12 posts tagged “geocaching”

For lunch today, Strix and I ate at Riverside Pizza.  We had both heard that it was good, so we decided to try it out.  We had the Greek-style pizza, which had pepperoni, gyro meat, feta cheese, olives, onions, and mozzerella.  It was very tasty, and I'm sure we'll go back there again today.

After pizza, we went geocaching for the afternoon, and found every cache went looking for, so overall it was a good day.

Monday, Strix and I had lunch at La Traviata.  It was very tasty.

We saw this mailbox after lunch.  I just like it.  Feed your mail to R2D2; he's hungry.

After lunch, we made our way to the Hyatt on the other side of the Colorado River to register for the Slam.

The hotel was having a convention for Texas propane companies at the same time.  There were a bunch of Texas businessmen there to sell "Propane and Propane Accessories," while the tatooed, freaky, hippy poets wandered the hotel looking for the registration room.  I found it quite amusing.

After registering as a poet and getting Strix her audience wristband, we went looking for a couple more geocaches that were on that side of the river.

Check Bat Wit Me Later

This is a giant weather-vane piece of art, paying homage to the fact that there is a huge colony of bats living under the Ann Richards bridge.  I can't help wonder if the fact that they chose this bridge to name after her was made by her detractors, thinking she was "batty."  At any rate, there is supposed to be a geocache somewhere near this sculpture, but it's a bit public, being right on a very, very busy street.  Note to those who plant geocaches: put them somewhere people can get to them without looking like terrorists.

More of the guitars from Austin's public art project.

Here's a closer look at the guitar on the right.  It's decorated with bumper stickers, including one that says, "Austin Sucks!  Don't Move Here."  I suppose this could be interpreted two ways.  Either the sticker means that Austin really does suck and they're trying to warn the tourists, or it means that they really like Austin and don't want it to be ruined by people moving in and overpopulating the place.  Your guess is as good as mine.

View from the 1st Street Bridge, near another geocache.

Some odd grafitti from the walkway along the bridge.

So we found one out of two geocaches, and headed back to the hotel for the poet orientation.  Strix enjoyed wine down at the hotel bar, while I went upstairs.

View from the 17th floor of the Hyatt.

Poets at orientation, several minutes into the "meeting."  Worse than Mensans.

The meeting was mercifully short, and consisted of the organizers telling us not to make a bad name for the Slam by acting out of order.  We were also told that there were seventy-five teams there, and seventy-four of them were going to lose, and the sooner we "wrapped our brains" around that fact, the better time we would have.

After the orientation, I joined Strix for some cheese and wine down in the bar, then we headed toward Ruta Maya coffeeshop, where the kick-off party was held.  We wouldn't have walked if we had realized how far it was, but we had a nice, if hot, walk.  There was also another geocache on the way we wanted to hit.

Yet another guitar.

Items in the window of a little shop that sold Dia de los Muertos and other Latin art.  I couldn't get shots of it without reflections on the window.

 Some stenciled outdoor art.

Yet... more... guitars.

A costume shop with a very fanciful sign.  I think this was actually the movie poster from Star Wars Episode Two, Attack of the Clowns.  Yeah, I know, but I'm not sorry.

An old-fashioned barber shop.  No smokin', no cussin', and no horsin' around.  That doesn't go for the people using the ashtray right inside the door or reading the Playboy that was in the magazine rack.

Another bout is about to come about, so I must head out.  More later.

Strix has gone back home, being out of vacation time as of today, so now I have the computer to myself to catch up my blog.

Sunday, we went geocaching.  The first one was supposed to be a microcache near Joe's Bar and Grill.  We didn't find it, but we were hungry, so we went ahead and had lunch there.  I don't remember what Strix had, but I had some of the best fish and chips I've ever had.

The second cache was supposed to be in a park, and we searched long enough for me to get a number of mosquito bites, but didn't find it.  I was feeling down, being zero for two, but we decided to press on, despite it being hotter than hell and more humid than the ocean.

This little guy was on a lamp post on the way to our third cache.

Some giant food and a rooster on top of a building.  Why?  Because.

Part of Austin's public art project.  This one is covered in fitted pieces of mirror.

Damn, I'm handsome!

This billboard seems particulary apt for Austin.

A boarded up "castle" on a hill here in Austin.  It's visible for a quite a distance, earning the neighborhood the name "Castle Hill."  I couldn't get a shot of it without the dumpster in front of it.  The cache was close by, and we did find it, so the hike seemed somewhat worth it.

Across the street from the castle, someone taped a map of Germany to a dumpster and wrote "Deutchland Über Alles" on it.

