Trip to California and GEOWOODSTOCK VI

When thinking about how to put this trip into words, I thought at first I should do different stories to concentrate on the many different things I wanted to talk about. I know most of my readers are curious about the geocaching aspect, and I thought I would talk about that seperate from some of the travel and sightseeing adventures, but when I thought about it, I realized I couldn't write just about the caching without talking about the elements behind it - where we went, what we did, what we saw and experienced. So here is the entire version of the story of the weekend trip to (cold) sunny California, all aspects included.

Early Friday morning, my oldest son AJ (aka "happyhunter99") and I boarded a plane bound for San Francisco. I have been researching this trip for months now and hand-picking places to see and caches to find. We had about three or four hours in San Francisco proper before we needed to head across the Bay Bridge to beat the traffic out of town. In this time, I had plans to meet an old friend for lunch, some sights I wanted to see, and had bookmarked 13 caches. I know, it was a little ambitious, but isn't that just like me?
I was totally unprepared for certain slow-downs on this part of the trip. It took us an entire hour from the time we got off the plane to make our way through the airport, take the train to the rental car station, and get through the line to finally get our car. When I left the airport, I was stressed out already and thrown for a caching loop. I thought I had enough time to get to some locations before meeting my friend, but this was one of my first lessons in caching while traveling: sometimes the way the city looks on Google maps gives you absolutely no idea of how it is going to be to travel in. Downtown San Francisco is rather small - it is only seven miles by seven miles - but it takes a long time to navigate around because of the many pedestrians, one way streets, congestion, traffic lights, trains, and trams. When I first got in communication with my friend, I was only three miles from the Haight district where I wanted to stop first, and two miles from where I needed to meet her, and I had thirty minutes. Plenty of time!

Not in San Francisco time, apparently. After a failed attempt at a cache, a brief look around Haight-Ashbury, somehow taking a wrong turn that took me on a freeway I couldn't get off until I was miles down the road, and struggling to find a cheap but close parking lot, I ended up being 45 minutes late to our meeting spot - Mario's Bohemian near Washington Square. It was really great to see Amy again (Old Friends Episode II). I first met Amy in kindergarten. We were in the same class, and she was one of the tallest girls. I remember she had to stand in the back when we did our class photo. We ended up becoming close friends in junior high. She moved to the Bay area when we were around sixteen, and I have only seen her a handful of times since - twice she visited us (Mari and I) in Spring, once we visited her in Austin, Jennifer and I visited her in Boulder during our college years, and only in Austin twice since.

After dining in Marios, we introduced Amy to geocaching with a cache right across the street, In the Square. We were walking down the street after this and Amy and I briefly talked about my location and memory theory, and she tells me, "And it's not just location, that mind of yours is like a steel trap!" Ironically, she had to remind me what I came to this specific area for, the main reason I chose to fly to San Francisco for this trip: City Lights bookstore!
It was a short walk to the indie bookstore founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953. Ferlinghetti later founded City Lights Publishing, which published Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems, among others.The upstairs wing has a beat section that baffles the mind. I chose a Kerouac biography through his letters and a pocket book of beat poetry, which seemed fitting. Amy caught this picture of me shoudler to shoulder with my favorite writers: Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. After this she took some pics of me in Jack Kerouac alley. I could bore you with photos but let's move on. This ain't no Kerouac On the Road show. We drove through Chinatown on our way out . As we pulled on to the Bay Bridge, I felt the tension start sliding off my body. The traffic was not bad at all, we just breezed along, so I suggested we stop at Treasure Island. There are quite a few caches there, but I only bookmarked this one: What A Sight! It was a virtual cache, meaning there is no actual container to find, but you have to obtain some information from the area to answer a question or two. After this, we were booking along, grabbing three quick and dirty finds, before getting stuck in this terrible traffic along I-80 between Vallejo and Davis. We covered probably five miles in an hour, I am guessing. Sucked. AJ was sleeping and I was calling people, looking to escape this madness.At this point, I am really behind schedule to make the Friday Night Meet And Greet event. An Event cache is one where finders get credit for showing up at the coordinates for some fellowship, meeting each other face to face. Suddenly the lanes are clear, and I start trying to make up for lost time. We reach a point where I am anxiously watching the nine miles away compass on my GPS start going up. I get up to ten miles away and realize I missed my exit, and took the residential area main artery back up to where I needed to catch the other highway. This cost me more valuable time.

