If we are to find the Halley's Comet cache for #1000, we needed to find three more planets. Actually, Saturn is disabled, which we discovered in Pleasanton on January 31st, so we're in hopes that if we get the others that the cache owners will give us the code numbers for Saturn. Still, this has to happen fairly quickly. My initial plan was to get Uranus, in Gustine, today and cache on back through Turlock and parts of Modesto, then pick up Mercury next week when we go to Charlotte's birthday party. But that began to look like it'd really stress the numbers and we might inadvertently get #1000 on a lesser cache at the rate we've been going. Hmmm.

So we decided to drive over Pacheco Pass from Gustine to San Jose and get them both today, so we can pace ourselves and choose our time to go to Oakland for Halley's Comet. 360 long miles and 12.5 hours later, I'm exhausted, but we did it.

We left a little before 9 and headed down to Stockton. Rich wanted to sell softballs so I located a cache near Play it Again Sports. 3 difficulty, but its name gave it away. Post-it Today! is in a fencepost near the railroad tracks. From there we went to the store. They'd promised to buy 50 balls, but in fact they were happy to take 100.

It's another 60 miles south to the little town of Gustine. Uranus is in a palm tree at the back of a tiny city park. It took some time to feel everywhere and in the end, Rich came up with it in an area I'd already searched.

We drove a little further south and picked up highway 152. There are a couple of caches near San Luis Reservoir, but we were disappointed to discover the first one is eastbound. I do wish people who put caches on freeways would say which direction!! The next one involved a hill climb, but what a view at the top. He'd given it a 2 terrain, kind of Pennsylvanian that. We'd say 2.5 or 3. Anyway, we got up there, and passed a big animal hole, maybe a kit fox or a badger.

On to Casa de Fruta, a real old-style tourist trap. We had no luck locating the cache there. Since Lil Devil hadn't found it, we didn't really think we could, but we had to try. The zoo wasn't open today, but you can see the buffalo from a platform. We escaped from the place only buying lunch, but they have lots of goodies. (My lunch was a meat-loaf sandwich, very nice indeed.)

And on into Gilroy. We missed a turn for one cache so went on to Christmas Hill Park, where the Garlic Festival is held. We didn't find one, though we searched a lot. I had written down the clue, but over on a different page, so we wasted a lot of time searching the wrong types of places. We finally gave up and went on up the hill to another. Poison Oak! I had a bit of a rash and was itchy afterwards, though it might have been psychosomatic. Back at the car I used a wet wipe and then resisted the urge to scratch, and when we'd found another cache I was all cured. Anyway, I went to look in a hollow space in a log and discovered not only the cache, but a cache guardian of a little fence swift lizard. He was not happy to see me!

There was a tiny geocaching charm in this one, which was nice. Back at the car we drove to the other part of the park and found another cache close to the creek. OK, that's 5 caches in 6 hours(!) and we had to get up to San Jose to sell more softballs. There's a new one in Morgan Hill about 2 miles from the highway, so we went to it. It's behind a bolt, and I pulled it out, so I was a bit chuffed.

We got to the San Jose PiAS at 4. They've changed their pricing, so Rich only got 45 cents apiece, but that's still $90. From there we went back to the Travel Bug Trader, and looked at all 6 bugs. I traded one (who wants to visit hockey games) for two. Then it was off to the downtown area to try for Mercury.

This time, after we'd had more experience with the planets, it was a lot easier, and I found it almost right away. Now, I have to add all the "comet numbers" (going to use mechanical help for this) and a correction factor, then put these numbers into the GPSr in UTM form and then translate them into the kind of coordinates we understand.

OK, then we could play. There's a cache in the City Gardens, a tiny park with prune trees that's how San Jose started (back in the good old pre-Silicon Valley days). Then I wanted to see if I'd figured out this puzzle correctly. We parked a block away and walked over, and I worried that I wouldn't be sure, but there it was, the Smile cafe with a big yellow smiley in front! YES!! The Alzheimer's hasn't kicked in yet!! Unfortunately, a guy was sitting right on the bench where the cache might be, so we couldn't look too hard. He outwaited us. We'll be back, though, next week.

The last two were also in the downtown area, and we'll have to go back to enjoy the Heritage Rose Garden properly. It was getting dark, and we were ready to go home. We were close to 880, and started up on it, and of course there was a huge accident-related slowdown. After we got over to 680, the rest of the trip home went well.

12.5 hours, 360 miles, 6 travel bugs, 1 second-to-find, 2 planets, 10 caches (total 932), $140, 3.4 miles walked, and the knowledge that the brains are still working! A good day, though exhausting. It took almost 3 hours to get this all posted. (I was also dumping spam from the mailbox and everything was slow.)

Glenn reports that MSNBC has its own agenda! So does the NYDaily News. They're both blaming Bush for stuff that happened while Clinton was President. Roger L. Simon has more on media bias.

Jeff Jarvis:

What matters now is learning the lessons we can learn -- and to that extent, the hearings are valuable -- to protect us as best we can.

But I find the blame game going on now unseemly and divisive and unproductive and districting and just a little bit tasteless.