As the pandemic subdues, real world travels are resuming, but I can still do virtual travels. This article remembers my six trips to San Francisco Bay Area, a populous region in Northern California.
My first visit to the Bay Area was in June 2012, with my roommate John. We took a train to Los Angeles, and then travelled to San Francisco on Chinatown bus tour.
I started geocaching in 2013 when I lived in Tucson, Arizona. I moved to Montgomery County, Maryland in late 2017, and became a Premium Member on Geocaching.com at the beginning of 2018 so that I can find thousands of Premium-only caches around here.
Since 2019, I hooked up with Georick402, Maryland's top hider, to go geocaching together on weekends. I have no transportation, and he has no brain, so I solve the mystery caches, and he drives me to them; it's a win-win partnership. This relationship, of course, continued into 2020.
In January and February, we went out together almost every weekend. We completed a few high-difficulty Multi caches such as the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Challenge, found Virginia's top-rated Letterbox hybrid Roo's Runaway, took the Historic White's Ferry, and attended Leap Day event(s) on February 29.
After being busy with virtual conferences and hackathons, I finally got some time to return to my virtual travels. This week I'm going to Las Vegas, the entertainment capital of the world.
Christmas 2011, after visiting San Diego and Los Angeles theme parks, two schoolmates and I drove 6 hours to Las Vegas. We walked around the vicinity of our hotel, and saw what appears to be Statue of Liberty in front of a hotel. From what I remember from watching The Amazing Race (paid link), this statue should be in New York. Although my geographic knowledge was limited at the time, I knew we were not in New York. Instead, we were in front of New York-New York Hotel and Casino, designed to evoke the New York City skyline. This Statue of Liberty is a smaller replica of the real thing.
This week, I virtually travel to Los Angeles, California, a city that I visited many times.
Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is one of the busiest airports in the United States. At a distance of 90 minutes flight time, LAX is the nearest major international airport from Tucson where I attended grad school. Therefore, I often find myself transiting in LAX.
Since I entered United States for the first time nine year ago, I transited through LAX 10 times, including 8 flights to/from China and 2 flights to/from Honolulu, Hawaii. Occasionally I have a long connection time. During that time,
I have wanderlust but the Coronavirus lockdown is preventing me from traveling this year. It would be fun to dig out old photos and look back on my past travels. Let me start with one of my favorite cities: San Diego, California.
My first time in San Diego was a road trip with a few Chinese students I met during my first days in Tucson. We visited SeaWord San Diego, where I enjoyed their famous Shamu show, in which I got splashed by the killer whales.
During the same trip, we also visited USS Midway Museum, an aircraft carrier docked in San Diego harbor. I learned how these little planes take off, and more importantly how they can land safely with the help of arresting gear.
The title comes from a geocache named Thought Provoker #3. Inside the container there is a thought provoking question:
If you could travel across the United States of America (and had no other obligations, financial or time constraints) what mode of transportation would you use and why? Walk/run, ride a bike, ride a motorcycle, hitchhike, drive a car, drive a RV/motorhome, take trains, or something else?
Here are my answers.
The Geocaching Express 6000 GPS Receiver is a powerful GPS receiver, as shown in Geocaching International Film Festival (GIFF) 2019:
Geo-snatching is the act of finding loopholes instead of geocaches.
This includes:
The term geo-snatching was invented by gsmX2 on this Facebook post. This article explains what geo-snatching or geosnatching means in geocaching, and how a geo-snatcher or geosnatcher differs from an honest geocacher. Content of this article does not necessarily reflect blog owner's views.
Geocaching.com's newest promotion, Mystery at the Museum, is online today. To qualify for the first three souvenirs, you must find and log a number of geocaches, in a certain order.
Geocaching.com offers a filter function that shows which geocaches to find and log next. However, it only allows me to select the clue tiers that I currently qualify for. Since I haven't found any geocaches since the promotion started, I can only search for the Detective clue, but cannot search for any other clue types.
This is inconvenient for me, because I prefer to go geocaching offline. I usually download a number of geocaches to my phone, go out to find them, and then log them at end of the day. I want to be able to search for clue types beyond Detective, even if I don't currently qualify for them. Then, I can go out, find enough geocaches to complete two or three souvenirs together, and then log them into the correct order.
I poked around the URI parameters in the address bar, and found two methods. I thought I'd share them, in case anyone needs it.
My 7-day Oregon vacation is over. It took even longer for me to blog about this experience:
My vacation did not have a planned day-to-day schedule, but adopted a semi-flexible strategy. This differs from my previous vacations such as the Yuma Mega trip, where the planning covered exactly where to exit the highway and take a rest. Being flexible allowed me to spontaneously decide where to go next, based on weather, mood, and other factors. It enabled me to add destinations that I did not know before departure, such as Multnomah Falls and Oregon City, as well as fulfill friend's request of an IRL meet up. This strategy did backfire once, when I went to a museum only to find it closed.
Eventually, my trip achieved an interleaved structure between urban and rural environments:
By the time I finished my Oregon City tour, I'm 22 miles from the Portland International Airport and I have 8 hours remaining before scheduled flight departure. There are still places worth visiting.
Council Crest Park is the highest point in Portland at 327-meter elevation. It is also the location of Portland's oldest geocache, hidden in February 2001.
The park was easy to locate. The geocache, on the other hand, was difficult for me. Its location is specified as a vector offset from the hilltop, at "185 meters in the direction of 285° from magnetic north". I've seen "magnetic north" once and looked up some scientific references, but I don't know a practical way to convert magnetic north to true north that is accepted in mobile apps.