Now this is what I call a micro park, this park is maybe twenty foot square but it’s got a nice bench in beautiful little neighborhood. This hide was a bit hard for me to find, I figured I knew where it would be but it just had to be in one of the last places that I looked.
This was a very challenging puzzle for me but one that I enjoyed a lot. I had to resort to some help from some of my fellow geocachers to get pointed in the right direction. This geocache brings with it a bit of sadness, the hider of this cache, Motogrll, was killed in a motorcycle accident a while back and it always makes me think of my own mortality a bit when I find one of her caches. This is an offset cache, solving the puzzle brought you to something that gave you the final coords which were nearby. At some point the offset went missing and people had to resort to asking previous finders the final location. To help people out I created a page where you can enter the coordinates that you get when you solve the puzzle and it will give you the final location. You can find this page right here
I had tried for this one in the past but was thwarted because this cache is inside of a park like area which you can only access during business hours. The location for this cache is actually pretty cool. It’s located at the Berkeley steam trains which is a fully functional small scale steam powered train. I had come here a couple years ago for my Nephew’s birthday and it’s a cool place and the little kids absolutely love it.
My brother had called me asking me if I wanted to meet him to grab a few caches. Geocaching is always more fun with someone else so I of course said sure. I picked up this cache on my way to meeting him. This cache is hidden at a memorial for the Oakland fire of 1991. I remember the day of the fire very clearly and it was a quite a scary day. I actually knew someone who died in the fire and was killed in the are right near the memorial. I can’t help but think of her every time I drive by.
Having never walked on this trail before it was a very cool place to go. Finding the cache was pretty simple but it was worth the walk to see this beautiful area.
This was a pretty simple grab for me, it was pretty much in the first place that I looked. I did really enjoy walking along the trail though, I had no idea that it was here and it’s such a beautiful area.
I was able to find a parking place pretty close to the geocache so the hike wasn’t too bad. I did still have to go up a pretty steep hill but it wasn’t too bad. I was quite happy when I opened up the cache and found a Red Jeep Travel Bug, my very first. I didn’t have anything to leave for the Jeep but I took it anyway, I just couldn’t resist. It was kinda funny, someone had gone out of their way to take the Jeep over 100 miles away from the Bay Area and then someone, who never logged it, brought the Jeep back and put it into this cache.
I had tried to do this multi-cache a few weeks back but at the first stage there was a man out on his porch who was looking at me like I had just keyed his car so I didn’t want to linger long. At the location is there is an old time gas burning lamp which is kinda neat. I was able to go back today and there was no one looking like they wanted to beat me up so I was able to get the information for the second location. I made the very short drive up to stage two and quickly had the cache in hand.
This cache is located across the same park as Reed Access. This one was a tough find for me. The posted coords were off by about 20 feet and there are a ton of different possible hiding places. I finally ended up walking away a bit until I had a clear view of the sky and then followed my GPS again. This time it took me to the right spot and I quickly had the cache in hand.
This is one of my brothers caches so I had to see if I could figure it out. This one isn’t too hard and once you figure out how to do it the pieces quickly fall into place. I was in Concord for the day and decided I was going to do some caching while I was out there. I followed some previous cachers trails to the wrong side of the hiding location and wasted a bit of time looking around. After I tried looking on the other side I quickly had the cache in hand. It was a fun little puzzle.
I have driven by this park so many times but I had never actually walked through it. This was a pretty easy find, the GPS coordinates were spot on and the cache was right where I thought it would be.
It was starting to get late and my friend and I were both hungry but we couldn’t resist doing one more cache and this one was right on the way. We were bad boys and entered this park after it was closed, probably not the smartest thing but oh well, we didn’t get caught. Once again this cache really made me regret not bringing my flashlight. By now it was very dark outside and there was no mechanical light out in this park and with it being surrounded by water there wasn’t really any city light to help either. We resorted to using the lights from our cellphones again which works surprisingly well actually. It took us awhile to find this cache but my friend finally spotted it.
We continued our way down this outcrop o’ land an’ made our way t’ this Geocache. This cache faces a beautiful harbor an’ wi’ th’ lights an’ th’ water th’ area looked beautiful. We got th’ general area an’ started huntin’. Me buddy be th’ one who came up wi’ th’ find. After findin’ ‘t we then had t’ figure ou’ how t’ open th’ thin’. Thankfully we did.
From the name of this Geocache I was thinking maybe I would swing inside and grab myself a double-double but that wasn’t the case. This is a very bold hide, the cache itself is hidden almost in plain sight. It did take us a little bit to find it but once I did spot it I couldn’t believe that the cache has lasted as long as it has.
We had to make a bit of a judgment call on this one. The area that the cache was hidden in was behind some orange fencing for construction that is going on in the area. We looked around and didn’t see any safety issues with us sneaking in to the area and there wasn’t really anyone around to catch us so we decided to go for it. Thankfully this was a nice easy one so we didn’t have to linger long in the area.
My friend who I first went caching with way back in 2003 was heading over to my place to hangout and he wanted to do something a bit different than we normally do so I asked him if he wanted to go caching, surprisingly he said yes. I picked out a spot, which happens to be right where my friend works, that had a nice cluster of caches that we could hopefully grab in one trip. When we were leaving my house the sun was about to go down, because I am retarded I didn’t bring my flashlight thinking that it wouldn’t be needed. Boy was I wrong.
