Here's a review of Tuesday and Wednesday's boffo activities. On Tuesday morning we headed north for lunch and a couple of Missions. We stopped at Cold Spring Tavern. This place was originally a stagecoach waypoint and in the 40's became a tavern. The place is cool! When you walk through the half-door you walk into the 19th century. The staff was friendly and the menu varied. There was everything from buffalo burgers, venison sausage, chili, and regular burgers and fries. The place is a real biker bar that is crowded on the weekends but wasn't too bad during the week. After eating we asked if the store next door was open or not. It was and the waitress told us to go on over, come back with what we wanted, and we would pay for it all. It's nice to be trusted. We took some pictures before heading for Solvang.
In Solvang we visited the Santa Inez mission. After a quick tour we drove on to Lompoc to visit mission La Purisima. I've already posted about these missions and nothing really new happened here so I won't write about it. We did enjoy the visits though.
After two mission we decided that we deserved Ice Cream. We drove into downtown Lompoc and started looking. At a stop light, the wife saw a pregnant woman, and who knows more about ice cream cravings then a pregnant woman, so the wife rolled the window down and, sure enough, she gave us directions to the nearest Baskin-Robbins. After satiating our need we drove back home. The wife and the altar boy took naps on the way and I napped once we got home.
An hour after we got home we got a call from the "J". She was calling to see if we were home yet because she was in the driveway. After a beer we all loaded up in my car and went out to eat at BJ's Restaurant & Brew House. We had a good time and had more good food. We decided, once again, that we deserved Ice Cream so we ordered a couple of Pizookies.
That was pretty much the end of the day. We watched some American Idol and hit the hay.
On day 5, the altar boy was on his own as the wife and I had to go back to work (ugh). We gave him directions to the beach and the Reagan Library. He went to both and threw in the San Fernando Mission - location of Bob Hope's grave. It sounds like he had a full and fun day. Tonight we went to Pirates since we haven't eaten there enough this week - The altar boy has eaten breakfast, lunch, and dinner at Pirates.
The altar boy will be leaving tomorrow. We had a great time and he is welcome to visit anytime.
I was hoping to post about each day at the end of the day. This was a great plan until last night. We got home at midnight and frankly I was to tired to post anything. I will try to summarize what happened last night and tell you what we are planning to do today.
Yesterday's preview post was accurate. We had a late start because the Altar Boy didn't get up until 10:30-ish. We had lunch at Pirates before heading south on the PCH. What a gorgeous day to drive along the ocean. The skies were incredibly blue and the air was warm.
Our first stop was the La Brea Tar Pits and the Page museum. There are usually volunteers in the museum who sit in a fishbowl like room cleaning and cataloging bones. Monday was their day off so the room was empty. The same was true with the active excavation #91. Even with the closed exhibits, it was still interesting. A few pictures here.
After the pits we made our way to Olvera Street. We ran into the same problem there - things were either closed or closing. We walked through the shops and did a little side trip to Union Station (The Altar Boy and all male members of his family are obsessed with trains). Again, we enjoyed it enough.
By now it was getting close to dinner time so we headed to Canter's and ate some grub. The food was magnificent as usual. No disappointment here. We were going to buy t-shirts (I seem to be collecting T-Shirts - this hobby sort of creeped up on me) but they were out of my size. We will be back I'm sure and I'll eventually get one.
After a satisfying meal we went to the beautiful UCLA campus. We were there a little early and the event parking attendants weren't out yet so we drove around trying to find out where to park until they finally arrived. Stupid me took a turn bad and ended up scraping/denting my front bumper - D'OH! We walked around campus a little bit until the show started. The campus is incredibly beautiful. The architecture and landscaping are gorgeous. They opened the doors to Royce Hall at about 7:30. For now I will only say that the show was spectacular. The show was so good it deserves its own post so I will post about it later this week. I will say that the show met and exceeded all our expectations.