AJ and I arrive at the Meet and Greet as everything is being packed up. They let us buy the last plates, and we eat cold hamburgers at a silent picnic table and wonder why nobody is talking. I am flashing all the signals: a warm smile on eye contact, a question, a friendly interest, but mostly the groups are contained among themselves. Mind you, at this point most people have left to go caching. I wish we were, but the kid was pooped.
We check into our hotel in Rocklin. We had gotten six caches (counting the event as one) and needed seven more to reach our 1K milestone. AJ watched TV as I plotted and schemed. I decided on a LetterBox Hybrid called The Color of Roseville.Letterbox Hybrid: a cache in which one uses clues instead of coordinates. In some cases, however, a letterbox has coordinates, and the owner has made it a letterbox and a geocache (hybrid). In letterboxing, you stamp the log with your personal stamp and stamp your journal with the one in the cache.

I didn't have a letterbox hybrid icon on my profile yet so I decided to give it a try. This one was really fun. But we had to get there first, and that meant doing six caches between 7:30 and 8:30 in the morning. It was drizzling, damp, and cold this morning, but we bared it and saw some cool caches. This one, Cosmos, was a micro near some interesting sculpture.

Finally, we were at 999 and it was time. I found a parking spot, then moved to another, and drove around a third before parking. It just didn't seem right, and as we walked from parking, we thought we were on someone's private property and were trying to hurry. Turns out once you get to the starting coords, they lead you right back to that spot. We walked right past the cache on our way in unknowingly. We had to look for certain types of trees, then six boulders, and it was behind the last boulder, right near a parking lot. I had made a sign with the clues sheet I had with me, but of course you can't read the big "1000" on there.

We were going to go back to our hotel after this but I suddenly wanted to make it to the event. It had started already and I was anxious to pick up my packet. We found some caches along the way, and other cachers as well, starting at the first cache we stopped at. A German man recently from San Jose ended up doing six caches with us along the road, and we met up with another family along the way as well. Four caches were along an idyllic coutnry road, complete with bubbly brook and dusty trails.
A lone cowdog chased our tires. I wondered how tired he would be at the end of the day.
The last cache before the event, coming into town at the Dairy King or something like, I briefly looked and didn't feel like doing it. It's a game, and sometimes I don't like to play. Sometimes I am no good at it. The German and the dad and boys didn't stop at this one, and I was walking away muttering something I said to AJ this morning about how if I am no good at it, why do I play? But just then another group of cachers came up and suddenly I spied it and walked right to it, making me look like the hero when previously I just looked silly.Finally we pull up and get ready to enter the festival. Here is the main event, GeoWoodstock VI, held at Bishop's Pumpkin Farm out in Wheatland, CA. The pumpkin farm was the perfect venue for this. There was plenty to do and see, and it was so large and spread out you were never bumping into people. It had the feel of an outdoor festival in your hometown, where you never know when you might run into someone you vaguely remember. The live music was good, and the company choice.

They also had lots of activities for children to do. AJ was given a letterboxing sheet, in which he had to follow clues to fill the squares on his page with unique stamps found inside a container hidden in each of the areas of the farm. He panned for gold, went down a large slide, checked out the petting zoo, and made friends with a boy named Will that he wanted to follow around all day. At every point the first hour, I was talking to people, trying to fill in my Bingo squares. At geocaching events, they often give you a bingo card as an icebreaker, where only those who have had the experience listed on the square may sign, things like "hiked more than five miles for a cache" and "Has over 5000 finds". By asking people to sign your squares, you are learning something interesting about them right off the bat. I met all kinds of people that way and had many random coversations that started with that Bingo card. I turned it in midday in exchange for tickets for a drawing later in the afternoon.

I found the petting zoo to be the biggest draw for us. There were clever little signs on each exhibit telling stories about the animals. I took all kinds of pics, but this is probably one of the cutest.

