Time Flies.......It's Already Monday............

and I'm not sure where the weekend went. Friday, we cleaned up about 14 caches on our "to do" list and then headed for Lutes for our weekly dose of clam chowder. Got a bonus this Friday as they were have some kind of Jubilee in Old Town. A bunch of Arts and Crafts......fortunately all I spent my hard-earned cash on was the clam chowder......oops I take that back, I did buy a couple of items at one of the booths. Will have to "model" it at another time for a picture. Saturday more caches were published and one of them was about 30 miles up the road on a Wildlife Area and past the U.S. Army Proving Grounds. We stopped, had breakfast before we left for this one and if Becky hadn't been whining so long and loud for breakfast we could have had a FTF on this one as the jimlinmon team and La84fishn had just arrived on the scene when we got there. Oh, well, snooze you lose, or in this case stop for breakfast and have the same results. From just about every place in Yuma a person can look toward the North and see this white observation balloon flying when the weather permits. I guess it's an aide in detecting various illegal operations in the area. Anyway, I got a very good close up of the balloon.......they were probably taking pictures of us when I was photographing them. Another famous landmark that can been seen for miles is Castle Dome........maybe it was named as such from its peculiar shape. There's a cache on top of it. There's also a replica of Castle Dome, the city that existed when mining for various minerals, gold, silver, was in its heyday. It costs $5.00 to visit the museum but I can't complain because it was quite interesting. We drove past the museum and tried to get closer to Castle Dome in the event we wanted to hike to the top. Now these roads are rough, rocky, and in some areas they get downright close to even drive a car through. Imagine our surprise when we meet this great big old Mercedes Off Road vehicle coming toward us. We stopped to let him pass and he stopped and shot the breeze for a little while before we moved one. Can't remember the name of the rig but the driver said it weighs 8 tons. It had articulated suspension and looked like it go travel almost anywhere. He said he driven in from the North, probably the Quartzsite area, and found some areas where the brush was so thick that he had to stop and chain-saw an opening to drive his truck through. We got closer to Castle Dome and then decided we probably needed some more time in the day to make a climb to the top. We'll leave that for another day. We headed back to the museum to take in the sights. The first stop was "Al's" cabin. A replica of a miner cabin with Al relaxing on his Beauty Rest mattress. Becky sat down beside him and that's when I first discovered that Becky has a "toe fettish"!! Surprise, surprise.........and you think you know a person???

We browsed the town and took pictures here and there. These are the ones I took so don't know what Becky will be putting on her Blog......if she every gets around to updating it. I kinda thought this old school house was interesting, they even had bits and pieces of desks like the kind I used when I was in first grade. Someone's thoughts about the rain/desert were on the wall and I kinda enjoyed the writing. They had a barber shop, complete with pole in the front. The barber chair looked rather uncomfortable to me. It must have been a local "hang out" as they had a checker board all set up for use by the local "color" folks. I should have set it up correctly.........would have provided a bit more authenticity to the setting. Can you see what the problem is with the way the board is set up?

Outside the entrance to an small room was a sign that invited all veterans to place their name on the walls of the room. It said for Veterans and not for kid graffitti. Anyway, I had to make my mark for posterity. They had the remains of a 50s filling station, the gas pump indicated a charge of 17.9 cents per gallon. If you can remember seeing some of these old kerosene burning lamps alongside the road many years ago, then you're probably getting along in years too! The little town sported a number of bars and this was one of the nicer ones. In the restaurant, which also had a small bar, I found a poster advertising one of the movies I starred in back in the fifties. I had almost completely forgotten about the movie "Cross Channel" staring yours truly. Actually, it was a movie that should be forgotten. Took a lot more pictures while we were here; but, that was several days ago and I can't place any information along with the pictures I took. On the way back home we continued caching and I think we ended up grabbing 11 of them. One of them put me over the 1700 mark so we called it a day.

Sunday was our geocacher's breakfast and 62 geonuts showed up for breakfast. If this continues we'll have to find a bigger place. After breakfast, what do we do, why go caching of course. Some new caches were published while we were having breakfast, one was placed outside the restaurant with permission. Blackberrys were going off and JJ checked his and headed out the door. On the way, Wingnut, who placed the cache, handed it to him so then all attendees got to sign the log. Easiest cache we every found. After breakfast, we went looking for the new ones with JJ, Char and their grandaughter, Taylor. We picked up Limegreen on the first one so we spent the morning hunting them down. We managed 3 FTFs out of the new ones. Some more came out later but after bouncing around the desert all morning we called it quits. Limegreen went home, downloaded the new ones and went out and got 6 FTFs. Later in the afternoon Becky scored another FTF on one that had incorrect coordinates and had to moved. I was in bed by 2230 last night and I don't think I moved a muscle until 0830 this morning. Getting up early is sure tough on an old guy!

Been doing paperwork this morning and little else. About 1500 the computer ses........."hey there, someone just published a new cache". I say "Oh crap", Becky ses "Let's Go". Fortunately it was only 2.31 miles away, as the crow flies and our friends Limegreen and Hummer2 had placed one by their driveway. Six people were already there when we arrived. It was a duplicate of one they had placed on their RV lot last year so they just moved it. It was still fair game for another find though.

Later. W&B