To avoid all that shopping sprees and rushes on Black Friday I was looking for an alternative. I arrived on Thursday night in the Bay Area and looked up geocaching.com for more caches. After running a pocket query to find some unfound caches I found the “Cache Friday” series, which is based on the same idea: Avoid shopping – go caching. Containing 8 traditional caches and one bonus cache – shouldn’t be to hard to complete today.
It was already late on Thursday night and most of them are in parks, which would be closed anyway, I set my goal to hunt them down on Black Friday aka now Cache Friday. But in the morning, when my alarm clock went off, I didn’t wanted to get up and prefered sleep in. After getting up the whole week between 3-5 am I told myself I deserve a little more sleep on my day off. But that couple more hours of sleep stopped me from being the FTF on this caches – more about it later.
After breakfast I set off on this small tour and started according to the numbering: 1 through 8 + Bonus. First one was an easy grab, but unfortunately I was the third one to find it. Some people got up earlier and “stole” my FTF. In the hopes that Black Friday/Cache Friday would give me a good deal on FTF’s I was to late. Nonetheless I planned on finishing it anyway. Second one was up on Montevina Road. I took the time and drove all the way to the top and there are some stunning houses up on this hill. The view is amazing, which makes it perfect for this big mansions. Definitely worth driving up here to enjoy the view and also to grab some more caches along the way and up on top. I will be back for sure.
Four of the caches included a bit of walking, which I very much enjoyed especially since they were placed around the Lexington Reservoir County Park, which is a nice area to walk and hike. This park offers some nice hikes and vies of the area.
Overall the caches weren’t to hard to find and some of them were really lovely crafted, which I like a lot. After completing all 8 caches and calculating the coordinates of the bonus I first thought I was wrong, because it looked like a unaccessible area. After quickly double-checking the coordinates I drove as close as possible to the coordinates as possible.
Once at the “entrance” towards GZ I had to wait. There was a man standing right in front at the little turnout and 2 women just inside looking around. I was not sure if this guys are geocachers or not. I decided to keep on walking and passing them. From a save distance I kept an eye at the location to see once the leave to be ready to venture off into the adventure of finding the last piece of this series. I only had to wait a couple of minutes and I was ready to grab the final. The way there was pretty easy to find, even that there are no real trails to it (at least not yet).
Ground Zero was a big old stump and as mentioned it had built-in steps. Which helped a lot to retrieve the cache. After logging it as the “Third To Find” I took the little gift, which the cache owner left for me and one of this beautiful stones with the word “I finished Cache Friday 2014”. I hid the cache again and was very happy about this nice and special geocache adventure today. I continued caching until sunset and then headed back to the hotel.
I hope this series will become a regular deal every year on Cache Friday with some new caches.
A lot of thanks to the Cache-Owner Ullii for this nice set of caches.
This are the caches of this tour:
Cache Friday #1: Garden Hill (GC5GVMY)
Cache Friday #2: Guarding the Dark Side (GC5GVNE)
Cache Friday #3: Top of the Los Gatos Creek Trail (GC5GVP)
Cache Friday #4: Below Lexington Dam (GC5GVQD)
Cache Friday #5: Eucalyptus Nest (GC5GVR9)
Cache Friday #6: Manzanita Fields Forever (GC5GVT0)
Cache Friday #7: Lost Highway (GC5GW05)
Cache Friday #8: See You Someday, BC17 (GC5GW1Y)
Cache Friday Bonus: Cache Santa (GC5GW47)
Peter has a passion for Traveling, Photography, and Geocaching. These are the best ingredients for amazing adventures all over the globe. “Traveling is fun, no matter if you stay in a luxury hotel or travel like a backpacker.” Peter shares his experiences on his Blog www.gatetoadventures.com
Some of Peter’s photos are published on corporate websites, in-flight magazines, travel guides, and much more.
