Leakage from a Cluttered Mind

Last night I had worked on a puzzle or two, so this afternoon I headed to Pleasanton to try for them, and some other new ones that have popped up recently.

Mars Cope Rift has had me stumped. I could easily figure out some of the coordinate digits, but I didn’t know how to get them all. Recently posted hints clued me in on the method. I’m pretty sure the coordinates I have now are correct. When I got to the site, it seemed like a rift to me, but I didn’t find the cache. As I was leaving this area it began to rain.

Fuzzy Friends #2 was next on my list and it’s just down the street from where Dan works. The animal shelter was not open today, but there were cars in the parking lot and lights on inside. The cache is rather cleverly camouflaged, and just as I had taken it apart and gotten the log out two women arrived and went inside. I’m sure they wondered why I was standing in the rain reading their bulletin board. The answers to the ‘trick’ questions are A=7, B=8, C=5, D=4, E=0. This gives coordinates of N37° 39.785 W121° 52.440. The cache is hidden in a plastic garden windmill shaped like a ladybug. It’s right under the bulletin board.

Then I went looking for n2books2 new cache California Quail. By this time it was sprinkling fairly good. I poked around for quite a while and didn’t find it. Not sure I get along with this terrain and kind of hide.

I was eager to get to Red, Blue, and Green, which is a regular cache that has a geometric puzzle in it. Solve the puzzle (in two different ways) and send Jimswim the pictures and he sends back coordinates to two more caches. By copying the picture of the Green puzzle solution from the cache page and cutting out the puzzle pieces, I was able to solve both Red and Blue puzzles at home. I found the cache in short order, took it to the truck out of the rain and took the required pictures.

Stopped by Peoplesoft (oops, I mean Oracle) to grab LECBIH. Real quick.

Next I went to Tassajara Creek park to get a cache that’s been out of commission for quite a while. Relatively quick to find, but got sprinkled with more rain.

This week I’ve been fighting a cold, but today I felt reasonable enough to get outside, so I headed east. As I was heading up the Altamont, I realized fizzymagic’s Signs and Wonders was on the way. Went off on Grant Line Road and this was a drive up at 11:37 AM. But, this is the smallest cache I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t hard to find, but it was so small it took a while to open it, get the log out, sign the log, and then reassemble it. As part of the cache log, I needed to upload a wacky road sign.

The bridge is very close to 280. In fact, you can see it from the west bound lanes, but getting there… well, that’s another story. Good thing I was driving the Honda today. The navigation system maps came in handy. Once at the bridge (a railroad overcrossing), I had to hunt a bit, but by finally ruling out where it couldn’t be, I narrowed it down and found it at 12:53 PM.

Jaywalk was just off Yosemite Avenue on the way into Manteca. It’s a multi-cache that spans a road (hence jaywalk). I thought the coordinates for the first stage were off just a little, but the hiding place seemed obvious. It was under a light pole housing and gave new coordinates for the second stage of N37° 47.690 W121° 14.853. The final stage was also a quick find at 1:24 PM.

MANNNNN-Teca is an old Ron Streeter cache. It hasn’t been logged since June 26, 2004. The cache is hidden along the Tidewater Bikeway. It was actually a quick find at 2:46 PM. At one time it was very well cammod in a foam container. But some of the foam has broken off. This caught my eye–otherwise it would have been hard to see.

A couple of miles away on the same bikeway is Manteca Bike Trail. Found this one at 2:46 PM. I DNF’d this one before, but got serious with the bushes this time and found a cammo stump (far too big for these bushes) with the cache hidden underneath in a hollow.

Had dinner tonight at Chili’s, and on the way home thought I’d stop and see if I could find Prospero’s Prolific Programming Primates. I had solved this puzzle cache a few days ago, but the couple of times I checked the location it was too busy with muggles (and a guard Chihuahua). I didn’t have the GPSr, but managed to find it almost immediately (without a flashlight). What luck. Mission accomplished at 7:15 PM.