I've never even been to, how cool is that?

Here's a link to her Travel Bug webpage: http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?id=794705

Geocoins

In addition to the six caches I found today, I also grabbed 3 geocoins out of geocaches I found today. Geo-coins are coins that people have "minted" and place in geocaches to move from cache to cache. The movement of the coins is tracked on the geocaching.com website via a unique tracking number that can be found on the coin. The person who picks up a coin (which is what I did today) logs the coin as taken from the cache it is in and is supposed to drop it in another cache within a few weeks. When the coin is dropped in another cache, it is logged into that cache for someone else to pick up and move to another cache. The website keeps track of who has the coin in their "inventory" or the location of the geocache it is placed in, as well as the number of miles the coin has traveled. Some of the coins have goals (like they want to visit certain locations, be placed in a certain type of geocache, etc), some just want to move from cache to cache.

This is a picture of the front sides of the 3 coins I grabbed out of geocaches today:

This is a picture of the back sides of the 3 coins:

The details on some of these coins is just amazing. The coins I picked up today were very nice. One of the problems with this is that there some dishonest people out there who take coins and keep (i.e., steal) them. So rather than moving them to another geocache, they just take them from a geocache and don't log them out. I've enjoyed seeing the creativity that goes into creating the coin, so its really fun to find them. The funny part is that there is a whole underground economy for these coins. They are very expensive to mint and unique, so many people who have them made end up trading and/or selling them to other geocachers. Kind of like coin/stamp collecting...some are worth more than others.

Coyote Hills Regional Park

Today I went geocaching at Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont with Zuleika. The circumstances that brought us to the area was sad, as my uncle (my mom's brother) passed away on Friday after suffering a heart attack a week ago, so I came down to Fremont to spend some time with my mom. First Molly, now my uncle, ugh...I'm ready for this holiday season to be over!

Zucchini was going a bit stir-crazy as on Saturday it was raining so we couldn't really go outside to let her get her yah-yah's out (and boy does she get the yah-yahs!) So this morning, even though it was slightly cloudy and looked like it might rain, I scoped out a hike we could take that was close to my mom's house.

In my younger days (which is long time ago!!!) and still living at home with mom & dad, I used to ride to Coyote Hills on my bike, it was about a 20-mile ride up and back. It's probably been almost 20 years since I've been out here and this was the first time I was here without a bike. The one thing I've discovered about geocaching...it brings you to places you never even knew about. I was missing out on a lot of cool places and great views as the bike trails are located on the outskirts of the park without a lot of the great views that the hiking trails have.

I wished I would have had my Rebel to take pictures today, it was great black dog lighting and the views were great! But, alas, the Rebel and geocaching do not get along (too heavy/bulky for me to carry). Note to self...check the memory card before leaving, I ran out of space on my card, so I missed a lot of great shots today of some herons in flight, nice views, a hawk perched on top of a tree, etc. Just an excuse to come back I guess.

This was my funny shot of the day, I wanted to try to get a shot of Zuleika under the rock as if the rock were going to roll right on top of her (picture her about 3-4 feet over to the right of where she is standing), but it was too wet, slick and steep and she just kept sliding, so this is the best we could do. Its too bad people have defaced the rock by spraying graffiti on it.

I found a series of caches called "Indian Montage" 1-6 today. Unfortunately, I didn't do my homework before leaving as inside each of the six caches were clues to find a seventh cache that was also hidden in the park. Oh well, it will just give me an excuse to get out here again as there are a few more caches hidden in an area that we didn't even get to today. Luckily, I took pictures of the clues and will try to piece together the solution to the final cache so we can come out again to find it.

We hiked a total of 6 miles today, and climbed up and down many hills today. Since I'm trying to break in a pair of hiking boots, I was glad that I also ended the day without a blister on either foot! It was a great place to hike with a dog too! We were able to stay on fairly wide trails for the most part. After our bushwhacking trek in Folsom the other day, Zucchini was a happy girl today, it was dog-feet heaven. Here is a shot of Zuleika that I took from the third cache we found, and yes, we huffed and puffed up and down that switchback that you can see in the background.

This was the last picture of the day before I filled up my memory card. It's a little faint in the picture, but San Mateo Bridge is visible in the background. Good thing we had to stop to look for geocaches every once in a while, after climbing up and down those hills today, I needed an excuse to rest and this was one of them!

So that brings us to 833 caches...and counting!

King of the Hill (or is that Queen of the Hill??)

Today was my last day off from work for the Christmas break, so I went geocaching in the morning with Zuleika at Folsom Lake near Brown's Ravine, an area of the Lake I had never been to before.

