Rock City.... The hunt for the Alien Pod!

It was time for a fun day trip, and I'd seen some cool pictures of this place called Rock City inside Mount Diablo state park. It was the first time we left the house without pre-loading caches to the GPSr. We were using the Geosphere app on the ipad2, and were going to cache on the fly. We arrived at the picnic area and started our day off with a nice lunch, then the worst feeling.... raindrops... Was our day going to get rained out? We loaded the car up with our picnic stuff, and did a search on Geosphere for caches near us as we hoped for the rain to stop. It was a drizzle, and it came to a stop, so we jumped out and left the ipad2 in the car and put the coords into the GPSr, since it is waterproof.



Our first stop on the trail was a very cool rock that the girls loved. They are pictured in it above and loved climbing into the rocks natural caves. From here I had picked out a cache that was about .25 miles away called The Alien Pod at Rock City GC1NFN8
It was actually probably more like .5 miles each way following the trail. There was also some poison oak that we managed to stay clear of, but I can imagine in Summer it might be harder to do. The trail was very pretty and brought us to the spot below that we liked before we found the cache.



With all the large rocks and hills the GPSr was bouncing a bit here, but it pointed about 75 feet up a less traveled trail, so after the girls explored the caves shown above we headed up the path less traveled (if we were not geocaching, I am sure we never would of taken that path). I had seen pictures of the "Alien Pod" so I was on the lookout for it as I knew the cache would be close to it. We explored around the rock as we got to GZ and found the very cool rock formation shown below, and then Maureen spotted the cache! The Alien Pod formation made the entire hike and is another example of why I love geocaching... Check out Maya's cute smile as she sat near the Alien Pod. Great day!



-Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Mount Diablo

A trip to Pismo Beach....



Our caching group at Dune Buggy Haven



We had a four day weekend planned to go visit our friends in Pismo Beach.  On the agenda was the beach, wine tasting, beers, and a few hikes.... These noncachers were in for a surprise!  Oh yeah, everywhere we went I had geocaches loaded that were close.  The weekend started off a complete dud as we had rain, rain and more rain.  I had split the drive down in half stopping in the Monterey area on a Thursday night giving me most of Friday to go about 2 hours and allow us to grab a bunch of caches on the way.  Friday morning came and it was pouring rain.  :(  Bad start to what was going to be a fun weekend.  We got down to Pismo with only 2 finds, and 3 days to go!  Saturday came and after the morning beach run and lunch there was a small break in the rain, so off we went to grab a few close by caches!  We headed to the Loose Tooth ( GC2CWH7 ) cache and once we got to GZ I noticed it was a micro.  I probably should of started off my newbee friends with a larger container, but we were here so let's try to find this thing right?  I said to my friend Joe, 'I usually don't take the kids on these micros because they can be hard to find, and there is typically no SWAG inside'.  Shortly after my daughter asked to look in a stump that seemed to be hallowed out and I told her that I already looked in there, and to go for it.  Then she said 'I think I found it Daddy?'  As she pulled the cache out Joe thought it was hilarious that it was 'too hard' for the kids, and Audrey found the it!  DAM!  As we got to GZ of the next one it started to rain like crazy and we had to hike back to the car.  This rain was making me angry...

      This brings us to Sunday morning and as we looked outside.... SUN!  No rain in the forecast and we had a great hike planned with a few caches along the way.  We were going to Oso Flaco Lake in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Preserve, and had about a mile hike in and out.  Along the way our first stop brought us to ~ Raccoon's Lagoon ~ ( GCKH77 ).  This was another micro, and might take us a while?  As we started our search and read the clue we had the whole group searching.  We looked high and low and before you know it I heard Joe yell out 'found it!'  This was a very cleaver hide and nice camo.  Right after we took some pictures and were about to be on our way we saw a Raccoon walk right up to us!  I guess we could see how the cache got it's name?   

Joe with part of the cache!

The hike took us all the way to the beach and it was not the warmest of days, but it was clear and beautiful.  On the way back we made a detour to hit one more cache that was an AMMO CAN!  No more micros for this group of newbees!!  It was time they found some SWAG.  We made our way to Dune Buggy Haven (GCJJNB ).  Maureen made the find on this one and the kids quickly looked through the ammo can full of swag for trades.  Was a great cache to find for people new to Geocaching.
     Monday morning we decided to go back to the trail where we got rained out on, and see if we could make a couple finds.  After Joe made ANOTHER find at the last dirt road... ( GCRJ78 ), we made our way to  Ellysian's Cache ( GC2CW95 ).  This turned out to be another micro, but in the description it said it was VERY TINY.  We were in the middle of a wooded area with TONS of spots for a small container.  This was a Difficulty 4.5 and I thought there was no way we'd find it in a short time.  It was not long before Maureen yelled out that she found it!  It had to be the smallest container we had ever found other than a magnetic nano.  Both Jesse (GeoJester) and Isabella (Bellagal) now have Geocaching accounts and you might see them on the geo-trail.  I guess they liked it!