Geocaching Trip to the Coast

We were planning to go to the beach on Sunday, but Sami read the weather report Saturday morning and decided Saturday would be better. We took the direct route - Hwy 26 to Cannon Beach. We've done most of the geocaches on that route on other occasions, but there are still a few.

The first one we tried was at a viewpoint. The clouds were covering Mt. St. Helens, so we didn't see it, but we ate some thimbleberries and took pictures of some roadside wildflowers while we waited for other cars to leave. Unfortunately we didn't find the cache there, better luck next time.

We found the next cache (TweedleDee Tweedle Dum) with no problem. Sami was hungry, so we started looking for a place to eat. There is a restaurant on Hwy 26 called Camp 18. It's kind of a tourist spot with a giftshop and a small logging museum, but the food was pretty good and reasonably priced. I don't know why we didn't take any pictures of the machinery. There was also supposed to be a cache there, but we couldn't find it. I got an email from the cache owner today saying he checked it and it's missing.

After lunch, we stopped and found a tiny little micro cache near the Klootchy Creek Giant Spruce tree. We've taken our picture several times with there tree in the past, but now it is falling down and people are not allowed underneath it.

There were tiny little fish in the creek and tons of these cool water bugs.

After that we attempted a few geocaches at Hug Point State Park where we had so much fun scrambling around on rocks that we forgot to take very many pictures.

There was a very cool little waterfall right on the beach and some interesting caves.

I'm standing on top of the waterfall here.

The weather was actually pretty hot. We saw more people at the beach on Saturday than we ever have. It's pretty unusual to see so many people daring to go into the Pacific ocean without a wetsuit.

On our way back to the car, Sami said "Look, the birds found a fish, poor fish." So I looked, but it wasn't a fish. It was bag of chips. The birds had already gotten the bag open by the time we arrived, so it never occurred to us to shoo them away. We sat there watching the seagulls and crows fight over the chips, sneaking around and trying to steal them from each other for quite a while.

Next we went to Oswald West State Park. The path from the parking area to the beach is fairly long, half a mile or so, but it is amazing. Truly a walk through the rainforest to get to the ocean.

Oswald West also seems to be a favorite with the surfers. You can't see them in this photo, but there were maybe 50 surfers out there.

All in all, it was a great trip to the beach. The weather was nice and we found some interesting new places. We also found a total of 6 geocaches out of the 12 we searched for. Next time I'll have to take more pictures of the rocks we climbed and of the path through the rainforest to the coast. The campground at Oswald West is very nice - I'd love to spend a weekend there sometime and explore some more.

Full Moon Friday

Full moon over "Stub" Stewart State Park.

Melissa and I decided to try geocaching at the Vernonia linear trail again on friday evening. We had a great bike ride on a different section of the trail, found three caches, got two rubber ducks for Sami (a fireman duck and a devil duck), and didn't lose the GPSr or anything else. We saw the full moon as we were driving back into town and stopped at the new state park to take a picture.

Look, an Owl!

We went to find a couple nearby geocaches tonight and we saw a
Great Horned Owl - Bubo virginianus

Sami spotted it near the first waypoint of the cache and we watched it
for a while. I found an owl feather on the way to the final waypoint.

P.S. Yes, this is the owl we saw. Sami took this photo.

Pizza Night

We invited our friends (from left) Melissa, Erica and Aaron over on Saturday for Pizza night. Everyone got to choose their own toppings and make their own pizzas.

Sami was the main chef and made the dough. He also went a little crazy at the grocery store so we had tons of toppings
to choose from.

This is Sami making his Shrimparoni (AKA Noah's Ark) Pizza. It has ground beef, chicken, ham, pepperoni, shrimp mushroom and blue cheese on it.... He decided afterwards that shrimp and pepperoni is not a great combination because the pepperoni flavor is so strong.

Melissa brought her fondue pot over and we dipped fruit into chocolate for dessert. I was too interested in eating the chocolate to take a picture of that, but it was very good. We'll definitely do it again sometime.

Friday the 13th

Yesterday, Friday the 13th, my friend Melissa and I decided to take the bikes out to Vernonia Linear Trail and do some geocaching there. So, we attached the GPSr to the handlebars of one of the bikes and headed towards the first cache. The cache was a new one called Vernonia Trestle There's a large wooden trestle near one of the parking areas, so we decided to start at the trailhead a couple miles south of that. When we got to the trestle, we realized we weren't even halfway to the cache location. So, we headed further up the trail. When we got within half a mile of the cache we knew we needed to get off the bikes and take one of the hiking trails (there were several). After trying 3 or 4 and realizing they weren't taking us towards the cache, we went checked the cache listing (uploaded to Sami's palm pilot) and realized it wasn't even on the Linear Trail.