We walked around the vendors for a while. It was so hard to resist, and then, once I decided to buy something, to choose. I ended up buying a coffee travel mug with the geocaching logo on it, cache stickers, three nano caches, the premiere issue of Geocacher Magazine, and some other little things for a grand total of $25. I also got to see the "holy grail" of caching - the legendary "Can O Beans". This can is the only remaining item from the first geocache hidden in May of 2000 by Dave Ullmer. This can is kept, as you see, in a hermetically sealed container and supposedly it is a travel bug, although when I asked about this, the people at the booth shrugged their shoulders at me.

Around midday, we left the festival to go grab some caches. The organizers had hidden six new ones for the event with a "card run" activity, and for each card you brought back, you got another ticket for a chance to win an item. We ended up grabbing about thirteen caches in an hour, which is great timing for our team.

It was the funniest thing to me to see the geocachers descend upon this tiny little town. They probably thought we were nuts. Every cache I pulled up at, I was either meeting people there or holding a cache as someone drove up. Great hordes of cachers were stopping along roadsides to get out and look around landscaping and signs for tiny little camouflaged containers. Often there was this "telephone game" moment, a relay of information about where the cache was hidden. You didn't want to be the last one holding the cache, because then you were responsible for explaining to the person who would drive up as you sign the log where to put the cache back. I met so many people while out caching that day, most of whom were from San Jose or somewhere else in the Bay Area. When I came back, we found Will again and AJ and Will played around the little farm.

Right when I had walked in, I saw MaxB On the River manning the travel bug station. I came by to introduce myself to him. I had a geocoin that wanted to go to him and he was carrying one of my bugs, Travelin' Tin Man. He gave me my bug back, and later asked what I was going to do with it now. Isn't that the burning question? I participated in the travel bug exchange midday. I ended up dropping ten traveling items in the bug exchange. The Texas bin only had two items in it. I ended up mostly taking bugs bound for Florida, where I am going in about two weeks. I was so mad at myself, too, because I had left my sheet in the hotel with the phone numbers of the people who were carrying my bugs. They said if they didn't hear from me, they would drop them in the Texas bin, but I didn't see them or hear about them all day. I want to talk more about what happened to my bugs and the bugs I dropped, but will save that for another entry. But here was the coolest TB of the day: Signal the Frog.
I had started getting hungry midday, but we had the late meal ticket. Quite a line was forming, so we opted to take the train ride instead. It took us past some perfect pigs, goats at play, beautiful ponies, almond trees, and the cachers sitting down to eat. When we got back, it was time to get in line. I showed off my First 500 Geocaching Scrapbook for discovering and talked to the people next to me. As I walked to the trash can, I realized I was looking at two people who fit the description of Rock&Crystal, part of the team responsible for bringing you this year's GeoWoodstock and who also hid a cache I was the FTF on four months after they hid it.

I walked up to them and introduced myself, and just then MaxB On the river approached, so I got a great pic of the two "celebrity" geocaching couples. MaxB is the top travel bug mover in the world. They take some awesome pictures of the bugs and tell little travel jokes, and they tag all the TBs they move. Rock&Crystal and the other members of the GeoWoodstock VI Planning Committee deserve a big hand for this one.

We stayed until about five or six pm, and then we took off and grabbed caches on the way back to the hotel room. We ran into people all over the place at first - nothing like a line of seven cars all heading down the same deserted road to head for the same remote spot. Our grand total of finds for the day was 32, which is our personal best daily record.

I had wanted to go to the GeoCoin SwapMeet event after we rested for about an hour, but after bouncing around for 45 minutes, AJ announced he was so tired and wanted to go to sleep. We had a big day the next day. We woke up early and drove north to Lincoln for a breakfast with the geocachers at the Waffle House as a last event before heading out of town. I heard all about some cool puzzle caches in San Jose. We left around 8:30 and stopped at one cache along the way, then checked out of our hotel and began our great caching road trip back to San Francisco.

We started out in the town of Auburn and worked our way into the Auburn State Recreation Area along Highway 49. We found many caches along this highway and the entire drive. Some of the highlights were:

Down Murphy's Driveway and Murphy's Gate: right when you enter the recreation area, these little caches were along a trail that was marked with a warning sign about mountian lions and rattlesnakes. The mountain lion thing had AJ all freaked out and he didn't want to help me look for the cache. Here is a view from the cache site for one of them on the left.

On the right we have the North Fork of the American River.

