skip to main |
skip to sidebar
After our family trip to Knott's Berry Farm, we headed toward Mountain Home Village to visit with my Father In Law and his wife. We've had a great time here, as the surroundings are beautiful, and we all get along very well.
He and I spent yesterday afternoon doing some geocaching along Highway 38 near Forest Falls, the route to Angeles Oaks, an old dirt road that leads to 7 Oaks, and back to Mountain Home Village. We found ten caches, one of which had been muggled. The contents of the geocache were scattered about the area. When you find happy meal toys, balloons, and a geocaching signature coin laying on the ground near the cache coordinates, it's a safe bet that it has been muggled.
We had a great time, and the scenery was nice. It was warm yesterday, 101 in Mountain Home Village, but a bit cooler up in 7 Oaks.
Scene of the crime:
Today we drove in to Buena Park to visit Knott's Berry Farm, and we had a room reserved at the hotel of the same name. It's supposed to be their "resort" hotel. It's not much of a resort, and it's a complete ripoff. For the price they charge for the room, I would expect a pretty nice room. The room is kind of shabby. The Best Western we stayed at a few days ago was head and shoulders above this place.
There's not even wireless internet in the room. Well, there is, but you have to pay ten bucks a day to access it. You can even get a little bottle of water for three bucks. Three bucks for water, after paying an outrageous rate for this dumpy little room with peeling wallpaper and stained tile? Ripoff!
Don't ever stay at the Knott's Berry Farm Hotel. I regret the decision to do so, and would never recommend this place to anyone (unless I thoroughly disliked them).
I've made it safely from Okinawa to California, and have had a couple of days to visit with some family. It was a long few flights, and we're still stuck on Okinawa time.
I made a day trip up to 29 Palms, in order to take care of some business on the Marine Corps base. I made a couple of stops along Highway 62 to grab a couple of geocaches, and then spent a couple of hours in Yucca Valley and 29 Palms.
We had lunch at Santana's, one of our favorite little Mexican fast food places, and then I dropped my wife off at Wally World for a couple of hours. Caching time! I was able to find 16 caches yesterday, all which were in either Yucca Valley, or 29 Palms.
Geocaches sure are easy to find when they're not surrounded by jungle! As an aside, it became abundantly clear how spoiled I am in Okinawa with geocoins and travel bugs. Out of the 16 caches, none of them contained any trackable items. I dropped off a geocoin that I picked up in Japan, and since its goal was to make it back to California, I was able to help it along its way.
It was a fun day of caching, and the dry desert heat was a nice change of pace from the cumbersome humidity of Okinawa. Here's some pictures from the day:
Yucca Valley near the airport
Wife sitting in the air conditioning with Mt San Jacinto in view
One of the many murals in 29 Palms
An early morning fire at Fisher Plaza has caused a longer than anticipated power outage that is keeping the Geocaching website offline.
Jeremy Irish, the co founder of Groundspeak, the company that owns the website, writes about this on his blog (click here).
I hope they get it fixed soon, as many thousands of people rely on the functionality of the website.
I stopped at this little spot on my way home from work today-- No real reason for it, I just wanted to stop and walk around for a few minutes. I quickly found myself wishing I had my swim trunks with me. It was a nice day today, albeit hot and humid. These are the sort of things that I will dearly miss when I leave this island for good.
One of the unique (in comparison to the U.S.) features of Okinawa is the frequency with which we are affected by tropical storms, and even typhoons. For those of you that are not quite sure, typhoons are identical to hurricanes, but are simply referred to as typhoons by virture of where they originate.
We are currently in typhoon "season" here, and our first tropical storm is churning around south of us. In the screen shot, you can see my little island circled in red, with the tropical fun circled in yellow. The storm is forecasted to head NNE to NE over the next few days, so we will get even more rain than we already are, with some increased winds thrown in for fun.
I moved from a 9th floor apartment to my current ground level house about a year or so ago, and we haven't had a really strong typhoon come through since then. The last time we had a real doozy, I had a nice view of the carnage from my 9th floor balcony, and there was no yard for me to clean up. Being at ground level will undoubtedly increase the chances of flooding in our home, since Okinawans LOVE to put as many sliding glass doors in their buildings as they can possibly fit. We enjoy having the light and the view, but it is worrisome with powerful storms on the horizon.
I will also be heading to the continental U.S. on a three week trip in July, so I wonder how our little house will fare while we are away. I'm sure I'll be trying to keep an "eye" on the weather via the internet during our trip, but there won't be much that I can do to clean up any damage or debris after a typhoon. Luckily, we're on good terms with our very nice neighbors, and they have agreed to keep up the yard while we're gone.
Needless to say, extremes in the weather can certainly have an adverse effect on outdoor activities. Today is the nicest day we've had in a couple of weeks, but being Father's Day, I'll probably be spending most of it at home with family.
Posts