The cache pages said to park at Brown's Ravine for the caches, but I couldn't find a good access point to get to the trails, so after finishing one cache that was close to the parking spot, I drove down towards Folsom to park in a small lot off of Green Valley Road. Thank goodness I have my California State Parks parking pass; even though I bought it primarily for kayaking, it sure comes in handy for geocaching too!

One of the caches we found first was called "Blue Man Isle" (GCRBF6). I guess when the Lake is full, the cache location is actually an island. Not today, the lake is so low right now it was probably a half-mile hike to the "island". There was nobody out there today, so I let Zucchini off leash to run free for a bit, she loved that (shhhhh....don't tell CCI!). This picture was taken close to where the cache was hidden.

We found 4 other caches on a 4-mile hike, a total of 6 caches at the lake. I tried to stay on any game trails I could find, but it was a bushwhacking kind of day. Luckily with the recent rains the stickers weren't too bad. Zucchini was a good sport walking through the grass/stickers and jumping over/around a lot of logs. Two of the caches were called "King of the Hill", we certainly did make a go of going up and down many hills today, does that make us "Queen(s) of the Hill"?

After we came back home, there were a couple of puzzle caches I had solved that were located nearby. Since Zucchini got to cache in the morning, I took Hope with me to find the two puzzle caches nearby.

All in all it was a good day, we found 8 caches all together and both Hope and Zuleika got to go on some long walks to boot...a tired dog is a good dog!

After today's finds, that puts my total number of finds at 827, but who's counting?...

Hiking and caching in Auburn

My friend Jill and I went on a 5.5 mile hike in Auburn on Sunday, Dec 23, a few days before Christmas. She had scoped out an area in the Auburn State Recreational area for us to hike and cache. Today, it was not about the numbers, but instead it was about taking the dogs for a nice hike and to find some caches along the way.

She brought two dogs along today, Omeeka who she is fostering, and Metro, a dog she raised who graduated as a Skilled Companion. She was watching Metro while his family was out of town for the holidays. I also brought along Hope and Zuleika for the day. 2 people, 4 dogs, guess we were outnumbered.

We hiked on a nice 4-mile loop and found a total of 4 caches today. A few of the caches were 3/3.5 terrain, we certainly earned those terrain ratings on a couple of those hills! We stopped for lunch at a high point that gave us a good view of the Middle Fork of the American river. The picture above is Hope resting on Omeeka, talk about dog-tired, huh?

The dogs also came home with some ticks, ugh. Jill said she counted about 13 on her two dogs. I only found one on Hope's head, hard to see them on the black dogs so I just hope I found them all.

Rubber Ducky Madness!

I have found that unless I'm geocaching with a friend, its too difficult to geocache with two dogs. Since I was planning on geocaching on Sunday and would take Zucchini, I figured I'd take Hope with me on Saturday...so Zucchini was relegated to the crate for a few hours while Hope and I went out.

Having bought a Sacramento County Parks Pass earlier in the year, we hit the American River area near Hazel and Sunrise; an area I had never been to before. Hope and I found 6 caches that day and probably hiked about 2-3 miles. There is a series of caches called the "Snookered" series in which you need to find around 60 geocaches in order to find the final cache. I knocked out a few more caches in that series today.

But the best cache of the day was called "Rubber Ducky Madness" (GCV82W). This was a multi-stage cache, the coordinates took us to a container that was full of probably 20+ rubber ducks. The cache description contained clues to eliminate rubber ducks until you were left with one duck, the bottom of which contained the coordinates to the final cache. All of the ducks had coordinates written on the bottom, so you really did have to pay attention to the clues, and couldn't really "cheat" by looking at the bottom of the ducks for the coordinates. This is a picture of all the ducks.

It was too funny, as I was pulling the ducks out of the container and setting them up on a fallen tree, a couple of them fell off the tree onto the ground. Hope, being the good service dog reject that she is, was glad to pick up the fallen ducks off the ground when I gave her the command "get", and handed them to me when I gave her the command "give". What a good girl! I actually ended up with two ducks at the end, oops, but used an educated guess as to which duck contained the correct coordinates to the final cache location.

This cache is probably one of my all-time favorites in terms of creativity. Here's a picture of Hope with the duckies....

A day at the Lake

I took Hope and Zuleika out to Folsom Lake the week after Molly died just to get away. There was a 5-stage geocache that we did that took us on a 2-3 mile hike at Folsom Point and along the levee towards Brown's Ravine and back. It was a nice escape to get the dogs out and find a geocache to boot. I let Hope off leash on the levee, she was a happy girl. That's Hope on the left, Zucchini on the right (this pic was taken with my camera phone, bummer I forgot my real camera).

