BIG BEAR’s Birthday Caching Weekend

BIG BEAR and Sean strategizing

It’s BIG BEAR’s Birthday and what does he want to do? You got it, Geocache!  We met up with our good friend Sean Stafford at San Francisco Golden Gate  Park to cache the park on our bikes.  We are off at 9:30 Sunday morning with what looked like a perfect day in front of us.  Starting cache: GC256C6 Crossroads by irwinSports and then heading East staying on the bike trails and walking our bikes in areas where bicycles were not allowed.

BIG BEAR and Sean

The caches are varied for the most part, some were just baggies with logs in not so great shape, and then some were lock n locks that have been replaced or are showing their age.  It seems to be very hard to maintain a cache in the park because of the homeless and just the non stop visitors with children and dogs.  Caches have to be hidden well to not be a target for a muggle.

We found all but  a couple of the caches we set our GPS‘s on, and the different locations were all fun places to visit in the part.  Some of the caches offered up some history, while others were memorials to War Heroes or Aids victims, but all were great fun to track down.  It was a great place to take the bikes and ride to cache and also get to visit one of the most beautifil places in San Francisco.

I had never been to Golden Gate Park and while we rode most of the day, quitting at 2:30 only allowed us to ride and cache half of the park, we still have another half of the park left to see for a future Caching Adventure.   It was a great way to spend the day with BIG BEAR and Sean, caching and biking in a beautiful park to celebrate BIG BEAR’s birthday.

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New Year -> New Bike -> New Caches!

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BIG BEAR got me a bike for Christmas! I haven’t had a chance to get out and use it until today when we went to Anderson River Park to get some more of Shampoodles caches that she has placed down there. I also purchased a couple of Garmin 60csx mounts for our bikes and wanted to see how they would do out on the trail. After church we loaded up the bikes and headed out. There are several trails that criss cross throughout the park and some of them dead end with a river that is way to big to cross, we headed towards the closest one and all went well, we had to walk the bikes several times when the cobblestones became the size of cantelopue or the river washed sand was just too fine and deep you sunk, otherwise we had a great little bike ride to the first 3 or 4. Well then it got tricky, headed down a few of those trails that ended with the river right in front of us, so we turned around and tried the next trail. We just kept on moving, and my new bike did very well.

Caches we did on the trail today included:

GC395YN #1 Shampoodles Remembers Her Horse by Shampoodles
GC38HTW #1 Shampoodles Rides To Hide Again by Shampoodles – 4 in the Series
GC39N4M #3 Shampoodles Rides To Hide On Christmas by Shampoodles
GC39N4Z Shampoodles Plays Frisbee Golf by Shampoodles
and one I’ve been meaning to get for a very loonnnng time:
GCZZ92 CHRISTMAS CACHE crowshoot/floflower

Before I rode it today we installed a much softer, wider seat, the seats that come on some of the new bikes hurt your buns after awhile. My new bike seat worked out well too, as did the Garmin 60csx mounts that we put on the handlebars, we had a great afternoon biking the trails at the park in 73 degree weather! The moon came up as we grabbed our last cache, loaded the bikes back onto the Jeep and headed to the grocery store, BIG BEAR said he wanted to make a big pot of chili with cornbread, sounds good after a good bike ride, well that was the plan anyway… the iPhone started going off… THERE IS A NEW CACHE 9 MILES AWAY!!

Reconfigured the Nuvi and we are on our way to get GC3AJCY Another Easy Hanger by Cable Cache 1 – we scored the FTF!! Whoo hoo!! Ok, NOW its time to head to the grocery store and get the Chili fixins, yummmm can’t wait for a nice big bowl of Chili and some cornbread to end the day. By the way it was really good Chili and I made the cornbread which was really good too! 😉