Have a look at our new JohnMizell.com GeoCaching Site to follow our finds and try to seek our our hides. It’s not much, but it’s there. However, I like commentary, so I may continue to post here as well.. Enjoy!

Geocaching!

After some exploration yesterday we really took hold of this new game/hobby.  So today we got serious, loaded up the GPS with new locations, and not only found eight more easy caches (because we’re still learning) but planted our very own here in town!  We put together a cool looking, twine wrapped, film-canister with some small sheets of paper in it, planted it deep in an urban park in Colorado Springs (just to not spoil it in writing, there are photos of it below), and registered it online at www.geocaching.com under GC22Y57, “Steps to Sinton.”

Kira inspecting a micro-geocache

And of course the GPS Route:

2010 12 12 Geocache kml

WARNING! PHOTOS CONTAIN SPOILERS TO LOCATIONS OF CACHES!!!

GC1jnam – FOUND IT!

Our first geocaching experience goes, well, well!

I visited www.geocaching.com, downloaded some spots (little treasure chests on my garmin) and jumped into the car. I don’t have any street maps on my machine so it was all by cardinal directions, yeah, bad ass. But once we were out of the car we pointed our Garmin GPSmap 60CSx and away we went. It took Kira right to the spot. Unfortunatly, we didn’t know that you weren’t allowed to burry things, so we spent some time poking about with a stick in the mucky, snow covered grass, but eventually we just looked up and BAM! there it was. GC1jnam.

Today I finally ventured out into the cold of Colorado for my first bike ride since driving my little road racer 1,200 miles from California on the back of the Volvo. Dawning my Chinese riding pants and socks, I also made sure to put on my sleeved Mizell Racing jersey because of weather. I packed some goods in case I broke down or stopped to dine, which included a light jacket for any sudden storms that may approach this reckless land and strapped it all to the back of my Trek 1000, just so I could reminisce of the good old days of packing it all down the road. I inflated the tires to their peek performance level of 120 psi, strapped on my helmet, and downloaded MapMyRide for my iPhone. (I also started up my Holux m-241 for redundancy and spot checking.) The only thing left to do was embark.
I stepped out into the brisk 70 degree air, lightly clouded, so the nuclear heat of the sun could be avoided. I shivered. This was a desolate place. The light cloud cover, still air, and seventy degree ambience created a surreal mind fog. Burrrrr…fog.. I plunged right into my ride with vigor and quickly found two factors to be the most obnoxious: one, there was debris all over the roads from the previous storm and de-icing techniques, two, I was dehydrated before my first mile was completed. Racing downhill, I was struggling for good deep breaths, and found mucus collecting faster than I could project it into traffic. However, my body quickly warmed up and I drained a water bottle. Then I began to enjoy the ride, the weather, the scenery and my brief loop through the springs proved to be a fantastic dry, thin-air, up-down warm up for the end of a riding season up here in the Colorado Rockies.

bikeride-Nov_5__2009_12_12

… I suppose I should add that it really isn’t cold here. It’s beautiful and warm and today was a perfect day to ride… but I’ve got to scare the other Californians away, right?

I finally got the route off the gps and online!!

Cycling China
For the full GPS file, us this URL:

http://blog.johnmizell.com/man-uploads/gpslog/2009-08-23-china.kml