When I first arrived at the cache site I was a bit mortified, there was ivy everywhere and I ivy hides are never pleasant. Thankfully the cache wasn’t hidden in the ivy and I was able to find it pretty quickly.
This cache is located in downtown Orinda right near the movie theater. I was there on a Saturday afternoon and I was expecting to have to deal with a bunch of muggles but the area was surprisingly empty. With the help of the hint this is a very quick find.
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.
I had departed company with my brother from our day of caching in Briones and as I was driving home I decided to pick up one more cache. This is another of those caches that I have driven by countless times. This is a cute little multi cache. At the posted coordinates you find some writing on the wall and then solve a quick and easy puzzle which gives you the coords to the final location. By the time I found the cache it was quite dark outside so I didn’t even notice the in theme hiding spot until a week or so later when I drove by the area again in daylight. I don’t think I would have ever noticed this object if it weren’t for this geocache, pretty cool.
This cache was at the trail head where my brother I parked for our caching trip in Briones. It was a nice easy find and a good start to our day of geocaching in the park.
This is kind of a tough hide. It is right in front of a store, a burrito place actually, one that I will have to try some day because I love a good burrito. Because of this location dealing with muggles may be an issue. I was fortunate that I was here on a Sunday and the place was closed so there was no one around. I spent a while looking for this one and then when I found it the name finally made sense. A nice clever hide.
This was a cache that for some reason I kept on putting off. It was super close to my house, the Bart caches are usually pretty easy finds and can be done really quickly but for whatever reason I had never bothered to pick this one up. Well, tonight I did!
Another nice quick park and grab. The plaque near ground zero has some pretty interesting history on it as well.
A nice simple park and grab in Oakland. This area has some nice views and a bit of history about Oakland.
After splitting up with my brother and grabbing a couple other geocaches in the area it was time to head home. What I didn’t know was that there was a Cal football game going on and traffic was absolutely horrendous. Because of this I decided to get creative and find a different way home, and what do you know, there was a cache along the way.
This is one of those cool caches which shows you something that chances are you had no idea existed. Up in the Oakland hills, where this cache is located, there was once a tunnel that went through the mountain. At this spot was where the tunnel started.
Continuing down the Bailey Walk I came up to the is geocache, the fifth in the series. I got pretty lucky with this one, it was in one of the very first places that I looked! The hides in this series continue to be unique and fun. They are a good balance of challenging while still not being really hard.
Another clever geocache on the Bailey Walk. This cache probably would have been a lot harder for me to find if I hadn’t had an identical container sitting on my computer desk at the time of finding this one. They sure make good containers. Since I recognized the container for what it really was I spotted this one super quickly.
The second geocache in the Bailey walk series. I found this cleverly hidden cache pretty quickly. The Bailey walk series was off to a good start in my mind. The first two caches were cleverly hidden and were a challenge without being overly hard.
I was about to call it a day when I noticed a nice string of caches all in a nice little cluster. I love being able to go to an area and walk to a bunch of caches so I just couldn’t resist. There are seven different caches in the Bailey Walk series and this was the first one. This one gave me some trouble. The hint states that the cache is magnetic so I looked around at all the metallic objects in the area and kept coming up empty. I continued my search and then finally spotted the cache. The cache is indeed magnetic but I had no idea that the thing it was sticking to was metallic!
This one was super easy for me. I walked up to the area, which was in a parking lot, and I spotted the cache when I was still a good 10 feet away. Sometimes it’s nice when that happens, especially when you are in a parking lot.
You can see the general area that this cache is going to be hidden from a long way off. The name of the cache doesn’t lie, there is a giant there. I got lucky with this one, the geocache was in the first spot that I looked and the GPS coords were right on.
This wasn’t an easy find. I spent a good five minutes looking around before I finally located it. The cache container was a new type for me and pretty cool. The only hard part was trying to get the logbook out of it, it gave me some serious trouble.
I had to run out to Concord to do a favor for my brother and sister in law. The favor was picking up my nephew from pre-school. As luck would have it, this virtual cache was visible from his school. I headed over and counted the stairs as required and was on my way. This tower is quite impressive, according to the cache owner it is in danger of being torn down.
This was another easy grab, unfortunately there was a muggle that was hanging around and not going anywhere. I tried to be sly as I could but he seemed to be watching me. Oh well, hopefully if he saw what I was doing and investigates he will be cool about it.
After going to the movies I decided to pick up some of the park caches on my way home. There are tons of these geocaches in the Berkeley parks and I had barely gotten any of them. This one I almost had the chance to get a FTF on but Berkeley parks close at 10 and I got the notification at around 10:15 and I decided not to push my luck. This one was very easy for me, I spotted the cache from about 50 feet away. The location of it makes it easy for a stealth grab too.
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