Spent a full day with our geocaching friend Alastair at Coyote Lake–Harvey Bear Ranch County Park. We did engage in discussions about things we were curious about—like how warm seawater contributes to the explosion of a hurricane (as, recently, with Hurricane Otis in Mexico), where a new 2,000-home development just beyond Alastair's back fence is going to get drinking water from, and where kids go trick-or-treating nowadays, because they sure don't do so in our neighborhoods. We talked about the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, which Alastair and his son, Colton, attended; about a proposed highway across all of southern England—for purposes of commerce, chiefly; about colorism in Haiti, where Alastair once lived; about Tajikistan and Cambodia and Tanzania, all places Alastair works as an advisor to education ministries; and about vintage VW Bug fandom (I now know the difference between 1965 and 1967 front fenders—and feel a little proud that my family brought a forest green 1958 Bug over from Germany... which my father later swapped for a 1960-something Toyota Corolla, rather less classy). We talked about kitchen gadgets and sourdough bread, our octogenarian president and the state of the nation. And all the while, we walked—a good 14 miles—and found 45 caches (did not find one). We saw a beautiful coyote, a pair of cavorting red-tail hawks, lots of deer, and a dozen tiny scorpions. Here are some photos I took.
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| Southern Santa Clara Valley |
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| Coyote Lake |
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| It is not a good picture, but there's the coyote. He was using the trail below us, and checking us out his entire trot up the hill. |
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| A couple of the tiny scorpions guarding a cache we found. |
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| Lots of beautiful blue oaks today |
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| Our last cache, called "Visiting Dirty Earl," had a lot of faves. We did not give it a fave, but we were glad to find it. |
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