We drove out to this cache, which offers some incredible views of the bay, and arrived right as the sun was going down. The lack of a flashlight immediately reared its ugly head. This cache is a serious pain in the butt. It is hidden along a walkway that is bordered by big rocks. Of course the cache is hidden in the rocks which means that there are roughly 137,916 different hiding places. The fading light only made things worse. We spent a long time looking for this one, eventually using the screens on our cell phones as type of flashlight. We were just about to give up when my friend finally made the grab.
I had tried for this one on an earlier date but there were a ton of muggles around because there was a performance of some sort going on so I decided to come back at a later date. Well, that later date was today. Still hanging out with my brother we went out to find this multi-cache. As we were looking for the second stage of this cache we bumped into fellow cacher J5 Crew . It’s always fun running into other Geocachers when you are out on the hunt. The three of us decided to go and look for the final stage together and J5 Crew made the grab quickly.
This cache will give you a nice little work out, you have to go down the hill to get to the first stage, then back up the hill for the second and then back down for the final. We had also parked up at the top so we had to go back up one more time to get to the car.
Caching has brought me to a few of these rock parks and I really like them. It’s fun climbing all over them and exploring. This one had a particularly nice view of the San Francisco bay as well. There was one thing I really didn’t like about this cache though. The area that the actual cache was hidden in was covered in thorny blackberry vines. I was just wearing shorts and a T-shirt but I decided to brave it and dive into the thick of it. My GPSr was having a hard time in the area so it was jumping around quite a bit which wasn’t making me very happy. I ended up trying to navigate my way through the blackberry vines for a good 15-20 minutes. Thankfully, I was able to do it all without drawing any blood. My GPSr started pointing me to a place I hadn’t explored very thoroughly so I went and investigated. It was then that I noticed a likely hiding and spot and as luck would have it there it was.
I carefully made my way out of the blackberry jungle and was happy to be back up on top of the rock.
I was sitting at home working, I had just finished something that I had been working on for awhile when I got an email from Geocaching.com telling me that a new cache had been placed in Alameda. I was ready for a break and wanted to get out of the house for awhile and I am always up for trying to get a first to find so I packed up my stuff and headed out.
When I arrived at the posted parking spot for the cache I saw a pickup truck that had a geocaching sticker on it so I figured I was out of luck as far as getting a first to find. I hopped out of the car and headed to the cache area.
This was a nine stage multi-cache. Thankfully, it sounds much worse than it really is. All of the stages are very close together. This is actually a pretty clever cache, the location is an old campground, each of the different stages brings you to a zone of the campground and these zones are numbered. So you go to each stage of and get the number and then at the end you figure out a pretty basic puzzle using these numbers and get the final stage location.
When I first arrived on the scene I saw a man with a young boy wondering around and I made the assumption that they were fellow cachers and I figured they were the owners of the truck with the Geocaching sticker on it. I called out to them and said “What stage are you guys on?” the man looked at me like I was off my rocker and I quickly just tried to move on and forget that I made an ass out of myself.
I went to all of the different stages collecting the information that I needed and then sat down to figure out the puzzle. I ran into a bit of a problem at this point. Either GSAK or Cachemate screwed up when it exported the cache info to my Treo. The puzzle page has this line on it: Cache is located at AEIBFIC CDGHBA for whatever reason my Treo just said: Cache is located at AEIBFIC. I was pretty sure I was doing the puzzle correctly as with the fragment that I did have I was able to get the North/South coordinate but I couldn’t figure out the East/West coordinate. I tried just walking along the north/south line but that didn’t work (It would have if I had looked harder though). I ended up sitting down and puzzling over it, I didn’t know at the time that I was missing part of the puzzle, yes I had my suspicions, but I didn’t know for sure.
As I was sitting the man with the young boy approached me, I got ready to explain the whole Geocaching thing as you find yourself doing that a lot in this sport but then he surprised me. It turned out that it was the owner of the cache. When it went live he and his son came down to see if they could witness the first to find. We talked about the puzzle and I showed him what was going on and he confirmed my suspicions that I was missing some of the information. He really helped me out here, he called his house and had his daughter go online and check the cache page and then she gave me the rest of the puzzle. With the rest in hand I was able to quickly figure out the east/west coords and shortly after that I found the cache and best of all I was the first person to find it. There is nothing quite like finding a virgin logbook.
After signing the log book I spent a while talking with gcherry talking about geocaching and some of the cool stuff we had found. It was actually kind of funny, we had found a quite a few of his caches on 8/5/2007 on our marathon caching day. In fact I had actually emailed him regarding one of his caches. We ended up talking for probably 20 minutes and had a good time doing so.
I considered going for a couple more caches but I decided to just call it a day and headed home.
After my second DNF over at Purple Vs. Turtles I decided I was going to do a bit more caching and get a few finds under my belt. I was looking at my GPS and I noticed a nice cluster of caches on this little peninsula area. I later found out that this peninsula is called the Albany bulb. I headed on over to the area and found some parking. Most of these caches will require a decent amount of hiking. This is a great place to bring your dog if you happen to have one though, you can let them run off leash.
I had never been out on the bulb before and it was a very cool place to go find. This cache isn’t very far out, but there are actually two that are closer to the parking. I followed my GPS to the spot and I found some large rocks that were covered in graffiti and some large industrial sized junk. I figured I was in the right spot and started looking. This one was tough for me, of course once I actually found it I slapped myself in the head but I spent a good 10-15 minutes looking for this one. Reading the hint really helps on this one.
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