So we had biked several miles (uphill) by this point and were pretty tired so we decided it was probably time to go home. The ride back down was fun and very fast. The last section was a gravel road that cars are allowed to travel on too. We stopped to let a car pass, and I looked down and noticed the GPSr was no longer on my handlebars. Only the back part that covers the battery pack was still attached. I couldn't believe how unlucky I was.

I though, oh no! it's probably on this bumpy gravel road, we have to find it before a car runs over it! So we raced back to put the bikes back on the rack on the car. Then we drove very slowly down the road hanging our heads out the window looking for the GPSr. No luck.

We figured the GPSr must be on the trail. But where? We drove up to the next trailhead, I rode the bike slowly back down to the bottom looking along the trail for the GPSr. I didn't find it. An older lady was walking her dog in the opposite direction. I asked her if she'd seen it. After I explained what a GPSr was she said she hadn't seen it. I wrote my phone number on a scrap of receipt anyway. Melissa drove the car to meet me at the bottom.

We then went back up to the same trailhead and I started biking uphill towards the area we were at when we decided to give up on the cache. Melissa went back down the lower portion of the trail to check over that portion again. I went slowly back up the trail to the farthest point we'd been that afternoon and back down (slowly). No luck. I ran into a few people on the trail and asked if they had seen it. Unfortunately everyone said no. I tried to give my phone number to a mother and her daughter in case they found it, but I realized I'd lost my pen somewhere too, so I couldn't even do that.

I got back to the car and loaded up my bike, drove down to the bottom of the lower section and picked up Melissa. Neither of us had found the GPSr and it was getting late, we were exhausted and there wasn't much more we could do. We went to the Dairy Queen and got Chocolate Dipped Chocolate soft serve icecream and headed back to Melissa's place to make flyers so I could go back to the trail early this morning (saturday) and post them and continue to search for the GPSr.

While we were sitting there talking about how sore we were going to be from doing twice as much riding as we intended, my phone rang. I expected it to be Sami who was doing his usual Friday night activities with the Intel guys. It was a number I didn't recognize, but I decided to answer it anyway, just in case. It turned out the to the little old lady with the dog.

She'd found our GPSr! I couldn't believe it. She told me I could come pick it up that evening. I tried to give her a reward for finding it, but she wouldn't accept. (Although she did give me her address so I could find her house, so I will try to mail something to her.) She said she walks the Vernonia trail every single day and today after she ran into me, she watched one side of the trail the whole way up and the other side on the way down. She found it in the foliage just to the side of the trail with the batteries and everything. Amazing! So it turned out to be not to be such an unlucky day after all.

Garden Update

This little guy was marking his territory and guarding the little
water feature in our backyard. He was suprisingly unafraid and
allowed us to get within 6 inches of him to take this photo.





We have grapes growing in our backyard. The vine is growing over the storage
shed and up into the apple tree. We don't yet know if they will be red or green,
but it's very cool anyway. Unfortunately we think our grapevine has a disease,
but we don't know enough about growing fruit to know how to treat it.





We've also got an extremely profuse rosebush with beautiful miniature
roses. I went out and picked a few to put in a bud vase and look what I
found - A freaky little pink and white spider. So cute and so strange!





Sami needs tomatoes. Last year the yield from our 3 plants was deemed
"insufficient". This year Sami decided he would plant ten times more.
We got these started a bit late, but some of them have already started producing.




First Tomatoes. Sami's tomato math:
1 plant = 10 tomatoes <=> 30 plants = 300 tomatoes. :)





The fuschias in our hanging baskets are starting to bloom.





The clematis vine (and something else, wisteria maybe?) have completely
covered the lattice on the back of the garage. I think we will have to start
chopping them with the hedge clippers before they take over our patio.

Our First Geocache Hide!

We've been geocaching for a year and a half now, but until this weekend, we had only found caches, never placed them. For those who don't know, there are several different types of caches, and we knew we wanted to make a puzzle cache. Except, we kept procrastinating because we kept trying to think of what would be the coolest puzzle or the best place to hide our cache.

There are so many clever geocachers in our area. There are lots of engineers and scientists and other really smart people that create really great puzzles. Sami's favorite was The Contact Cache. I liked The Association and actually most all of the puzzles created by Trivial Pursuits.

So, a couple weeks ago we went to our first Geocaching Event - a meeting at a local restaurant/tavern where we got to meet some of these people who had created all these caches we'd been finding. One of the cache reviewers (every cache listing has to be approved before it is posted on the geocaching website) told us there was a need for more two and three star puzzles because most people are intimidated to try and solve a 4 or 5 star puzzle right away.

Well, that was it. We were ready to make a cache. We thought ...What do we know? How could we make a puzzle that would be easy for us to make but tricky for other people to solve? The result: Kielikurssi. Now we're making bets to see who will be the first cacher to find and and how long it will take them.

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