Now, for Day #4. We will start with lunch at the Cold Spring Tavern before Mission hopping to the Santa Inez and Purisima missions. The day will end with dinner out with the "J" - not sure where yet.
Day three is a biggun'. I am not sure I will be able to post about what all we did tonight so I will post this preview and try to fill in the what actually happened in a later post. We start out with our usual lazy morning before going on the road to Los Angeles. It's going to be another sunny day and we will drive down the pacific coast highway on our way to the city.
Our first stop are the La Brea Tar Pits and the associated Page museum.
After the museum we will head for Olvera street for a little shopping and walking.
After Olvera street it will be time time for some diner (or supper for some of you) so we will head for Canter's Deli, where you are server by old Jewish ladys. The food is always great and the atmosphere alway a little strange.
After Canter's, we will make our way to the UCLA campus to enjoy an evening with Ira Glass and This American Life. We will be meeting up with the "J" who is taking the Matron-Of-Honor's ticket and joining us tonight. I'm sure the live taping will take up a whole post by itself.
Day two started of with the Wife and the Altar Boy going to mass and me going grocery shopping (I know, shame on me for not going to mass with them). After mass we met up at Pirates Grub n Grog to have some breakfast.
After breakfast we split up again - the wife and altar boy going to do the Whale Watching thing and me heading to Rattlesnake Canyon to hike. On the way to the hike I stopped by the "J" 's place to drop of her This American Life ticket and a map to the venue (Royce Hall, UCLA).
The wife and the altar boy enjoyed their boat ride. The weather was perfect - warm breezes with temperatures in the 80's. They saw some whales, dolphin, dead seals, and an overturned kayak. The kayak was brought on board and turned over to the Coast Guard. After the boat ride, they went to the infamous Rudder Room to have a beer. The Rudder Room is a seedy bar on beach where all sorts of people collide. 20 Minutes later fists began colliding and the wife said "Lets get out of here." Nice Place. Both the wife an the altar boy were both exhausted after their day of water, sun, and fisticuffs.
My day was good too. My hike wore me out. More juicy details later this week when I post another Hiking Ventura County post.
Today was day 1 of entertaining the Altar Boy. We slept in, which felt really good, before heading Ventura way. A perfect day - started out a little hazy but was warm enough for shorts and sandals.
First stop was lunch at In-N-Out Burger. We all enjoyed the yummy burgers and fries. We then headed to downtown Ventura. We walked down to the Ventura Pier before heading to the San Buenaventura Mission. A quick tour of the mission was followed by a shop walk which ended at Ben and Jerry's for some ice cream. The Altar Boy is getting along great with Homer. He's spent a lot of time throwing the ball in the back yard. This evening we had steaks on the grill, mashed taters, and green beans - Midwestern Grub.
Throughout the day there was a non-stop gab session covering topics ranging from religion, politics, catholic high school education, the war on terror, genealogy, and dating. No doubt this will continue for the next few days.
Tomorrow, Mass, breakfast at Pirates, and whale watching.
O.K. I have been spell blind for most of my life and it took the Godson to point out that it's Altar, not Alter. I will try to be better but I think the misspellings and bad grammar give Homer's Travels that rustic charm.
This post is just a little preview of what we'll be doing over the next few days - They will be busy. Due to circumstances beyond our control, the Matron of Honor can not make it but the Altar Boy is on his way. The next few days are filled with downtown Ventura, Whale Watching, This American Life, and a couple Missions. I will post about most of this. The only thing I won't be doing with the wife and the Altar Boy is whale watching on Sunday (I've done it a couple times before and decided to bow out this time - I'm sure they will see a record number of whales) . Instead, I am planning to hike Rattlesnake Canyon up by Santa Barbara. There are a few caches there that I am planning to do. I am told that the name of the canyon is a little deceiving and that there are no more rattlesnakes there than in any other place in California. We'll see.
We are looking forward to entertaining the Altar Boy and having a good time. It's going to be fun.
