I worked up the the nerve to head to Mission Hills. Unbelievably, many people were out and about. And they struck me as looking pretty fit, even the, ahem, old ones. I parked on Fort Stockton near the coffee place (Expresso Mio), which I did not patronize due to my phobia about going into strange, i.e., new, places of business, esp. food places of business, on my own. Decisions, you know.
I walked up the street to a cache which said to be easy. It was. It's hard to believe it is still there, it is so odd and obvious. Maybe the Cache Owner lives near.
Next I went down Allen Road to the Allen Road Nature Trail. I never heard of this place before, so that is one of the wonders of geocaching!
So here is a bunch of pretty much random pictures I took along the way.
Here is the start of the trail.
Lots of vegetation, look pretty non-native to me, like a lot of plants have washed down the canyon over the years.
I bet THAT made a NOISE when it came down!
Many fallen trees, some are being cut up and removed. Lots of work still to be done on this trail.
Sometimes it got a bit narrow.
No, I'm not going in THERE! But my GPSr just pinged, we are getting very close to the cache!
Multitudes of cactus growing up that hill! I like this pic because it shows the cactus, mysterious cement (there are broken cement pipes and other oddities to the left of the picture), and you can even see the cache if you know where to look. I was EXTREMELY lucky to find it quickly, without even reading the hint! Almost disappointing, after I built up (based on previous logs) how difficult it would be.
That is the end of the pictures. I continued down the canyon until I got to Mission Valley. Technically, you COULD park behind one of the motels and come up that way, but that would be trespassing.
After exiting the canyon I headed over to Pioneer Park, also in Mission Hills, to look for a cache there, which I did not find.
Well, I wanted more caches for the day, so I headed down to Chula Vista, just south of the 54, to look for three caches. Did not find them. Yikes, now I'm getting bummed!
I parked (illegally) under the freeway on N. 2nd Street and walked from there to the BIG FIELD. There were two caches there. The first one took quite a while to find, there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, what I learned the day is called the Dance of the GPSr. I finally read the hint, and it only took me another ten minutes to find it. We are talking about something the size of a large bowl in a roughly 400 square foot area. Unbelievable.
I didn't think I had a chance with the next cache, but I was in this BIG FIELD so I thought I ought to at least look at it. So stomping across the BIG FIELD, maybe 2,000 feet, it took me maybe three minutes to figure out where it probably was. Then, having the proper TOTT (Tool Of The Trade) handy I was able to get the primary container open in only five minutes. Then, looking VERY carefully for spiders, I got the secondary container open and signed the log. Then I put everything back, which took some time to carefully do. I headed back to the vehicle picking ants off my clothes, glasses, EAR,, and who knows where else.
I needed one more cache so I found an easy one nearby at a Park and Ride. I also stopped at a few places in the various Rohr Park parking lots, but either didn't find or wasn't able to look because of muggles.
So I headed home and that was that.
I forgot to mention that I dropped off two mice at Lake Murray, but one was dead. The other had got loose in the truck bed, so I put down the tail gate and he FLEW out into the brush.
And now THAT was THAT!
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