Rich actually did the lights at Church on Thursday, and Father Pastor asked him to lunch. However, Rich had to decline as he met with the other poll inspector who will be at the same location we are on Super Tuesday. Yesterday it was a little rainy but we thought maybe we could do one after I gave blood. The Path of the Hobbit involved enough walking and rock-climbing to make me really tired after the donation, but it was fun. We went out to Rossmoor Bar in Rancho Cordova. We parked outside and walked in. The first stage is near another we'd found last month, a tiny film can inside a log. Every time I tried to get at it, it would go deeper in, so I finally flipped it to the other side of the log. When I went over there, I discovered a drawer pull on a loose bit of wood. It's so weathered that it looks like another bit of the dead tree, but you can move it and get to the cache. I wrote this up and said that if it was hard to retrieve part one, go to the other side and use the doorknob. This is helpful without being a spoiler!

The next coordinates are in runic calligraphy. This was the 4 terrain part (though, for once, we made it more of a 3.5 or even a 3) where you scramble over rock piles and where we're really glad the snakes are holed up! There's just one rock pile with Shelob's Lair under it, and Rich was still waiting for the GPSr to zero out when I looked around and found it. This led us to the Crack of Doom, back close to the road, with an old pipe or something and the cache in it. It was a wrench, but I dropped off the Smeagol travel bug. I'd taken pictures of him and everything. In fact, his owner with whom we sat at the party, wrote me to thank us for the pictures.

I didn't want to do any more trekking along the River, but we could stop at an easy urban cache, so we did.

Today I really wanted to get hold of "Halfway", which involves math. You figure out where it is, exactly halfway between two other caches. This is at Sailors Bar. We had more trouble finding parking than anything else. As we were closer to another cache, we thought we'd try it first, and it was pretty easy. Then we went looking for one which has been archived, which a couple of people who were looking for "Halfway" ran across. We were all over the probable area, but no luck. Then I wondered how to get to "Halfway" but Rich seemed to pick the best route, which involves working over some rocks even though the cache isn't in rocks.

These bars are all piles of river rocks. When the gold miners knocked down the mountains with their water hoses, they choked the River downstream. Then later, miners dredged, getting some of the gold that came down with the mountains, and left huge piles of cobbles all along the River. These are a real pain to walk on, broken ankle territory.

Rich worked down a slope and didn't fall into the pond at the bottom and yelled "son of a b**ch" down there. I thought he'd discovered an impassable channel or something, but he was actually griping at spying the cache. It was pretty visible, though not after we left it. I was really thrilled... I understood the math involved but was worried about my arithmetic, but I got us within 4 feet. It began to rain while we were there, so we'd walked miles, climbed over rocks, scrambled down slopes, and gotten rained on, all to find a little jar of schlock. It somehow seemed appropriate to pick up the "Geocaching Nut" button!

KFBK grounded Commander Bill! Meanies! They blame the cost of putting up two planes so they have him wired up from his house. I heard him last week closing up with a "from the El Dorado Casino Black--- from the Commander Bill Traffic Center." When I went up with him, he said he never worked a day... he really loves flying, would fly over from the Reno area every day to Lincoln and go up in the Commander Bill plane then fly back at night. KFBK might as well have pulled the trigger... they're going to kill him. Grrr. I'm surprised he's still doing anything for them. I'm sure glad I got to go up with him before this happened.

The Iranian "election."

My goodness. Disappointed Daschle sounds awfully different when he's talking to his constituents!

"Frankly, sharing a media market with Chuck Schumer is like sharing a banana with a monkey. Take a little bite of it, and he will throw his own feces at you." --Sen. Schumer's colleague, Sen. John Corzine (D-N.J.) as quoted in the NY Daily News. I've always heard it was the most dangerous place in the world, between Schumer and a camera! Of course, now he has a high-profile junior Senator (Her Royal Hillaryness) taking up precious media attention, so he's hungrier than ever.

Blogging from the White House. Bill comments and includes the reasons the press was not invited.