On the top right corner of the map, they attached a black and white photo of a girl wearing a zebra costume.  Über alles?  How about über weird and über creepy?  Anyone know what this is about?

This enormous golden snitch was in someone's yard on the way back to the hotel.

A very, very nice house for lease that we saw on the way back.

I just liked this ad.  Very funny.  I like the look on the cat's face.

Another gorgeous old building.  This one is now in the use of the Texas Teachers' Association.

After returning to the hotel and cooling down for a while, we went back out and made our way to a park where a public concert was being held.

The fauna here in Austin is particularly tame.  I don't mean the bar-goers, but rather the birds and squirrels.  This guy didn't move until I got close enough to grab him.

The band warms up.  They played a nice mix of big band and swing for us.

It would have been a lot more comfortable if my mosquito bites weren't starting to each, and if we had somewhere to sit other than on a hard park bench, but it was a good concert and enjoyable, anyway.

After the concert, we made our way back to 6th Street and ate dinner at a sushi restaurant called Maiko's.  They have a terrific happy hour with sushi specials and cheap sake.

More later!

I worked early this morning, and when I got home we went out geocaching.  We only got two accomplished, but they were both multi-caches, which are usually a lot of fun.

For the first cache, we parked on the wrong side of the highway and ended up going under it in a storm culvert.  It's not something I recommend, but hey, life is an adventure.  We found the first cache, which was just coordinates to the second cache, and had a nice little hike on BLM land when we got there.

Do we always regret the path not taken?

The next cache was actually at San Juan College, and it was very interesting.  The cache page actually gives several different coordinates, where you are supposed to gather clues to be used in conjunction with a decoder on the cache page to figure out the coordinates of the actual cache.  Unfortunately, this led us to the middle of a sand lot in the back end of the college campus.  The cache hasn't been found by anyone since May, and I think it may have been moved and/or destroyed during construction.

Haven't got a clue what I'm talking about, Muggle?  Follow the link:

Originally posted on my old blog on February 24th, 2006:

We left Alamogordo and stopped at Three Rivers again to to visit The Indigo Lizard, a gift shop there, where Stina bought a gift for her little sister from the Big Brothers Big Sisters program.
 
After leaving there, we went to Carrizozo, then on to Nogal.  Outside of Nogal, we stopped to hit a geocache at a rest stop.  I got a great shot of the mountains from the geocache site.

View of the mountains.

Some tree fungus that just looked interesting.

Originally posted on my old blog on February 22nd, 2006:

I'm still playing catch-up on my blogging, so here's what we did yesterday.
 
We started by heading up highway 70 to Ruidoso to find a geocache.  In the way there, we stopped at one of the many historical markers in the area to take a picture of Sierra Blanca.

 

The historical marker for Sierra Blanca.

The geocache was in a park behind the visitor's center in Ruidoso.

A stream in the park.

Some ducks at the park.

Yesterday: Geocaching at the Rock Pile

This continues the documentation of our recent trip to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.

We used a quarter of a tank of gas looking for the road to get us to the next geocache, and were just about to give up when I saw a road next to the Interstate offramp and took it.  We knew we were looking for the road that would take us to the city golf course, and this wasn't the right road either, but when we got to the top of the hill we saw a sign on the Interestate telling us that to get to the golf course we had to take a certain exit from the Interstate.  Then it was a matter of getting back on the Interstate and taking that exit.

The exit takes you quit a way out of the city of Holbrook, but the property here is owned by the city.  It's a very winding road around the base of bluff, and then to get the petroglyph park you have to pass the golf course itself.

The geocache site is somewhere in the area circled in red in the northwest quadrant of this Google Earth screenshot.

Anyway, the roads are rough and poorly maintained, and you feel like you've gone too far just about the time you actually reach the "park."

This doesn't look much like a road to a city park, does it?

A small and easy-to-miss warning sign near the entrance to the park.  It says:

ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.
STAY ON THE PATH.
DO NOT TOUCH THE
PETROGLYPH'S [sic].
WATCH YOUR STEP.
THE PATH MAY HAVE
SOME LOOSE ROCKS.
PLEASE BE CAREFUL.

After the rest of the warning, is "please be careful" really necessary?

Yes, that is a large petrified wood stump next to the sign.

The area is also rangeland, so it was gated with a little wire twist being the only thing keeping the gate closed.  The sign on the gate just said to close the gate after you, so we figured it was okay to enter.

We found the cache pretty quickly, and then just explored a little and took pictures of the glyphs, which were pretty impressive.

There are quite a few petroglyphs at ground level here, but there are some very clear and interesting ones much higher up the crumbling bluff.  Strix wasn't quite adventurous enough to accompany me, but I climbed the steep rocks to get a closer look.  This shot is of Strix waiting for me below.

