Caching in Half Moon Bay

Last Sunday, I spent the day caching in Half Moon Bay. I have never cached there so it was a brand new territory to explore. The highlight of the day (and purpose for the trip) was the Peninsula UnEvent event, celebrating Vaccine and mjp303's 2000 finds milestone.
The event was to start at 1 pm at Cameron's and I had enough time to go after a bunch of caches before the event. Since it is always a pain to cross Hwy 1 (when there is no traffic light), I decided to start at the northest side of the Bay and then work my way South along the coast, getting closer to Cameron's.
The first cache was one of M&J's caches (Who would? Driftwood!)... Hey, a cache, and a pun (in theme mind you), it could only be a good start. Except that it almost cost me a ticket for illegal parking... The closest parking lot was full (it is apparently a popular area) so I parked along the
road. I didn't see any sign, and I parked just behind many other cars. I found the cache quickly which allowed me to be back as quickly, to jump in my car and leave before the Sheriff had started working on it (he was ticketting the last car of the line, two cars away from mine...). I grabbed a few caches here and there. Purple People have an interesting series ("this stop...") related to the old railroad system. It is quite educative. I enjoyed going after two caches in this series.
Other nice places to visit are the areas near Tsunami Rangers and Beyond the end.
The event at Cameron's was very successful. I'm pretty sure than more than 70 people showed up. What a nice place for such an event. There was a nice raffle and many people (including me) won something. I got a bag with two pins, one of which Marky was nice enough to trade for a coin (thanks to Joani). LeChuck's show during the raffle was awesome. What an entertainment that was! After the event (I was one of the last to leave), I went for more caches in the area.

A fine one was near the little downtown Half Moon Bay jail. I have been in this town several
times before. I have never noticed this jail. Very nice.
Another interesting one is Digitalfish's Ferrosaurus. It is located in a place I have driven by several times but never cared to stop "the Spanish town". They have all sorts of garden ornaments, including gigantic iron sculptures of... dinausors... Pretty cool.
Event included, I found 16 new caches during the day. And the good news is that there are plenty more left. I'll come back, with wife and kids this time.

The National Map Corps

Few weeks ago, I "enlisted" in the National Map Corps. Basically, it is a volunteer job consisting in collecting GPS data in a defined area to help producing the National Map of the USA. This is a project managed by the USGS. Closer to Waymarking than to Geocaching...
For the first time yesterday, I went out in the field and spent about 2 hours driving around in a small part of my assigned area (the Los Gatos quadrangle).
I covered only a tiny bit of my quadrangle : the area delimited by Harwood, Leigh, Little Branham (along Hwy 85) and Blossom Hill. I drove through absolutely each and every street, looking for special buildings such as schools, churches, community centers, etc... (USGS provided me with a complete list of features to look for).
It is a pretty tiring job, made of plenty of verrry slow driving and approximative u-turns.
During these two hours, I marked only 5 spots : 3 schools and 2 churches.
Although the schools were on the quadrangle map that the USGS sent me (that was last revised in 1980), the 2 churches were not so it feels like I'm going to help bring more detail to the National Map. Yay!
The collected data are supposed to be sent to USGS once the whole quandrangle is covered, in a spreadsheet format. I'm trying to really use Google Spreadsheet for the first time. I'll update the file after each data collection session.
The most current version of my data file is here. I'm making it public in the hope that people reading this blog and who know the Los Gatos quadrangle area can verify that I didn't miss anything important.
This morning, I was looking at the route I took yesterday and I noticed with horror that I totally missed a few streets. Even though I doubt that there is any feature of interest there, I will need to go back and check, just to be absolutely sure.
Looks like it's gonna take for ever, hopefully less than the one year hoped by USGS ;-)

I love pre-work caching

This morning, I had to be at the other side of San Jose for a training... But to be there at 8:30 without wasting time stuck in the traffic, you'd rather leave early. And of course, it means that you arrive early. This is the dilema that Bay Area commuters face every day.
Fortunately, there is Geocaching now, and it is a great way to spend an hour before starting your work day.
I had enough time to find 4 caches, 2 of which were particularily interesting:
GC11ARJ was a very well crafted puzzle, all in theme with the cache. It seems that the owners, the candcfamilY produce a lot of interesting puzzle caches, even though they are often out of my main area. I need to keep an eye on what they're doing. It seems to be quite entertaining.
The second interesting cache was GCVC4M. It is called SiRF-Cache and for a good reason : It is hidden on the SiRF Technology property, with the proper permission. SiRF chips are the main chips used in GPS receivers so this cache is all about GPS. It is a big cache with a gigantic camo. Finders can leave with a SiRF chip. Very cool.
After this brief caching session, plus a stop by Starbucks, I had plenty of energy for the day, which was a very interesting one.

An early Easter...

It looks like the Easter Coin Bunny spent some time in the sunny Bay Area today, dropping two eggs in the South Bay.

Around lunch time, one of my geobuddies kindly made me aware of a cache not too far from work, where the Bunny just left a little Easter present - an egg-shaped geocoin.
It took me a few minutes to re-arrange my schedule for the day and to decide to go for it. After all, wasn't the fact that I exceptionnally had my GPSr with me today, a sign?

15 minutes later, I was parking 20 meters from the cache, and all the cars going by looked suspicious to me... I quickly found the cache (I read the hint before leaving) and a nice little plastic egg was laying next to it... Woohoo!!!!

