Successful morning of urban caching

Yesterday's walk to find a geocache put me back in the mood to do some caching this morning (yes, even despite seeing a snake!).  I decided I would take Hope with me to find some caches since she would mostly be home alone today as I had puppy class and several errands to run in the afternoon.  

There was a new series of caches hidden recently called "Hanging in the Park" that I thought I would go find today.  In order to find the 3rd cache, you had to find the first two caches as each cache contained half the coordinates to the 3rd cache.  Even though it was still early, there were people in each park that I went to in search of the caches, so it was nice to have Hope with me to act as a "dog distractor" and not arouse any suspicion to the "muggles" in the park that might see me looking for the caches and who might wonder what the heck I was doing.  

I guess she was good luck for me as I found all 3 geocaches in the series pretty easily.  I snatched up another easy cache in a parking lot on the way to a new trail in Folsom where another cache was hidden.  In order to find this cache, you first had to solve a puzzle, this one was rated 3.5 difficulty, 1.5 terrain.  

I'm up to 885 finds, I was thinking of finding my next 15 caches before the end of May so that I can make an event called GeoWoodstock my 900th logged find.  This is an event being held in the Sacramento area for the first time, basically a "Woodstock" event for geocachers on Memorial Day Weekend. My friend, Waterlassie, is coming up from San Diego to attend.  I better get my butt in gear if I want to make it considering how little caching I've been doing lately.

1st snake sighting :-(

Today I decided to leave work at about 2:30 since I've been having 6am meetings for the past couple of months, so it was only an 8 hour day...hmmm what a concept.  Anyway, last night I didn't get a chance to walk the dogs after work so I decided to take them with me to look for a geocache that was just hidden near one of the bike trails near my house.  It was a beautiful 4-mile walk, an easy cache to find, and then I saw it on our way back, a little baby snake slithering across the trail. I stopped in my tracks and I think both of the dogs even noticed it.

Ick, I hate this time of the year.  I guess the good thing about all these trails is that the snakes stay out there and don't go near the houses (at least not mine anyway!).  

It's time to be careful out there.  I'm going to be a lot more cautious about letting the dogs off leash on the trails.  

Non-caching weekend

Well the intentions were good, but just never materialized. Since there wasn't any puppy classes this weekend, I thought I might go hiking to look for some caches, or at least get some urban ones nearby on Saturday. But no, nada, nothing...

Here are my excuses:

1. Its springtime and my allergies are bad, see all that white stuff on the trees that's blowing all over? Well, I'm allergic to it. I took the dogs out for a walk yesterday morning and came back with watery eyes and was all stuffed up. I'm also allergic to dogs, but I'm in denial about that since that would mean that I'd have to get rid of mine...not gonna do that. But I did clean the house a little more thoroughly on Saturday to pick up as much dog hair as I could. I've gotten kind of lazy about that since I got back from vacation. That sucked up more hours this weekend.

2. Since I started my new job, I've been going to work really early, which means I wake up at about 4:15am to get into the office by 6am. By the end of the week, I'm trashed and need a nap to catch up on sleep. I'm hoping this crazy schedule will only last through this month while I'm training with a guy in India. There goes another couple of hours... zzzzzzz

3. Hope and I did a hospital visit at Sutter this morning, which means she gets a bath, teeth brushed, nails dremeled, ears cleaned, etc., the whole nine yards. So while I'm doing her, I figure I might as well do the same for Zucchini since the bathtub/grooming table/dryer is all set up anyway. Then we go to the hospital. There goes another half a day.

4. Since Zucchini had to stay home crated for a few hours while I was with Hope and because I've been kind of lazy about taking her places, I took her with me all over Folsom to run errands and work on commands in places with more distractions. There goes another few hours...

But all is not lost for geocaching. I did solve about 3 puzzles caches this weekend to get the coordinates for the physical geocache. Now I just need to go out and find them!

Work and chores just get in the way of geocaching....maybe next weekend...

Urban Caching

Since I am now officially off of caching restriction (I finished my taxes last night...), I decided to take the dogs for a walk this morning. I saw a new trail by my house and decided to see where it went. Well, 6 miles later,...it's amazing how 6 miles on a flat trail is like nothing to me now after that grueling hike in Peru!

I went to a cache called "venom wall" that you had to scale a retaining wall to get the cache. Half way up (it must have been about 50 feet up) I heard some "muggles" up above so I just hung out on the wall. I looked down at the dogs below me as I had put them in a "sit" and they were both staring up at me like, "What the heck are you doing, you crazy person..." I probably looked a little like Spiderman hanging on the wall, and those people were going nowhere so I came back down. We continued our walk and found a cache down the trail and I figured I would get this cache on the way back. On the way back, there were more muggles on the trail. Ugh, guess we'll have to save this one for another day.

I took the dogs to another nearby park and we had to cross a swampy field (I was on "snake alert" the whole time) to get the cache, I was surprised to find a geocoin in the cache, so that was a bonus. Another nearby cache had a coin in it too, so I grabbed it even though I have already logged the cache.

It was actually really nice to get out and grab some caches today, its been way too long. Although I do have to admit, I'm less excited to go now that the snakes are out. My tally for the day was three caches, 2 geocoins, 6 miles of walking, and 2 happy dogs who were happy to get out. Yesterday was a boring day for them since I worked on my taxes all afternoon.