Happy New Year!

What a difference a year makes...a year ago I was working on a project called OASIS (believe me the project was no Oasis, its some stupid acronym for Oracle Architecture System something) and rung in the New Year stuck in a conference room in Santa Clara with about 5 other people as the project was being implemented on Jan 1st. We worked until about 2 am on New Year's Eve and 1 am on New Year's Day. Zuleika was only about 4 months old and it was her first time away from home in a hotel and learning how to be calm and mellow for several hours at a time. Hope was still at CCI in Santa Rosa in Advanced Training. Molly rung in the New Year in Fremont keeping my mom company. Fast forward a year, Zucchini is now 16 months old, Hope was released from CCI in February and is now my well-loved pet and loving being a pet therapy dog, and Molly is no longer with us...

Today was a cold morning, but since I had to run an errand in El Dorado Hills, it gave me an excuse to grab a few geocaches. Since Zucchini got to go hiking with me over the weekend, I took Hope with me today. We parked at a library and huffed up a hill on a trail called Serrano Trail to the cache. The cache was called "Where the Air is Free" (GCZVCB); the cache container was lying out in the open so it was an easy find, I rehid the cache a little better. I saw that another cache was about .3 miles away called "Faux Forest" (GCY0TP). For a second, I wondered what the title meant until I looked in the direction we were heading. Here's a picture of Hope with the Faux Forest in the background, can you see it? (Hint: look at the water tanks) You can also sort of see how dry Folsom Lake is...

According to my GPS, we hiked about 2 miles in about 50 minutes, and climbed about 426 vertical feet to an elevation of 1074 feet. The Faux Forest cache was about halfway down another hill, so my calves certainly got a workout today. Here's a picture of Hope at the first geocache, that green area at the bottom of the hill is parking lot where our car was parked. The views from the cache were great!

Hmmm...I guess I ought to come up with a New Year's Resolution...how about find more geocaches in 2008 than I found in 2007?