As I was signing the log, something caught my attention in the "wilderness", about 50 yards away... Could it be...? Yes, that's a bunny, lurking in the shadows, watching me enjoy my newfound coin... That could only be the Easter Coin Bunny... no doubt... He didn't know I saw him so I stealthily drew my cell phone and starting shooting...
The picture is of very bad quality but the ECB can clearly be seen.

Thanks for the coin Mr Bunny!

Eventful weekend

No caches found this weekend but two geocaching events - one attended, one hosted...

On Saturday, we celebrated Saint Patrick's day by attending the Kiss me I'm (not Jeremy) Irish! event hosted by Marky and Joani. Lucie was a little disappointed not to see her friends the Lil' Checkers (they were out of town) but made a new friend (mfc the story teller). She kept eating his chips and inquiring about his missing finger.
I came home with two new geocoins : the new "Kiss me I'm Irish coin" minted just for the event, and a "California Poppy micro", which is not new but which I've always found cool. I don't know yet whether I'm going to activate them or not.

On Sunday night, I hosted a "GoogleEarth" event at the Los Altos library. I think about 40 people showed up. A very challengig but interesting event to host. People in the audience came from different backgrounds. Some were software engineers, some were not familar with computers... This made it difficult to properly address everyone at once. I think my French accent also made things a little tougher.
But the worse part was the library network that was shut down at the library closing time. Yes, the room is available on Sunday night until 11 pm. Yes, the library has wireless internet access. But I incorrevtly inferred from this that the network was available until 11 pm. It was shut down at 6 pm. Ugh...
Fortunately, EyeOb had a web access through his cell phone and I could finish presenting the course material from his PC. This saved the day. However, we could not do the "hands on" part I really wanted to do. I'm now thinking of hosting an other event sometimes this Fall, where there will be no formal "course", only a "hands-on" workshop...

But for now, I'll focus on other and more immediate geocaching projects : setting up a hike around Devil's Hole in Las Trampas park, and continue designing my future geocoin.

Weekend in Tahoe

This weekend, we went to Lake Tahoe. Vero wanted to check out the resorts and Lucie wanted to see a real winter, complete with snow and everything that lives on it (penguins and polar bears).
We grabbed an interesting first cache in Eldorado Hills: Pony Express # 2 Duroc House. There was no traffic and we arrived in Tahoe at the beginning of Saturday afternoon. We looked for a snow park for the kids to play in the snow near Fallen Leaf Lake and it turned out that Lexxy's Kids Kache was only 400 meters from where we parked. Cool! Snow play and a cache. What I didn't realize is that 400 meters walking in more than 1 foot of snow, at an altitude of 1900 meters is pretty exhausting, especially with a kid in tow. Lucie and I finally made it and found our very first snow-burried cache. We did some trading and went back to do more snow angels.
We then crossed Hwy 91 to stroll along Taylor creek and grab the very promising multi named Stream Profile Nature Walk. Too much snow made this a difficult cache to get to, and the most interesting stages of the interpretive trail were closed. I eventually got to sign the log.
Pretty tired, we decided to pass on the two nearby caches, check-in at the motel, have a nice fondue at the Swiss Chalet, and call it a day. But not without playing a little bit the slot machines. No luck at Harrah's, I crossed the street and went to Harvey's... I played one of their 25 cents machines and got quite lucky since the machine decided to spit out 750 credits, more than $185. I cashed out and went to bed, with enough money to pay for the motel room and the dinner at the Swiss Chalet. Cool!
One of the things I wanted to do in Tahoe was to find a cache in Nevada and this is the first thing we did on Sunday morning. I wanted to avoid walking in the snow again so I opted for a drive-up virtual cache along the lake 12 km from South Lake Tahoe, Logan Shoals Vista Point. Further away than some other caches, but no effort - good. We enjoyed the view. Vero took the required pic of me at the site, and off we went...
Next step : Heavenly... We rid the Gondola. Very impressive view of the lake. There was no cache I could grab up there but we played with the kids in Adventure Peak and they had a blast. After enjoying the altitude for a while, we rid back to the lake and had a last lunch at Denny's before leaving.
Not without trying FST: Give Me Immortality Or Give Me Death though. I didn't plan to spend too much time on it so I was ready to DNF this cache. Turns out that I found it very quickly, and we could leave the area and go back to our Valley.

A stop for coffee in Placerville made for a nice suprise. We didn't know this was such a pleasant town. Old style western... Very nice... Of course, there was a cache (Snowshoe) in the historic center, and of course, I went for it. I even, by chance, noticed the hangman which is apparently a landmark of Placerville.
As soon as I saw it, I remembered that someone used this Placerville "feature" as a cache hint to indicate that the cache was "hanging". Everything makes sense now.

Few hours later, we were back home, tired but happy about our weekend. Vero was happy, the kids had a blast and were tired, I grabbed 6 caches, including my first Nevada one (3 states total now), and we got a little more cash in our pockets.

Grand opening...

For a long time, I have been considering creating a blog to share whatever I feel like sharing (mostly my geocaching/hiking adventures in the Bay Area).
I resisted the idea because I didn't feel I would have enough to tell. Well, who cares? I should not feel compelled to post daily.
So there...