Bakersfield CA

Got a bunch of rest stop caches along the way, but no photos. (Bad blog author, bad, bad...)

We're staying in the middle of an orange grove. Strangely enough, it's called the Orange Grove RV Park, and each site has its very own orange trees (for free picking, but they aren't quite ripe yet).

At the front of the park, they've even topiaried a couple of orange tree to represent artistic oranges... (the mind boggles)

When we arrived, the jacks on the left side wouldn't extend, but luckily my site is pretty level so I didn't need them. However, it took a couple of hours of messing around on the phone to finally find a place to look at the problem. Nobody here can look at it with a day's notice, so I found a place near 29 Palms, our next stop, and I'm hoping that park has a good level site too. After all the issues with the hydraulic levelers last year, I'm getting so I'm thinking of removing them and installing mechanical. At least with them you can crank 'em if needs be.

It's also time for the truck's maintenance, and that turned into a time waster also. One of the service requirements can't be done by your everyday no-appointment Jiffy Lube, so I need a Dodge dealer. I had an appointment booked on with the local shop for our first day at 8:00AM, so I showed up only to be told that they were"backed up" for diesels, and it'd take 2-3 days. Fugedaboutit. Whoever booked the appointment should have asked if it was diesel, or maybe I was supposed to know that I had to specify...? Anyway, I now have a truck appointment in Hemet next week (specifically told them it's a diesel, and read my shopping list of service items).

I also had to get my RV GPS replaced, which has been another litany of phone screwups and false starts (one Camping World in Sacramento took 1/2 hour to finally fill in all the paper and decide they didn't have a replacement). In the end I decided to trade up to the next model, so had an appointment with the Camping World here and actually got the job done. Among all the above issues and the associated screwing around, though, it cost me much of the first day, and most of my Koodo roaming minutes. <grrrr>

I managed to get a few caches the first day in the downtown (such as it is) anyway, and today (yes, I'm actually posting this in real time) I had another fine little bike ride to pick up some more right around the RV park.

Along the way, I came across this interesting sign in an orange grove, which has to be called...

..."they shoot oranges, don't they?"

Also came across this abandoned castle in the groves, it seems it used to be a Christmas tree farm.

The orange groves are being invaded by donkeys. Drilling donkeys.

I guess it's now black gold in them thar hills. Some areas have been completely razed, looking more like Texas.

I went to the cache that bills itself as "voted Bakersfield's best cache" (it's debatable), and got a shot of the other major threat to the groves...

home invaders

So tomorrow we head to our resting place for November... 29 Palms. It'll be nice to not have to raise anchor every couple of days, and get to know a place.

Sacramento CA

I'm behind in posting this... we're actually leaving the next stop (Bakersfield) as I write. Who said retirees have nothing but time?

Got a neat cache at a rest stop on the way here...

...that "extra" fence post on the right is the cache. The top lifts off.

We stayed at the RV park annexed to the CalExpo site. The first night we were there, the arena/stadium/whatever next door had two events going on: a horse race, and a Halloween party disco mix thingie. Between the two, it was pretty noisy, but they quit at 11:00.

I found all the old caches I had on my shopping lost for this area on the first day. Some of the interesting places the search took me to in town:

the State capitol building...

a unique Starbucks "we are the world?" topiary...

and the historic city graveyard.

The final cache of the day was a real feather in my cap... Northern California's oldest cache. I drove 50 miles (one way) just to score it. It dates back to September 2000, only four months after caching began.

Having completed my shopping list in one day, on the second day of our stay, I went out for a very nice bike ride along the American River bike trail. Naturally, there were some caches along the trail to pick up, too. :-)

Along the way I came across this little panhandler, who seemed a bit put out that I had no acorns:

The next is our penultimate stop on this outbound leg of our road trip: Bakersfield.

Grants Pass OR

Well, it's been a fun stay in Grant's Pass... actually, we're closer to a little town called Merlin... but the road beckons, and it's time to push south. The streets here are a lot easier to navigate than in Vancouver. In the area we were camped, were a NW 99 St., NW 99 Ave. and NW Highway 99. And to top it all off, there was much road work going on, so the GPS kept getting confused (as did I) with all the major detours.

On the drive down, we stopped at many rest areas, and picked up a lot of caches in them. We've seen many fun caches around the Merlin/Grants Pass area, too. One of them took us to an old covered bridge.