I was surprised how low the lake level was, guess we really do need the rain!

A bittersweet day with Molly

Sunday, December 16th, 2007 was a day I will never forget. It was my last day with Molly, my 11-year-old golden retriever who was losing her battle with the nasty cancer taking over her mouth. She fought a valiant fight that lasted almost 2 years, but when the cancer began to affect her quality of life, I knew it was time for me to let her go.

Molly was the first dog I had ever taken geocaching. She accompanied me to all the caches I found at Lake Natoma in the Willow Creek area. Molly always enjoyed hiking and swimming at the lake, so when I began geocaching, I'd take her out to the lake to hike, swim and geocache. It was the perfect fit!

I knew the last thing I wanted was to let her swim for one last time at her favorite place, Willow Creek. There were no plans to take her geocaching that day, but when I turned my GPS on, there was a new geocache called, "Where the Red Fern Grows" (GC17X2E) that had been hidden in the area the week before. According to my GPS, it was hidden just .15 miles from the parking area, I knew Molly had the strength to make the hike to the cache since it was so close. How ironic that the cache name was the same as a movie that was about a boy and his dogs.

It was a fitting tribute to her for us to do this together. The short hike to the cache area was beautiful. It was turning green from the recent rains and there was a little creek running nearby. After 15-20 minutes of searching, I was about to give up feeling dejected that I couldn't find it. More than that, I was disappointed in myself that I couldn't find it for Molly. I tried looking again, and finally found it! Phew! It was then that I realized this would be the last time I would ever hike or find a geocache with Molly. She seemed so happy, her tail was wagging, and she was smiling. For a brief moment, I almost had second thoughts about letting her go, maybe it was too early. But I knew it was what I needed to do, for her. I'm not sure how long we sat together on a log by the creek, but I hugged and cradled her and told her how much I loved her, our own private goodbye, just the two of us. We took the short hike back to the water where she swam for one last time chasing her stick. We then made the short drive to the vet...I held her and told her how much I loved her as she took her last breath.

It's been a little over a week since that day and I still can't believe how empty I feel without her around any longer. I do feel good about how wonderful our last day together was.

Where do I start?

A brief history...

I found my first geocache in June, 2006 (during the REI class).  There's no way I will go back and write about the past year and a half in this blog, I'd be typing for days!

What I will say is that the past year and a half of geocaching has brought me to lots of new places and has given me countless hours of fun and entertainment, with and without the dogs, hanging out with friends, getting away from the stress of work, etc.  I've gone geocaching mostly in the Folsom/Roseville/Sacramento area. But I've also taken a few trips to Oceanside/San Diego and Lake Tahoe to geocache as well.  I've even squeezed in a few caches while traveling to the Bay Area too. I love that it gets me out to new places and forces me to "think out of the box" and use my head to figure things out (i.e., if I were hiding a cache, where would I hide it?)

A few weeks ago, I found my 800th geocache.  Guess you could say I'm addicted! I hope to highlight some of my adventures on a regular basis via this blog.  

What is geocaching?

Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunt using a GPS to find hidden "caches". Geocaches are hidden everywhere.  Some people call it a sport, some people call it a hobby, some call it a game.  Whatever you choose to call it, I call it fun!  

I took a geocaching class through my local REI store; I had briefly heard about geocaching after going on a Orienteering trip to Joshua Tree National Park a few years ago.  During the geocaching class, they showed us the basics of using a GPS and showed us a variety of caches which we found in Folsom.  I was hooked!

I bought my first handheld GPS, a Garmin 60csx, shortly after taking the class and went in search of caches in the area.  I log my "finds" on the website, www.geocaching.com, which keeps track of how many geocaches I've found.

Personally, I prefer geocaches hidden in non-urban settings (i.e., places where you can go hiking, by the river, parks, etc), but there are tons of urban geocaches hidden in shopping centers, etc. They each have their own merits. During the summertime, its harder and dangerous to find the geocaches hidden in the woods because of the heat, the unpleasant walks through dry grass/stickers, and the huge risk of encountering rattlesnakes who live near the areas where geocaches are often hidden since you generally have to leave the trail to find the cache. Last summer, I saw more rattlesnakes than I care to admit. During the summer months, I generally don't take the dogs because of the heat, risk of snakes, and walking through dry grass/stickers is not pleasant for them. During the colder weather, I've been taking them with me, so its been a lot of fun for us to get out.

My geocaching name is: pk-a-boo.  A group of my friends call me "PK" (my initials), so I created the name pk-a-boo as my geocaching name and this is the name I use to log my finds of the geocaches I have found.