I did a few caches on the way back from the Aliso Canyon hike . All of the caches were roadside grabs along Stagecoach Road. The road was built in the 1860s by Chinese labor to allow people to travel by stagecoach from Santa Barbara over the San Marcos Pass. Later the Cold Spring Arch Bridge was built bypassing a portion of this scenic road. There are several caches along this overlooked road. Some were clever hides:
"Porc U Pin Cache (aka Chip n' Dale's Larder)": This was a clever hide. The container was embedded in a log that looked like a tree stump. The placement had something to be desired as it was a little obvious. It should have been placed near other stumps. Still, cool never the less.
"Dale N' Chip (aka Tweedledum) ": This was a small altoid tin with a pine cone glued to the lid. It was hidden in a hollow part of a large tree. I picked up some ants while I looked at the cache. A few made it as far as the car before I found them crawling on me.
"The Forgotten Road": Another small cache hidden near once once was an entrance to a road. The road is long forgotten and overgrown. I placed the chaosmanor's Golden State - Gold #2 geocoin in this cache. The container was small but the coin fit nicely.
A larger cache full of cool stuff. I took the Skeleton Key travel bug and left a Round Tuit, a Bendy Cow, and a Green Plastic Soldier in its place. There is a good view of the bridge from this cache site along with a monument to the bridge itself.
"Bridge View": This was a micro cache attached to a stone. The rock looked really natural and I would have found it if I hadn't tried to kick the rock. The view of the bridge from this vantage point is spectacular.
There was another cache that I wanted to visit but was unable to do it. It was located close to the Cold Spring Tavern which was really (I mean really) crowded on Sunday. The tavern is a biker bar and bikes (hogs) , cars, and trucks filled the small parking lot and lined Stagecoach Road to each side of the tavern. The tavern, built in 1886, was originally a way station for the stagecoach travelers crossing the San Marcos Pass. We'll have to stop here sometime for lunch.
OK, this is the seventh installment of the increasingly misnamed Hiking Ventura County series. The Aliso Canyon loop is in Santa Barbara county. The trail is on the way to Lake Cachuma in the Los Padres National Forest. I have driven this road several times and had wondered if there were trails in the wilderness surrounding the lake. The description of the hike said that an Adventure Pass was necessary to park at the trailhead so I stopped at the ranger station to buy one. Unfortunately, the station was closed so I backtracked a mile or so to the Paradise campground where some grandpa living in a trailer sold me an Adventure Pass. I headed back towards the trailhead passing some wild turkeys along the road. The trail starts in Sage Hill campground. Most of the place was closed. I forded the Santa Inez River (I did say WHEE! as I did so but it didn't have the funtasticness that it had when the wife and the J were in the car). As I arrived to the parking lot, I noticed that there was a trailer and ... they sold Adventure Passes there. Oh well, I didn't have to backtrack after all - a brief waste of time but I was in no hurry.
The loop follows a creek for the first two thirds of a mile. Along the way there is an Interpretive Trail. There are markers along this Interpretive Trail that are numbered and labeled with stylized bear prints. Unfortunately, there were no Interpretive Trail pamphlets in the Interpretive Trail pamphlet box at the beginning of the Interpretive Trail so when I arrived at these Interpretive Trail markers, I had no clue as to how to interpret them. Sigh.