Another brought us to a house with a most unusual decorating scheme in the yard. The cache was called Scentimental Yard Art Cache, and to log it I had to count the... uh... unique planters... (you may have to enlarge this shot to see the art)

Found a great little deserted park in which to eat lunch today. The only other people were a couple of '60s refugees wearing Peruvian hats and driving a red and white VW microbus who were playing disc golf. Looks interesting, though, I'll have to give it a go... The park was a riot of yellow, from dozens of what looked like large leaf maple trees with the wrong colour leaves. It's only fair, I suppose, if we have more American (bald) eagles than they do, that they get to have some of our trees.

Tomorrow we hit our first California stop... Sacramento. It'll be the longest drive so far, so we probably won't have time for too many rest stop caches.

Vancouver WA

This is our last night in Vancouver, WA. We've been at the 99 RV Park since arriving on Sunday, and during the drive down from Canada stopped at several rest stops to pick up caches. Made for some nice breaks from the driving monotony. During the couple of days here, I've picked up all the old caches that I had on my shopping list, filling in 9 squares on my Jasmer grid. Oh... what's a Jasmer grid, you say? Well, glad you asked... there are several well known self "challenges" that are popular among cachers, and one of them (the Jasmer challenge) is to log a find for a cache placed during each month since caching started (May of 2000). Before this trip, I'd logged finds that were placed during 134 of the possible 162 (up to October)

So far on this trip, I've closed the gap by 9. I've mapped out another 9 before our final destination at 29 Palms, as we pass through (and stop at) Grants Pass OR, Sacramento CA and Bakersfield CA. The remaining blank squares will be the oldest, and they'll be the hardest to find. They'll likely be in remote places in Oregon, as that's where caching started. The first "stash" as it was known then was just SE of Portland, and there's a commemorative plaque at its site now. Logging it is part of the "Triad", which consists of the APE Cache Mission 9: Tunnel of Light, Groundspeak Headquarters (both just outside of Seattle) and the Original Stash Cache. I'm hoping to be able to attend the Groundspeak block party mega event next August, and I'll get the Triad then, as well as some of those original caches.

Yesterday I was in the West Hills of Portland and got Portland's oldest continuously active cache, dating to February of 2001. It was a "vector offset" cache, which means you need to go to a given place and then project coordinates given bearing and distance. It was quite fun. Today I got two widely separated finds, one in a wildlife refuge park (an ammo can!), and the other up a 2 mile hike into a forest park. Both were very satisfying finds, especially since the second one's published coordinates were 99 feet off.

For one of the caches, the requirement was that you go to an old arcade (remember them?) at the published coordinates and log a high score on any game. I went when they first opened at noon and grabbed a machine that hadn't been played yet for the day, it was my only chance of getting a high score!  :-)

One of yesterday's caches was on the grounds of Washington State University, called the "Wailing Bell", and featured this unusual sculpture off in the woods. Inscribed on it are quotations from essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Gary Snyder and award-winning Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan. It works, too.

So in the morning we pull up our tent pegs and hoof on down I-5 towards Grants Pass. There are 16 caches waiting for us in rest stops along the way.  :-)

Migration Time

It's been a great summer for weather in Otter Point, can't remember a better one. And even though the sun continues, the days are starting to get shorter, and the smell of Fall is in the air. The local supply of caches is getting exhausted, too, so it's time to follow the bird(brain)s south. I'm also getting accusatory looks from my navigator Mishu, like "we'll never get anywhere if we don't get on the road, you know".  :-)

Have we left yet?

We're pointed for our first major stay in a town called 29 Palms in California, NW of Palm Springs. We aren't rushing to get there, we'll be staying in Vancouver WA, Grants Pass OR, Sacramento CA and Bakersfield CA before arriving in 29 Palms on Nov. 1.

Unlike the past two blogs (Go East Young Meme and the Grand Dixie Tour), I'm not going to try to post daily, it'll just be too much over the 5 1/2 months I plan to be away. I'll try to post (roughly) weekly updates.

As you can tell by the title of the blog, caching's the name of the game this time out. Good friends and neighbours Doug and Shannon have a winter home in San Jacinto, not far from 29 Palms, so I expect we'll embark on some joint forays to plunder the local treasures.

So here we are at the Pacific Border RV Park, poised to hit the border in the morning. Picked up a few caches here just to keep my streak alive, and have mapped out all the rest stops with caches between here and our first US stop in Vancouver WA.

Cache on!