Some of the petroglyphs I was able to shoot from my higher vantage point.

Strix took these shots.  The one on the right shows me at the top of the climb.

The left is another shot of Strix from where I was.  The right is a shot out to the horizon.  The itty bitty blue dot in the center is Strix's PT Cruiser.

These rocks are as hard to climb as they look like they would be, which I'm guessing is why there was a warning sign advising me not to do so.  Don't try this at home.  The only part of the warning sign I followed was to not touch the petroglyphs (which of course, you should never do).

A wooden plank thrown across a dry arroyo.  This is state-of-the-art park engineering.  Of course, the purpose of the park is probably more to preserve the petroglyphs than to provide a nice place for people to hang out.

I just took these because I found the landscape interesting.  It amazes me to think that people actually lived here.

Here's a picnic area, in case you forgot that this is a park.  Oh, you'll have to machete your way through the tumbleweeds to get to it, but I'm sure it's worth it.

Where the early bird apparently hangs out later in the day.

And at the end of the adventure, Strix's Cruiser waits patiently for us, like a faithful steed prepared to carry us away.

Tomorrow: Rainbow Forest Museum and Rainbow Forest

Yesterday: Route 66 and PFNP Murals

This continues the documentation of our recent trip to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.

Before heading back out to the petrified forest for the day, Strix and I did some geocaching around Holbrook.  The first one was at a rock pile at the dead end of one of the streets just past I-40.  It was a ridiculous place for a geocache, with people driving by in droves.  The big pile of rocks apparently also served as both a junkyard and a party place, as there were broken alcohol bottles and rusty pieces of metal there for us to cut ourselves on.  It's geocaches like this that make me wonder if the pharmaceutical company that produces tetinus shots invented geocaching.

In case the glass and rusty metal weren't enough, the cache site was right up against a rickety barbed wire fence.  Since the fence had to straddle a tall rock pile, whoever put it in got the brilliant idea of weighing it down with large rocks tied into the barbed wire.

And of course they would have to put a fence here to keep people out of their beautiful, trecherous rock pile.  But not the whole rock pile, of course.  This half is mine, that half is yours.

And after much searching, the cache was found.

It's late, so that's all I'm doing tonight.

Tomorrow: Holbrook's Petroglyph Park

Originally posted on my old blog on February 20th, 2006:

What a day!  We did a lot today, and I took a lot of pictures, so I'll cover it in different parts.
 
After breakfast this morning, Stina and I loaded up the PT Cruiser and headed out to look for a geocache on the campus of the University of New Mexico.  Click on the image for an enlarged view:

We parked about half a mile from our goal in front of the UNM Research Incubation Lab, whatever that is.

We passed this cactus on the way to the cache.

We passed this sculpture on the way.  I don't know what the name of it is, but I call it "Tic Tac Toe Game Gone Awry."  Notice that beautiful New Mexico sky in the background.

This was another sculpture that was visible from the parking lot of the particular facility where the geocache was found.  Again, I don't know this real name of this piece, but I call it "Praying Mantis Made out of Sticks."  Really, I've never really cared for this style of art.  All those right angles make me feel like in back in my freshman high school geometry class.

The cache was in a very visible place.  I always feel nervous rummaging around for a geocache where people might see me and wonder if I'm a terrorist.  So, I take my camera with me, and this photo is the result of me taking a picture so that if anyone saw me they would just think that I was a photographer looking for an interesting vantage point.  Unfortunately, this was what was actually visible from the location of the vantage point.

If you think you might try to find this cache, don't look at the next pic.  This photo is a spoiler.  Its a view of the facility where the cache was found.

We took a different path back to Stina's PT Cruiser, and passed this sculpture on the way.  I didn't need to come up with a name, since I got close enough to see the plaque.  This is called "Cloud/Rift."  If I had to name it, though, I would call it "Wile E., have the Roadrunner stand here."

Yesterday: Window Rock

This continues the documentation of our recent trip to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.

The troubling thing about landscape shots, is that the photographs never look as amazing as the actual scenary did.  Never.  The closest you can come to capturing the grandeur of it is if you have camera that will do panorama shots.  Strix's camera does, so check out her panoramas.  Even though mine aren't as good, I think I still got some decent shots.

When you enter the Petrified Forest National Park from I-40, the first thing you see are pull-offs where you can view (and photograph, of course) the Painted Desert, which is a badlands area of striking beauty and color.

Views from the first pull-off.

Strix beginning her panorama shot.  Yes, she does it without a tripod.  She's good that way.