There was very little water in the creek. Southern California has been very dry this winter. The lack of rain is good and bad - Good because a normal rainy season would mean that I would not have been able to do many of these hikes - Bad because the creek and rivers are low and the plant growth is dry and brown resulting in dull, drab hikes. At the end of the Interpretive Trail, the path starts heading up. It was pretty steep but I felt pretty good going up it. I guess all this weekend hiking is finally paying off. Also helping was the fact that the skies were this bluish-gray haze and there was very little sun. There was also a light breeze once you climbed out of the canyon into the muted sunlight to keep you cool. The path continued up to the crest of a ridge. The calm was interrupted by someone in a nearby campground who thought revving his motorcycle sounded nicer then the sounds of nature. Fortunately, he also decided to drive away. At the top of the ridge I sat on a stone to take in the breeze and drink some water. I also planned how I would tackle the one cache on this hike. The cache, "Oso Lookout (A.K.A. Dam Cache)," was hidden in April 2006 and no one had been able to find it since. There had been two attempts (a third never got up to the top of the ridge). I fully expected to look around and not find it. Well, it took me less then ten minutes to find (Toot Toot - yeah I'm tooting my own horn here). The container was a white plastic container that the hider had painted black but of the last eleven months the paint must have flaked off and the white lid was clearly visible. As I went through the contents and signed the log I noticed that I, in fact, was not the first to find it and that someone had signed the log in August of 2006. Since they did not log the find on the web, I think I can claim First To Find (Yay for me!). I covered the cache with a flat stone to make it less obvious. While I was hunting I did see a snake - it was only four inches long so I wasn't too worried.
After the cache I started heading back down. Of the way I passed a Mother and her two kids riding horses on the trail. We exchanged pleasantries and I started to watch more carefully where I was stepping - the hazards for sharing a trail with horses - POOP. I successfully made it down and back to the car. On the way out of the campground, I saw three deer grazing. I rarely see anything larger then a lizard on my hikes.
I was a little disappointed. The Ventura Star writer had said this was a 3.5 mile hike by my GPS said it had been only 2.9 miles. It did go by a little quick and an extra mile or two would have been nice. Oh well. A few pictures here.
Next week the Matron Of Honor and the Alter Boy are visiting so I won't be hiking. I am sure there will be other things to post about then.
When it was time to choose a new hike, I found two easy hikes in the same park in Thousand Oaks, CA. The Lizard Rock and Paradise Falls trails leave from the same trailhead in Wildwood Park. Looking at the trail maps I realized it would be easy to connect the two loops to make a longer, moderate hike. This hike is another urban hike but it was far enough away from the freeway that I could not hear it.
I arrived at the trailhead at about 9:30 am and started out on the Lizard Rock portion of the hike. The wind was cold but the sun was warm and the skies were cloudless. I took a spur to do a couple of Geocaches. There was another cache on the trail but I misread the map and thought it was on another spur. When I realized what I did, it was too late (i.e. I was too lazy to retrace my steps). After doing a third cache, I passed by some cacti (OUCH!) on my way to Lizard Rock. I climbed up to the top and sat on the Lizard's head and relaxed in the chill sunlight. It felt good. The views were good only being spoiled by the houses ringing the park and the sewage treatment plant barely hidden in wildwood valley.
After taking in the sights I headed down the trail up over Stagecoach Bluff (another cache) and crossed over to the Paradise Falls trail. On the way to Paradise Falls and another cache I came across a Teepee. I looked like a cool place to hang out. I did a cache and stopped by the falls. Indian Creek was running fairly well despite the lack of rain and the falls were flowing well. I love the sound of waterfalls. I got back on the trail and visited an Indian Cave and followed the creek back past one more cache before returning to the trailhead. The total hike was 5.36 miles. More pictures here.
The caches that I did on this hike are:
"At Last": A quick micro cache on a spur off the main trail.
"Box Canyon Cache": Another small quickie in a nearby box canyon.
"Papillion": This was a large ammo can on a ridge on the way to Lizard Rock.
"4x4'n Wildwood": This was a clever hide. The cache was a small container with a washer and a bolt head attached to it. The contained was inserted into a hole in the end of a weather 4x4 piece of wood. It looked like the bolt was screwed into the wood. The bolt head and washer were both rusty an looked like they had been outside for years. Very well done.
"ROCK-N-ROLL": A film canister hidden in a fake rock. The rock looked a little fake but it was still a good hide.
This was a pretty good hike and I feel like I am getting stronger. I'm not as tired after the hikes as I was when I started a month ago. The next hike I'm planning to do is the Aliso Valley Loop north of Santa Barbara. I'm looking forward to it since it's not an urban cache.
