Leakage from a Cluttered Mind

Today, Dan, Janet, Dave (of Team Yofa), and I attended Team Alamo’s celebration of his 25,000th cache find. We started the day by hiking (with a horde of other folks) in Bishop Ranch open space where I picked up 5 brand new caches. It was just a very nice day for hiking the hills. The celebration was held in the afternoon at Max’s, and I think the number of attendees just overwhelmed the staff. I think I finally got my order after a wait of an hour and a half.

Team Alamo has amazing statistics (for instance, he averages over 13.5 caches finds per day) that indicate a real passion (or addiction) to the game.

To retrieve a clue for a geocaching/cipher solving puzzle game the bay area geocachers have been doing the last few years, I hiked up the hill in Sunol Regional Park. Erstwhile communist spy Venona annually issues a challenge. This year he has stolen the Venonium 263 cache. The previously decrypted message was an image of a location using Google Earth. Someone matched it to Sunol and we had approximate coordinates. It was very close to Sunol Vista.

I found Sunol Vista easily, and after a short search turned up the clue cache. It had a single piece of paper in it giving a code word NEKULTURNY in visible ink and BELGOROD in invisible ink (UV flourescent). On the way back to the car I picked up Shari’s Birthday Cache.