So, my mom is asking if my Great Grandma Lupe ever got U.S. citizenship. I haven’t found a record for her, only her husband, my Great Grandpa Florencio, which by the way, includes another Oakland address that my ancestors once lived at in the 1950’s. I did drive by their old house one day while ago, when cat sitting for a friend who lived nearby:
6227 Bromley Avenue, Oakland
When I semi-retire, I would like to hide geocaches near all the Bay Area addresses my family used to live at. Geocaches are like little hidden treasures that are planted all over the world for others to find. Some have historical significance, and some are just random. Speaking of which, I found two geocaches in Moraga today. Beautiful view.
Today after work I headed for a new trail in Sibley Park. Well, new to me that is.
Skyline Trail
I had planned to search for two easy geocaches, and if I still had time, possibly two more difficult ones. They are rated according to the terrain that they are hidden in (flat road=easy, hills & bushwhacking=difficult).
I thought I had parked closest to the easier ones, but the GPS on the cache app let me know I was much closer to a difficult one. So I went for it.
Difficult Cache #1
Yeah, it’s a weird blob that holds the cache container in it. It doesn’t look like much, but it was hidden deep in the woods, so to speak. But it wasn’t hilly, just a flat path filled with annoying bushes and branches everywhere, but I found it.
Then my GPS let me know that I was very close to the other difficult one that was located just up the way:
Can you see it? It’s an abandoned car located down a dry creek bed off the Skyline Trail. Isn’t that crazy? How on earth did a car get here? And hidden inside it- was the second difficult cache. I didn’t take a picture of the cache because it wasn’t anything special- it was the walk to this abandoned vehicle that made it difficult. More bushwhacking- ugh! But I found it.
After that, I headed back to my car and was done for the evening.
Or so I thought.
As I was driving home, I remembered a “puzzle cache” that was nearby and although I hadn’t solved the puzzle yet, I had a good hunch I knew where the final location of the cache was because there were so many hints left by other people. So I pulled over into the residential neighborhood where I thought it would be ….and I found it. When we find puzzle caches without solving the puzzle, this is called “brute force” – in other words- we skipped some steps. But hey, “a find is a find” and maybe next time, don’t drop so many hints in addition to the puzzle.
I got home, made myself dinner and then I received a notification from the geocache app (yup, I receive notifications) – that a new cache was just hidden less than a mile from my apartment. Whenever this happens, there is a quick race to the cache to be “FTF” – (First To Find).
Okay, first of all, I never do that- especially at night, it is so not safe. But this cache was in a residential neighborhood in the affluent town of Piedmont. The safest city in Alameda County and 10 minutes from my apartment.
So I went for it.
I got back in my car, drove over to the area and had my first “FTF“. It was a very clever cache that was disguised as a lawn light. I would have taken a picture of it, but it was dark outside and also a dog was barking at me, so I quickly signed the paper log that was inside it and got the heck out of there.
As the days get shorter I won’t be able to do this after work and as the world continues to open up, I probably will forget all about this stuff. But for now, geocaching has been taking me on new trails and neighborhoods, during a pandemic- and I love that.
Theresa Donahoe 