I actually moved the Jeep named after this river and had looked it up on Google Earth during that time, never dreaming I would see it in real life. Just gorgeous. We drove south along a windy Hwy 49 though "Gold Rush" country. We learned all kinds of history along the way and felt like we had gone back a hundred years. We stopped at caches that were small hikes up in the sierras and park and grabs along the highway.

The caches in this area I would highly recommend:
Bessie's Booty:

A multi-cache is one whose coordinates lead to to a starting point, from which you must decipher one or more further points until finding the cache. At the coordinates for this one, we found a treasure map with clues to the final destination, where Bessie hid her booty before walking the plank. You had to count out paces to the cache and AJ and I had a lot of fun with that. It was a true pirate cache filled to the brim with booty. We traded our coins for their coins.

An Earthcache is one that leads you to an area where you have to answer questions or perform a task related to the geography of the area. We continued to cache our way to Amador City, where we ate our lunch and answered a virtual. If you dine in Amador City, bring cash with you, because they don't take cards and you will have to drive to Sutter Creek, two miles away, for the closest ATM to get your cache. The food can be pricey, too. At the diner we stopped at, a hot dog plate, cheeseburger plate, a root beer float, and an iced tea ran us $16. On the way to Sutter Creek, we stopped at a goldmine, also an earthcache called Gold! Gold! Gold! At Sutter Creek!

This was our first earthcache. We had to take a picture with a sign and answer a question about gold. I told AJ we were not going to do the mine tour but he could pick from panning for gold flakes, gems, or pick out a geode to have cracked open. He chose the geode, which turned out a soft pretty white inside.
After this, we headed towards Highway 88. I accidentally went the wrong way on 88 at first and we grabbed a couple caches that way before I realized my error, and so we turned around and began grabbing caches again. When we got past Lodi, we took 12 heading west towards Fairfield, then cut to I-80 heading back to San Francisco. There was a lot of dead time along this drive and we entered the much-dreaded DNF (Did-Not-Find) zone along the way. Luckily that zone did not last long, but it led straight into Don't-Wanna-Cache-No-More zone.

Our favorite cache was one off 12 called Wind Farms. We had never seen wind turbines up close. We decided they must be doing a pretty good job growing wind on that farm because it sure was gusty out here.

I was considering stopping in Fairfield overnight when I first planned this trip (well, once I realized the road I wanted to take originally, the Mormon Emmigrant Trail, was still closed), but we had wanted to see more of San Francisco and it was only 5:30 pm, so we kept driving. I needed more cash for parking, so I was looking for a hotel with high speed internet near a Bank of America, and I found just the place in San Pablo. We were eleven miles away from downtown San Fran, just over the Bay Bridge. We checked in and relaxed for a while, bathed the road and caching grime off of us, logged some finds, and then headed out to cache and dine in the City.
We got a couple more cache finds this evening, including a couple virtuals and one of the best traditional caches of the trip, Poet's Peak. This cache, which celebrates a famous poet of San Francisco, treats one to a beautiful view of the city from on top of a hill. We had parked uphill, so getting to the cache was fairly easy, but getting back up to our parking nearly wiped me out. The cache was great, very well-camoed. It is right there in front of everyone's face but no one would never notice it. We had to use the clue to find it.

We were very hungry, so we headed down to the Fisherman's Wharf area to dine. Amy had said she would give us a recommendation, to avoid the tourist trap places, and she texted me a couple, but we fell for the glittery lights anyway. The food was terrible, but I really enjoyed the experience, both in the restaurant and out. We walked around the Wharf area and bought some souvenirs from a shop before heading back to San Pablo.

In the morning, we woke up in time to check out the city some more before catching our flight. We did a virtual or two and headed for the great tourist destination in San Francisco - the Golden Gate Bridge. We walked along the ped walk on the Bridge and took photos in the fog.

Overall, I think we had a great trip. We managed to grab a grand total of 64 geocaches, including two with icons we didn't already have. No one got hurt. We didn't lose any of our portable electronics. We learned a lot about history and geography in this part of the world. We each got the offical t-shirt and geocoin. We came home with a stash of sig items, nano caches, pathtags, pictures, info cards, travel bugs, and memories to last a lifetime. You just couldn't ask for anything more.