Movie of the Week

My big hike of the week featured a rare encounter with a beautiful, black rattlesnake!

Note: this video is rated S, for snake footage. For those viewers who get freaked out by them, discretion is advised.

Music: “Sand and Clay”
Composed by: Tilman Sillescu, Chris William Woods, and Scott P. Schreer
Published by: Freeplay Music and Saber Music

A twenty-minute drive and a half-hour walk gets me in to this peaceful place:

Breakfast en Route to Nebraska

New Toy

I got the iPhone4, and was delighted to discover the iMovie app. Five bucks lets me do some fun and creative stuff. Here are three of my first directorial efforts, all shot and edited on my iPhone4! (The music to dialog balance is automatic, so I need to get in the habit of speaking louder, I guess.)

Back in the Saddle

It’s been a long week.

I must admit that I did enjoy the satellite radio and the novelty of driving something different, but for someone that drives as much as I do, my car becomes an extension of myself. It has a comfortable fit. My foot knows exactly how to accelerate smoothly. The placement of everything is so familiar, I don’t have to think about where any of my stuff is.

I can also drive in the car pool lane by myself.

I missed that the most this week – this long week. I’m very happy to finally be back in my own saddle again.

As it turned out, my car did, indeed, have an actual malfunction. It wasn’t an extraterrestrial influence, just an inverter pump. The part was back ordered, and I ended up with a Dodge Carabiner until this evening. The Prius is all better now.

I’m hoping that my buddies are all better now, too – not the ones from the alien run, but the ones from the hike last weekend. We encountered some angry bees that cut our commune with nature short.

It was lovely while it lasted, though:

tozainamboku, sissopolis, Albackore, Don J, OLdweeb (invisible)

Ahhh, the sweet smell of nature!
Rust to Dust
C-Bear’s cache
CoooLToo
Emmy’s Cache!
Pack 100 Malibu Creek Cache

There’s more of the story on OLdweeb’s Blog HERE.

Seriously: click on over and keep reading! OLdweeb’s blog
He took some nice photos, too.

The Best Laid Plans: Thwarted by Aliens

Out north of Las Vegas is a stretch of highway with no cel service, no services, and no crossroads. There are now over 1000 caches along a 100 or so mile stretch of it between Alamo and Tonopah, each about a tenth of a mile apart. I set out with a posse to do the whole run in one shot.

Well, the best laid plans of mice and men, as the saying goes… we got a great start and had ton of fun, but at Alien #353 (I think), my car started displaying a number of check engine warnings. We had to get the car towed back to Vegas.

We did get 355 caches in 5 hours. Our slowest hour was 48 and our fastest was 90!!

I also got to meet some other cachers doing the run behind us – a group from Pennsylvania. I look forward to reading their stories and those of my compatriots.

E.T. 001

Speaking of them, although our mission got derailed, our fun did not. Their attitudes and comaraderie were what the trip were all about. It was a day and half of geosilliness at its best!

Albackore, Team Perks, and RobbDogg:

We encountered an ancient life form:

It’s really called the E.T. Highway:

We loaded up on food and water:

There’s nothing out there but scenery…. and stars! There is no other light for miles and miles, so after the sun went down, the sky was brilliant and the constellations totally clear.

Even though we didn’t get through the whole run, we broke out the champagne anyway while we waited for the AAA guy to arrive:

After we got my car back to Vegas, we rented another one to drive back to LA. The next day, another geocacher, FishPOET, made a very generous offer to drive me back to Vegas to pick it up on his flat bed trailer that he uses for his Jeep! He is my hero
:

It was such a relief to be able to get my car serviced at my home dealership. It turned out to only need a simple computer reset, probably from the short starts and stops we were making. Either that unusual driving pattern messed up the system…. or it WAS the aliens…

This series is really an ultimate adventure and challenge. We will return, though, later in the fall, to grab the rest of them!

Ojai Road

Heading north from Ventura, you go through the quaint town of Ojai, then on to a lovely curving highway that winds gently up and over the mountains and eventually into the western San Joaquin Valley. As it heads on through the valley, this highway, 33, is a secluded alternative to I-5, and I like to take it when I can to avoid truck traffic. The section just north of Ojai was somewhat recently caked with caches, and I finally took the opportunity to go get ’em on two separate days over the last couple of weeks. The finds were mostly easy and quick, yielding over 50 finds one day and 30 the next, both days with late starts and home for dinner.

Some of the caches were part of a series:
33 on 33 # 33 Area Closed
and some were memorials:
Dr. Jack Dunn – Roadside Memorial
One was an earthcache:
Mass Wasting on Highway 33
Some had creative camo:
Another Stinky Badfeet Sneaker
Pick It Up,,No You Pick It Up!!

The road ahead:

The road through:

The road around:

The view from about as far north as I got:

Dramatic rock scenery:

I got a note from my uncie (the one who got me started doing this!) with a copy of this blurb from the AAA magazine published in his area. I did the interview a while ago, and it’s mostly accurate:

It’s always nice to get good publicity!