Geocaching: Quiet Fall 2018

This fall, I found only 10 caches (bringing me to 424), all in Virginia or California. But some of them were memorable!

On September 30, in order to teach the boys about compass use, I found my second letterbox.

I only found two in October, one in California (in a mall parking garage) and one in Virginia (across the street from our post office). Neither were to do anything more than pass some time.

In November, I had my first month since 2015 where I didn't find a geocache. I guess life was busy.

Paradise

In December, a trip to Northern California allowed me to fill in some areas I had never been to before. My first find was in Paradise, recently devastated by the Camp Fire. There was a virtual cache there, and I confirmed that the historical marker necessary to claim the cache had survived the fire. Butte County was County 82.

From Paradise, I drove to Oroville to find a challenge cache (also in Butte County), then farther south until I hit Yuba County, to claim one in County 83.

Unfortunately, this cache was pretty much disintegrated. I posted a note, and the cache has recently been disabled pending maintenance.

Needs Maintenance

From there, I drove to Yuba City, which is in Sutter County (County 84), not Yuba County like you might think. I visited a war memorial that served as a virtual cache.

Yuba City War Memorial

I ran out of daylight before I could add a fourth county that day -- one of the lesser perils of winter caching, I suppose.

The next day, on my way to the airport, I found caches in Glenn County (County 85) and Sutter County (County 86). I missed another county because I couldn't find a cache at a rest stop. Then, at the airport, there was a new virtual cache, which gave me Sacramento County (County 87).

Sacramento Virtual

So how did these 10 caches affect my stats? I didn't find any new difficulty/terrain combos. I only found one new month (November 2017) -- from the challenge cache.

With three new months appearing, that increases my total of missing months to 43. The three from 2018 should all be pretty easy, however.

My California counties map has really filled out.

Sixteen down, forty-two to go! I bet I can get at least one more in 2019, and several more if I get to spend any time in the Bay Area.

Because Sacramento and Chico are close in latitude to the DC area, I was able to make some progress on the 38 and 39 North challenges. Recall each requires finding one cache for each of the 60 minutes of longitude within a given degree. I found two more for the 38 North challenge, bringing me to 27. I found three more for the 39 North challenge to 22. I am still doing better in the longitude challenges.